The Importance of Practice Management & Why Every Firm Needs a Strategy

by Auvenir

Deadlines are an essential aspect of every workplace, but they are particularly rampant in the accounting industry. As firms juggle multiple clients, looming deadlines, and hectic schedules, it is easy to forget to take a moment to reflect on what best practices and procedures work best and what needs to be adjusted. Sometimes firms can be so busy serving their clients that they can forget to make time to nurture their own success. It is critical to balance client needs with effective practice management strategies. 

 

If you’re looking to enhance your firm’s workflow, here are some key practice management tips that can help your firm increase both efficiency and revenue over time. 

 

Respect Your Own Time

With time becoming an increasingly valuable resource, it’s important for firms to think about how to protect their own time – starting with respect. It’s important for firms to take time to set goals, and to understand the motivation of the goals that have been set. 

 

Firstly, firms must determine where their time is going. Only when a firm understands how their time is being utilized, can make proper adjustments be made to remove any inefficiencies. Firms need to be mindful of purposeful time management, and several apps can help firms track their time to help make these modifications. 

 

A best practice to consider is to assign a specific day of the week for client meetings, which allows firms to stay focused on the projects they need to complete on time while maintaining close contact with their clients. 

 

Empower Your Team

When you hit a wall at work, you can often feel frustrated, and it can result in reduced productivity and engagement. To ensure your team feels empowered at work, it’s important to consider the support your business is providing employees to succeed. Employee empowerment can introduce more confidence in leadership, inspire employee enthusiasm, generate more creativity, and increase employee retention. This study showed that only 4% of employees are willing to provide extra effort when empowerment is low, but 67% as willing when empowerment is high. Empowerment can impact the engagement of your team, but it can also impact productivity in the workplace. 

 

A great example of how to help employees feel empowered as mentioned by Arti Marwaha, HR Generalist, Auvenir, in her blog is to create anonymous surveys and have constant touchpoints with your team to give your team an opportunity to voice their feedback. Your firm’s leaders, HR professionals, and fellow personnel all play critical roles in establishing a supportive, and empowered environment for businesses.

 

Invest in Technology

If you want to provide your clients with high-quality services, it’s critical to use practice management technology that’s modern and can help automate repetitive and manual processes when possible. If your firm is still relying on outdated tools like Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, you are not taking advantage of tools that could significantly improve and streamline your day-to-day operations and generate more revenue opportunities. In case you missed it, we previously shared why auditors need to move past excel for data analysis in our blog. 

 

With the acceleration of digital transformation for firms during the pandemic, adopting agile technology is critical for firms to succeed and thrive in the ‘new normal.’ As previously discussed in our blog, how technology can help foster teamwork and empower teams to collaborate are endless. 

 

Remember – Change is Inevitable! 

Firms need to remember to make time to review what currently works in your firm, and what could use some improvements. Allocating time to implement practice management strategies can increase both efficiency and earnings in the future. To optimize CPA practice management, firms should welcome feedback from all employees, implement changes where it is needed, and create an environment that encourages open dialogue for the whole team.  

 

Is your firm ready to embrace change and wants to provide a higher-quality and more efficient experience? Discover the benefits of using our cloud-based auditing and assurance platform and connect with our sales team today!