How to Reduce Costs in your Practice

Inflation increases and financial struggles mean that we all need to re-examine costs and find ways to save money. Rising costs will lead to harder times for clients and practices but there are some simple steps you can take to make sure your practice is operating as leanly as possible. 

If you know exactly what it costs to deliver the services you offer now, you may also discover where you might be losing money or missing opportunities. 

Investigate your Own Procedures

It's worth doing a little due diligence on your current situation before having to make any big decisions. You probably know how much your VAT or Payroll services costs but how about specific clients or special services? Are there certain things that you do that run at a loss or just break even? What about the individual activities that your team do? Are they being deployed efficiently? Often team members spend hours on repetitive administrative tasks that actually don’t add value or could be completed by a more junior member of staff.

To discover the answers to these vital questions you need to examine how your practice operates - what are the processes your team follows? Who is responsible for them and who achieves each step? Take a look at the time it takes to accomplish each part of the process. Does this vary with each client? If so why? Discover if it is always the same person to complete the step. 

Make Simple Changes

Once you have the answers to these questions you can start to explore the different ways you could change your process to make it more effective. By breaking your workflow into smaller pieces you can really begin to understand where the bottlenecks and the costs are. 

If you’d like to map out your processes and understand how your practice works you can use our handy Accountancy Practice on a Page template to help you. It's a great framework to start with and that you can use with everyone as a basis for discussing your procedures. Access the template for free here.

Skore is more than just the software platform designed to be used by everyone. We are here to show you how you can make easy and effective improvements to your practice within minutes of exploring your everyday business processes. Please get in touch if you’d like to find out more.