Accounting and bookkeeping professionals have gone above and beyond to support their small business clients over the past few years. Economic uncertainty, lockdowns and various government grants created significant workload, with a lack of staff to meet demands of client work.
For many advisors, this focus on their clients’ business and rapid response to changing needs meant work that should have been engaged on as new work, wasn’t; which resulted in advisors working longer hours without increasing fees.
Managing this scope creep has been an ongoing issue for accountants and bookkeepers. It occurs when you complete work that wasn’t covered in the initial engagement. This is not only an insidious drain on your revenue and profit, it can also damage relationships with clients.
It doesn’t stop there. There’s a risk of scope creep every time you do work for a client who hasn’t engaged with your agreed fee. It can also occur when you’ve been engaged but stepped outside the contracted parameters because the data isn’t as clean as you expected, or you needed to spend time checking over the work of other people in your team.
