25 Practice Management Tips for Accountants by Accountants

I have seen quite a few of my friends that started as generalists, and then as their firms grew, they realized that they loved working with their retail clients, and not so much with the construction folks or vice versa. I think it's okay to be a generalist, and within that generalist journey, you can find what you love and lean into that."

My mentor only wanted to do tax work. He referred his clients to bookkeepers. Later, he set up QBO and Gusto for their bookkeeping and payroll. However, the clients never ran their payroll or bookkeeping in these apps.

So, I decided I wouldn't do their tax returns alone. I decided to take care of it all, which saved me from the stress of selling the bookkeeping and payroll services separately. I just put it all in a bundle, and because I've taken care of the accounting, I just rolled all that data into the tax return, which is basically a reconciliation of everything we did all year long."

I’ve had a challenge where we would do high-quality bookkeeping work and hand it off to the client's tax preparers (without interacting much with the client). Over time, the clients began to forget all the things we were doing and were only seeing our monthly fee. Some began to question the value they were getting and left"

When anyone is looking up real estate CPA’s across the country, they are going to find our firm and contact us. We're not going to win every time but we're always going to be a part of the conversation. We have a sales process that helps us stay focused on our ideal clients. It goes thus - after prospects find us during their search and contact us, we have a whole process to qualify them. This qualification process determines if we will connect them with a sales rep. We have a scoring system where if they fill out our webform, they indicate certain things that help us determine if we want to talk to them.

If they're not qualified, meaning they're either not ready nor a good fit for our services, or we believe that based on how they filled out the form, they can't afford our services, we send them a different email sequence. The goal is to show them why we aren’t a good fit today while still highlighting other ways we can help (such as our membership groups or courses).

A strong qualification process will prevent you from wasting valuable time. You do not have to hold a call with every person who fills out your intake forms."

To resolve my tax season challenges, I always take the week of Christmas off to brainstorm ideas for my firm because things are slow. Find a week that's slow for you. It could be the summer months when people are on vacation or dealing with graduation. Look at your firm’s process that needs improvement and check on Google for apps that do (whatever the challenge is).

Review the list of apps that come up. Personally, the way I review apps is to go to their pricing page because they usually have the features listed out. That makes it easy to understand how much it will cost me and what I'm getting for my money."

Michael Gerber’s book, the E-Myth, talks about the three types of workers you need in your firm. The technician does the work, the manager oversees the work and the entrepreneur focuses on building the business.

Growing your firm requires you to spend less time as the technician and the manager and more time as the entrepreneur. Because I knew this, I knew I needed to build a firm that could run without me. And to do that, I immediately started documenting and building out processes so that someday, I wouldn’t be the one doing all these."

Which kind of work are you not looking forward to doing each morning? Where is the friction coming from? How can you resolve it? Maybe you need to reverse some steps in the process in the workflow."

The high level of redundancy in our system caused lots of frustration for our accountants and clients. We were doing double work and it was just a waste of time. Client communication and collaboration were a hassle, but now, we have eradicated such repetitive work by utilizing Financial Cents.

If our client intends to file their taxes, I'll create a project for them and request that the client upload their documents in Financial Cents.

From there, we can all view the project and monitor the progress. "

We use the due date feature to meet deadlines consistently.

With the due date filter, we can easily declutter our dashboard to show what we need to do at a time."

Financial Cents held not just my brain, not just my to-do lists, but everybody on my team, and I had everything I needed at my fingertips. I have staff working remotely. We are all on Financial Cents. It's all online. It'll hold your brain. Hold your staff's brain. It'll build in the workflows so you never forget that one little thing that gets forgotten."

I see it through two lenses, there's an element of AI that our tech partners will enable for us, like what Financial Cents does. But there's also a whole other side of that - a personal productivity angle where every day, honestly, we're stumbling into cool new use cases. For example, from looking up a whole bunch of ambiguous bookkeeping transactions, you start to figure out how you can use AI to solve those problems. You also start seeing how you can use it in writing and rewriting emails (and I think that's probably the most common use case). It's interesting. There's also a subset of folks who cover their eyes and say, ‘well, I'll make use of it a bit when my tech people implement it’. I think if you do that, you miss out on some elements that can help you get stuff done."

Loom has become valuable in my firm because it enables me to record my screen. With the audio setup, you can also be talking while you're doing the tasks. It’s like you're recording the story of how you're preparing tax returns for the future generation of people working in your firm.

If you were asked about the process of doing a tax return, you can mindlessly say things like:

- I would get the information
- Put the stuff in the software
- I will print out the return

But then, what does it mean to get the information? The information doesn't just magically show up. Then you'll realize that there are sub-steps and then each of those sub-steps have sub-steps.

However, if you record each step on video by showing what you did, what you clicked on, and what you typed in, then your team has a better chance of doing that."

Apart from giving us a good base for managing projects and jobs, our workflow software also helps us to stay efficient and consolidate the way we communicate with our customers.

My favorite feature is the automated request. We know who is scheduled on a project and each team member’s capacity. The automated request saves us from wasting time waiting around, which helps to automate and gain visibility in your practice."

Standardizing processes by documenting them and creating checklists was the single most important thing I did as a firm owner because it allowed me to hand off the work. That's why it blows my mind that so many firms don't have practice management software.

They're using Excel to maybe manage clients. They've got columns for different areas. There's so much documentation and if you don't systematically document your processes, you have no hope of scaling your business."

To this day, I see many tax accountants who would send attachments for you to sign. But I’ll tell them to put it in DocuSign and make everyone's life a little easier like just put it in DocuSign or Panda doc or whatever digital signature tool you prefer."

Delegation is not hiring someone and saying ‘do this now’. It gives more detail to things and builds out the processes and the workflows your team needs to complete work.

I've got my workflows built out in templates in my practice manager, and I'm constantly revising them. Almost every time we go through a monthly close or prepare a tax return, we say, wait a minute, this step is not clear enough. What needs to happen here?

This step is actually two steps. These two steps need to be in the reverse order because they don't work in that order."

Trust and flexibility have played a huge role in our staff retention in my firm—Compass. We've been focusing on giving people flexible remote working relationships. I have hired talents geographically, where I wanted somebody in the Eastern Time Zone or somebody in the Central Time Zone, but I haven't been super strict on where that is necessary.

And also I don't say that you'd have to be at your home to work. We have VPNs to keep our data secure and enable our staff to travel, feel free to work remotely or set their schedule that works for them. "

It’s really hard to give up control because we're technicians through and through. And also, there's something called delayed delegation, I think a lot of us also suffer from that. That is, there's a task that you shouldn't be doing or that you can delegate to someone else to do.

Even if you didn't hire someone, you can hire a VA to handle this task, but you don't actually delegate it until it's at the deadline, or it's too late. One of the things you can do to get over that fear of letting go and trusting others to handle those important tasks Is to start small and build trust for you.

Give them (employee, VA) a small task, delegate the outcome of what the task looks like when they complete it, and then give them autonomy to actually go out and do the task. When they are done, offer feedback, if it's not done correctly, or if there were some hiccups along the way."

Knowing why a goal exists is almost as important as knowing what the goal is. It's not enough to say that I want those books closed between the fifth and the 10th. What's the reason that we want them done on time?

You should say, I want my client books to be closed early in the month. I want my team to do weekly meetings on Mondays because I want my client's books to be caught up and we don't have a month-end chaotic situation. Plus, the work is more evenly spaced.

That's one of the things you need to do when you are getting everybody on board with your goals."

My team members live in different locations and different time zones which can make communication and collaboration difficult.

From the hiring process, we make our expectations about working remotely clear. We ask everybody to be available from 9-1 pm EST. That way, we have at least 4 hours to work together and in that 4 hours, we use Google Chat to communicate and collaborate and that helps our team bonding.

Each staff submits their favorite charity quarterly. We try to figure out how to support that charity together. A team member once submitted a blanket program for kids in the foster care system, and we got kits to hand-make blankets and sent them to the team some of us got on a Zoom call and made the blanket together, took pictures, and shared it, and supported the program of one of our team member. "

Business owners don't necessarily want to be buddy-buddy and best friends with their accountants. Most of them are perfectly open to a relationship where they don’t see you that much and they don't have to come to your office, but the communication is still there.

You just have to make their lives easy and efficient. With us Financial Cents allows us to set up reminders as part of our workflows to remind them to send their documents a particular day in the month and they upload it to the Financial Cents.

They can also drop sensitive tax documents with their social security and personal information on them. This has been crucial to our remote firm."

I once helped a client Implement a timekeeping system that I felt we could slice and dice in different with many data points, but at the end of the day, the main users were the managers and the people clocking in and out of that system.

It confused them because they were in a low-tech industry and I realized that even though it made sense for me, it did not make sense for my user"

This is your business. You have to set the terms and don't let your clients, especially family members, run over you by telling you how you're going to run your firm. If a family member wants to be my client, they have to abide by the rules of the firm.

They have to know that this is a business. It is not a little hobby. We have a team and we have to maintain profitability, so they have to pay regular fees and drop off their documents at the right time. They have to follow the rules. "

Value pricing is about setting a price based on the value to the customer, not based on how many hours something takes. It sounds really simple but it is difficult to implement in the real world."

One out of five new clients that come to me always say they're coming to me because their old accountant was not responsive enough.

So, I have made communication a pillar of our flat monthly fee contracts, where clients can email as much as they want. We can even set up calls or slacks.

One of the easiest things you can do is respond to people's emails within 24 hours, even if you can't complete their request. Acknowledge the email and set a new expectation with 'Hello, thank you. I've received your email. I'm looking and researching into this. Give me two to three days to get back to you.

And then follow up with that. Be true to your word. By the third day, if you don't have a response, check back in with them, and if you have it, give it to them."