How to Plan Out Your Accounting Firm Work for Up to a Year

Accounting workload management is more science than art. The lack of access to up-to-date capacity data naturally results in:

• Overworked Staff: Some employees are assigned more work than they can handle, leading to burnout and poor work quality.
• Underutilized Team Members: Other employees will not have enough work on their plates, leading to a waste of resources and job dissatisfaction.
• Last-minute Resource Allocation: With the inability to monitor trends, every increase in workload demand catches you unaware, leading to a last-minute rush to meet client deadlines, which never ends well.

Here’s how firm owners like you use Financial Cents to plan their capacity for up to a year to maintain workload balance and peak performance. 👇

Step-by-Step Guide:

Recommended Workload Planning Best Practices

When used well, the following suggestions will make your workload management more adaptable to evolving workload demands:

• Set Workload Limits for Team Member: Capacity limits enable Financial Cents to spot employees who have exceeded their maximum capacity.
  
  Without it, you’ll have to scroll through the capacity management dashboard to analyze each employee’s workload data. Even then, you can easily miss critical information.
• Review Capacity Reports Regularly: The longer it takes to spot overworking team members, the higher the chances of missed deadlines, employee burnout, client dissatisfaction, etc.
  
  Review your team’s workload as often as you assign tasks to your team members to catch and address workload imbalance more quickly.
• Adjust Workload During Tax Season: Tax seasons can disrupt even the most well-planned workload systems.
  
  Monitor your team’s workload even more closely during tax season to catch the bottlenecks causing delays and reassign tasks as quickly as necessary for optimal performance.

Why Yearly Workload Planning Is a Game Changer

Planning your work up to a full year helps you to:

• Reduce Last-minute Workload Adjustments: It gives you sufficient data to accurately forecast workload demands across the months, helping you spot and resolve potential bottlenecks that could have led to errors and missed deadlines.
• Ensure Balanced Workloads Across Employees: The ability to see your team’s future workload empowers you to assign the more complex tasks to the most qualified team members, which increases the quality of client service.
• Improve Productivity and Avoid Burnout: Ensuring no team member is assigned too much work frees everyone up to deliver their best results to meet client deadlines without working their fingers to the bone.
• Gain Real-Time Visibility into Long-Term Capacity Needs: Planning your capacity for up to a year makes it easier to see when you’ll need more hands to meet increased workload demand.
  
  This will enable you to hire the right persons for the right roles to maintain workload balance across your team.

Make Your Next 12 Months the Most Productive with Financial Cents

Financial Cents’ workload planning solution ensures you have the right number of staff (with the right skills) to meet your current and future client demands.

The auto-generated workload data shows you who is over- or underutilized so you can reallocate as many tasks as necessary to maintain productivity, efficiency, and profitability regardless of variations in workload demands.

If you rely on manual workload data, you’ll spend more time entering and analyzing data, and it’s more prone to errors, which might result in worse capacity challenges.

Planning your future workload shouldn’t be labor-intensive. Use the Financial Cents Capacity Management solution to do it on the go today.