How to Grow Your Practice with Automationf

Automation continues to sweep through the industry and disrupt traditional working practices for CPAs. Automated solutions are increasingly accessible to practices of all sizes, helping many to drive significant productivity gains. But beyond the headlines, and in practical terms, how can CPAs leverage automation to help their practice to become more efficient? And, in order to catch up with competing firms that may be more digitally advanced, how can they get started quickly?

Make an action plan

Ask your team for feedback on what processes could be automated and what technologies they used in other practices they’ve worked in. This can give you insight into what solutions similar firms are already using, and with what success.

If you use timesheets, review what activities are taking up too many hours in the day, or are inhibiting you from bringing in additional clients. Start gradually and automate one process at a time. Compare how long it takes to complete certain tasks by hand, to the cost of automating this process with software.

There’s a solution for it!

Whatever the process, there’ll likely be an automated solution which can support it. Consider automating the following activities to improve your capacity:

Automate onboarding

There’s a lot of paperwork involved when onboarding new clients, but it’s so important to impress them right away with an efficient, hassle free process. Automated onboarding solutions take the pressure off, by helping accountants to create and track proposals, set reminders for clients and automate billing.

Automate payments / AR

Keeping on top of payments and cash flow is critical for business owners, and accountants can simplify this process with automation. Solutions can sync with accounting software to track expenses, process invoices and send alerts when supplier payments are overdue.

Automate time tracking

Scheduling as a small business is incredibly important, but can be complicated and time consuming to manage by hand. As an accountant, you can help clients to streamline this function with time tracking apps, which coordinate rotas and provide data-driven reports based on activity.

Automate data entry

Typing up data from bills and receipts into accounting software for your bookkeeping clients, is a painstaking process. And automating this one activity alone, can make a huge difference to the productivity of your practice.

Whilst automating this process is easy, the trick is to find a service provider which can help you do more for less. CPAs should look for a versatile solution which can be applied to all customer types and which can capture almost any type of document, including bank statements, purchase and sales invoices, receipts and more. The solution must be able to integrate effortlessly with your accounting software and offer time saving features, such as full line item capture, expense capture, and the ability to match invoices to open purchase orders in your accounting solution. It should also offer flexible billing, rather than restrictive months contracts, so you only pay for what you use.

Don’t forget to make use of free automated tools

As well as investing in paid solutions, there are plenty of automated solutions that just need an email address to get started with. For instance:

Internal collaboration apps like Yammer and Slack, help teams to keep in touch, in the office or when working remotely
Online grammar checking widgets like Grammarly can keep client emails and proposals free of typos
Automated conferencing tools like PowWowNow schedules calls more easily across multiple regions, offering shared cost numbers to reduce long distance phone bills
Zapier connects apps to help users save time by automating workflows, offering a rage of subscriptions as well as a free version of the service

Empower your practice with automation

The strategic application of automation is a game changer, and those who are yet to adopt automated solutions, may be at risk of falling behind more digitally advanced practices. Automated solutions are typically incredibly user friendly, so practices can get started quickly, no matter how technically adept their team is. If practices already use accounting software such as Sage, QuickBooks or Xero, they can access a wide variety of add on applications through these vendors’ marketplaces.

And remember, whilst it’s great to have a more automated practice, continue to review the performance of new software as part of this journey. As automated applications are now abundant, there’s plenty of choice. So hold your service provider to high standards and set targets for the time and cost saving you hope to secure when selecting a new solution.

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AutoEntry is an automated data entry solution for CPAs. Visit www.AutoEntry.com for more information.

Firm Management