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Where are you wasting time in your Practice?

9th Feb 2022
Brought to you by
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Skore is the process improvement software that allows Accountants to map, analyse, improve and...
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The mad January rush may be over but if your practice is still feeling the strain there are some small simple steps you could take to ease the pressure on all the team. We all know that wasting time in your accountancy practice is not just inefficient but a drain on resources. A waste of money, it can also result in bad customer experiences that could damage your reputation as a firm. 

Discover the Opportunities

Perhaps an overhaul of your working environment might help? Get the consultants in to assess your activities and tasks? Whilst that might be a nice ambition, the reality is that resources won’t always stretch to this luxury. However the fact is that there are some simple measures that any accountancy practice can put in place or consider to easily identify areas where time could be saved. These may seem obvious to you, but actually taking the time to work through them as a team could result in some incredible time savings. 

Review the Basics

Firstly, have you recently considered the manual tasks your employees undertake everyday? As part of any activity there are often menial stages that we continue to do without considering if there is an alternative. We often continue to copy and paste data - such as copying email addresses, NI numbers, payroll information and tax rates with little thought to how these small inefficiencies add up to wasted time. Even if it only takes your employee a few seconds, repeating this task numerous times a day can result in a huge loss in time. One company discovered that when they examined how long it took to copy customer names and email addresses across everyday that it effectively added up to 80 days a year on copy and paste. Especially frustrating when they also discovered that the customer details were already saved in a system that could produce the documents they were creating. As it only took a few seconds every time no one on the team had considered that it was worth looking into until they looked at it collectively over a 12 month period.

Taking the time to examine the activities your employees are doing, in a step by step process, will help you to understand where the time delays are and how you can help them. You’ll probably discover that your staff already know what these wasted activities are, but until you ask them they don’t necessarily know how to articulate them. Not only will you free your employees up to an hour or two a week to work on other tasks, it could also massively improve their work environment and morale. 

Explore the Reasons Why

Another habit to get into is to review and question why your team completes the tasks and activities assigned to them in the way they do. You'd be amazed at how often you’ll hear the response: ‘well we’ve always done it this way..’. Often a piece of work set up in the past was so long ago that no one can quite remember why and haven't considered the rationale behind it. For example you could look at the monthly custom reports you create for customers and question whether they are still needed. It may well be that taking a fresh look at the activity will help you and the team to understand if it's really relevant and whether it's being achieved in the most efficient way. 

Question your Procedures

Whilst we’re looking back at past behaviours, also consider what delays there are in the processes you put together. Often review stages are put in a task or activity because in the past something went wrong. Now that your organisation has moved on and either got better at activities or volume has increased significantly you may well find that reviews are no longer needed as a gateway. Perhaps maybe, a more junior member of staff could authorise them? It’s often the same case for approvals, when a company is smaller and manageable, approvals come from the top. Therefore question whether the right person at the right seniority is now approving the work? Or is it just an inherited legacy?

A Small Change makes a Big Difference

These may only be small changes, but you could find that across your team you are saving hours. It’s never a bad thing to re-examine your team’s work activities and roles, with the added bonus of saving time and therefore money - there really is no reason not to start now. 

Skore is the Process Improvement Software Platform created to be used and understood by everyone in the organisation. A simple approach and powerful insights enables you to start making positive changes to your practice today.