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Top five tips to more efficiently manage project scope

11th Mar 2013
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Today, businesses are relying more and more on accounting firms, particularly when it comes to financial issues such as solvency and regulation. Businesses are also overly cautious when it comes to ensuring that they are compliant with the current governing legislation. Just this week, Microsoft was fined £484m for failing to comply with EU regulations. 

In this period of ‘increased reliance’, it’s important for accounting firms to manage client expectations. But, it is very difficult to do this if you don't have a clear overview of how any engagement progress is measuring against your agreed scope of work with the client. This insight is crucial to ensuring that you are not only delivering the best work for your client but are also remaining profitable. Having a proper practice management process in place may open up new opportunities to grow certain clients by billing additional time on any extra activity outside the agreed scope of work.

There are a number of ways that accounting firms can achieve this:

1. Communicate with clients up front about billing and pricing. Offering a price menu of services with a defined scope helps protect the value of your services and ensures that there’ll be no ambiguity when you present your invoice

2. Track all projects carefully from the outset. Using a practice management system, such as Deltek’s Maconomy, will ensure that you keep the engagement on track and that you are identifying any potential pitfalls or opportunities early on

3. Understand your capacity needs. Once you have a clear outline of your client engagement, you can ensure that adequate resource is allocated to ensure the project is delivered on time and more importantly on budget

4. Schedule mid- month project check-ins. Arranging a regular check-in on resource utilisation versus outlines can help to identify any areas of the engagement that may need attention or are running over budget

5. Base your decisions on hard facts. Tracking your client engagements on half a dozen spreadsheets can be a recipe for disaster. Ensure your whole team is working from and reports into a single source of truth to avoid errors and ensure that everyone is on the same page

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