Future Proofing Your Firm

When you start out, your firm might just be you. All the knowledge is in your head, and it works because it’s just you. It could also be possible you have a few employees. You train those employees to complete tasks, and they do a great job.

As you start expanding, your employees are training other employees. You simply don’t have time in the day to teach everyone.

Soon, you start to notice things are being done a bit different than they used to be.

Before long, the wheels are coming off the wagon. Deadline lines are being missed. Mistakes are being made, and errors are failing to be caught.

And, let’s face it. You start to become frustrated.

After all, you taught Jane how to do this months ago. And Jane swears she taught Jim how to do it as well. So, why isn’t Jim performing well?

Why are there so many errors come review time? And what’s taking so long?

If you feel like this, let me reassure you, you are not alone. Regardless of the size of practice, it is never too early to implement standard operating procedures (or “SOPs”).

SOPs are step-by-step instructions set in place for complex tasks. Proper SOPs will greatly improve uniformity of performance, efficiency, and quality of output.

If you don’t know here to being, there are a variety of things you can do:

1. If you feel overwhelmed, take a step back and start small. I always recommend this to all my clients. Pick one area that you want to improve, and work on improving that area first. If you want to start small, you can even start by just creating a video library of yourself completing different processes. Videos are a great tool to provide another training. For one, the person watching the video can rewind as many times as they want, and two, you don’t have to worry about reexplaining the process when it's time to teach the net person. It’s a win-win situation. Examples of screen recorders I like are Camtasia and Loom.

2. There are countless numbers of powerful systems out there that can be used to automate workflows or assist in practice management; however, I urge you to thoroughly define the process before putting systems in place to automate any process. A “bottom-up” approach, which focuses on organizing your immediate environment and input processing, will significantly decrease the resistance to system-adoption within your organization while improving system performance.

3. Hire a professional! It’s our job to do this. Just like you wouldn’t expect your clients to file their own taxes, you can’t expect yourself to completely design, correctly implement, and thoroughly test automated workflows and practice management systems within a single, integrated architecture. 

Katie Thomas, CPA & President of Thomas CPA, LLC Email: [email protected] Schedule an appointment with Katie here.