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5 ways to build a more efficient firm

October 4, 2022

Once the challenges of the financial year end are over, many advisors vow to become more efficient in time for the year ahead. However, with so many pressing and conflicting business priorities, the next year usually arrives without any of the changes you’d hoped to make, having actually been made.

With a constantly busy workload, are you finding that you’re already back on the treadmill?

It’s no wonder so many of us find it difficult to make the time to imagine what an efficient year-end looks like, let alone devise a plan to achieve one.

So as we farewell this year’s lodgement period, now is the ideal time to think about the issues you encountered and how they could be overcome.

Some common ones to consider include:

What caused the most headaches?
What bottlenecks did you encounter?
What were the most time-intensive manual processes and what were the workarounds?

It’s best to start documenting the main issues now, while they’re still fresh in your mind, and whatever you do, don’t put off fixing them or you’ll be facing the same challenges again next year.

Why an efficient compliance workflow matters

Some of the activities to focus on now include making your compliance workflow more efficient by collaborating with your team, your clients, and with the accountants or bookkeepers you work with, to improve the way you manage data integrity for your clients.

Working towards reducing the number of manual processes in your business and replacing them with technology brings capacity into workflows. Growth starts with running an efficient accounting or bookkeeping business. Increasing capacity, working smarter – not harder, reducing manual processes and workarounds, and decreasing the amount of data duplication, all create efficiencies.

Ensuring your firm is organised, efficient and using the latest software tools are the main drivers to delivering great services to your clients. You can then use the capacity you gain from an efficient and streamlined compliance workflow to work on your firm’s bigger goals.

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How an efficient firm becomes a growing firm

For many firms, growth may mean winning more work and clients, extending your services and expanding the team. For others, growth may be more holistic and include creating a more fulfilling work-life balance. Whatever your goals, efficiency, driven by a streamlined compliance workflow, can help you achieve them.

In our latest eBook, Intuit QuickBooks’ Shaye Thyer, Head of Accounting, and Meagan Wood

Advisor Product Marketing Lead, provide their top five tips for a more efficient new financial year. They share their experience to help you find additional capacity so you can start to focus on your bigger goals. These five tips cover:

Building a proactive, visible plan for your workload
Standardising your BAS process
Demanding tax workflow efficiency for clients, regardless of their cloud platform
Eliminating. Simplifying. Automating.
Earning your fees, not chasing them.

The tools in QuickBooks Online Accountant can help you achieve each of these goals.

From creating tasks or projects and requests and keeping track of communication, to organising and tracking your team's work, QuickBooks Online Accountant has powerful but easy-to-master tools to give you visibility over anything that is happening in your firm or with clients, and can alert you if things go off track.

The right tools to create workflow efficiencies

For bookkeepers, the Books Review tool in QuickBooks Online Accountant helps you create a single, repeatable process for your BAS preparation workflow – customised to how you work. Books Review focuses on common yet tricky bookkeeping areas like incomplete transactions, reconciliations and account balances. It lists key tasks so you can quickly tie up any loose ends and prioritise work. Importantly, it lets you customise your own tasks for review, letting you work the way you want.

QuickBooks Tax, powered by LodgeiT, further streamlines your tax and BAS workflows with automated data pre-filling and intelligent error-checking technology. Importantly, for clients using Xero, MYOB, or most other accounting solutions, you can import client data directly, so there’s no trade-off between having an efficient BAS or tax workflow and choosing the cloud accounting solution that meets each of your client’s individual needs.

You’ll also find a range of tools in QuickBooks Online Accountant to reduce the time you spend on manual or repetitive tasks, letting you simplify and automate your processes - including payment features to ensure you can stay focused on earning your fees, not chasing them.

Download our eBook to find out more about these tips, and the tools in QuickBooks Online Accountant that can help you work smarter not harder.

For more tips to help you save time and effort, visit our Efficiencies Hub, fearing more eBooks, video and other content that will help you find more hours in your day.

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