S P O N S O R E D
“I have a clear vision for my firm. I want to continue growing 25% YOY by focusing on my ideal clients, but I need to focus on the work that gets me paid, not managing the endless to-do tasks.”
Does this sound familiar? This quote stuck with me ever since I chatted with Ben, a firm owner who had a clear vision for his firm and wasn’t going to let manual processes slow down bringing that vision to life. In order to do that, his firm relies heavily on technology to remove the burden of the work that took away valuable time from meeting his firm and client goals.
The solution? His firm and many other firms, rely on Intuit® Practice Management as their tool of choice.
While there are many benefits in implementing a practice management solution, the three that rise to the top over and over again for firms that have, and continue to evolve, their practices, include standardizing and optimizing work, visibility into work, and collaboration in context.
1. Standardization and Optimization
Continuous improvement is key to evolution, and for today’s accounting firm, continuous improvements are built on standardizing work to ensure those improvements that are learned over time are leveraged across the firm. Obviously, engagements can differ based on the type of work and the client, but what is needed to do the work should be fairly standard based on the type of work you do. The more times you do that work, the more you learn and optimize your processes for future engagements.
Having a tool that helps you automate your systems makes it much easier to create standardizations that you can continue to optimize - a key to how successful firms work to maximize operations and create a great experience for your clients.
2. Visibility Into Work
Serving many clients, providing multiple services, and handling different types of clients makes it critical to stay on top of all the work for your firm. Without this visibility, making efficient and effective decisions becomes extremely difficult. Having a tool that helps you standardize your work and automates the visibility of work is key for efficiency and growth. When firms implement a solid solution, one of the resounding comments I usually hear is, “I now have my arms around all my work. I have less stress knowing that I am on top of all the work and do not have to spend as much time staying on top of it.” Standardization and visibility go hand and hand for optimizing your firm. Having a tool that can help with both greatly reduces the amount of time managing the work … freeing up your time to do the work.
3. Collaboration in Context
Communication with your clients and within your firm is critical for a successful engagement. What helps with this communication- in work and life - is the context, or the background needed to understand all of the ins and outs of an engagement and its status.
How often have you had a discussion where there was no context? Even if you spend time trying to provide the context and it is understood, you’ll still have less time to focus on the actual discussion you were wanting to have.
Standardization and visibility into the work helps provide this context. A practice management tool can enable internal and external collaboration as work progresses. Even if work is passed around your firm, the tool enables context of where the work is, so the work progresses, and there is no time wasted trying to come up to speed.
Focus on Your Clients
I feel extremely lucky to live in a time where we can leverage technology to do the work that, quite honestly, I do not want to do. My passion is fulfilled by doing work that provides the most benefit for my clients and their customers. Implementing tools to help me with this has made an impact in my day-to-day work. A practice management tool that helps with continuous improvement through standardization, visibility, and collaboration in context can help your firm, too.