Accountancy practice management software has come a long way. Today, features like automated billing and reconciliations are easily integrated into the day-to-day practice workflow of Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting UK customers.
Our employees work side by side with our customers to create and manage these solutions – driven by a deep understanding of their needs and addressing the rapid changes in their environment.
However, it’s often hard to look beyond improving performance in day-to-day operations. Amid Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and other disruptions, accountancy practices and their clients are dealing with an unpredictable economic landscape. Future business planning can appear daunting.
However, technology can support accountancy practices (and their clients) in making informed business decisions, and planning for the future. In the first part of our Accountancy Practice Management for Future-Fit Growth series, we’ll explore how they can use technology to define and easily track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Doing so gives practices closer control of performance tracking, and deeper insights that will inform strategic growth plans.
Saving Time
For several decades, business technology platforms have enabled practices to track performance metrics that they have customised. This highlights areas that qualify for improvement and underpins strategic planning.
Contemporary technology, such as CCH KPI Monitoring, makes setting up KPIs faster and easier for accountancy practices than ever before. This is vital today. The current business landscape demands that firms assess and amend KPIs more frequently, based on fresh market variables. KPIs such as client retention rate and business time-to-recovery have become increasingly prominent performance indicators in the past year. If clunky technology makes KPI management difficult, practices have less time and insight to plan future growth.
Reducing Risk
CCH KPI Monitoring makes it far easier to track KPIs and report on them. This is fundamental in minimising risk. For example, if a KPI is set to track and escalate debt filtered by overdue dates, the ability to easily set alerts and automatically generate reports is critical to practice performance management.
Some practices are manually running monthly reports to measure KPIs. Others are running real-time reporting engines, a key feature of CCH KPI Monitoring. This latter solution allows practices to review essential data at any time – covering both performance management and compliance requirements. They can do so remotely or on-premise.
This means that firms can assess issues before they become problems, and thus act proactively. Real-time reporting is a true asset in building a future-fit practice.
The Proof is in the Practice
A number of Wolters Kluwer customers have been using CCH KPI Monitoring for several years now. Our customers look to us when they need to be right. Ryecroft Glenton has successfully integrated CCH KPI Monitoring with its own system. This consolidates information from several sources, including CCH Central and CCH Practice Management.
“We can use the year end date to trigger a sequence of reminders. Have we asked for the books? Have they been received? If a request to a client has been outstanding for a certain period, the partner will receive an alert via email. For limited companies, we can monitor the corporation tax and Companies House filing deadlines – as well as the different deadlines for pension schemes”
– Ian Smith, partner at Ryecroft Glenton
“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”
“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”
“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”
“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”
In the dynamic landscape of the accountancy industry, optimising growth is a constant pursuit for firms seeking sustained success. An often overlooked function that plays a pivotal role in achieving this goal is resource management. The effective allocation and utilisation of people significantly impacts a firm's efficiency, client and employee satisfaction, and profitability. Therefore, improving or (as we like to call it) maturing your firm’s resource management function is imperative to stay ahead of the competition.
6 benefits of maturing your resource management function:
1. Increased utilisation
A lack of visibility into resource availability, siloed software and data, and different approaches to scheduling results in underutilised resources. Using a dedicated resource management solution that consolidates engagement and resource data in one place enables efficient, balanced allocation of work on a large scale, with full visibility of resource availability and suitability.
2. Optimal staffing
Optimal staffing decisions lead to increased utilisation as well as better client outcomes, engagement quality, and employee satisfaction. The organised and effective processes prevent a culture of resource hoarding. With AI-powered scheduling, resource managers can work through recommended resource matches and utilise intelligent scheduling to build a big-picture, fully optimised plan.
3. Increased revenues and margins
Having firm-wide visibility into resource availability has an immediate impact on increasing utilisation. It provides insights into pockets of both underutilisation and overutilisation, and it prevents resource hoarding through enhanced capacity planning. If your firm relies on delivery teams for resourcing instead of a centralised resourcing team, optimising and streamlining the process results in a more efficient operation. This, in turn, frees up the chargeable time of fee-earners within these teams.
4. Proactive engagement performance tracking
Mature resource management functions empower teams to make strategic decisions by providing visibility into real-time engagement performance. By bringing operations and finance together in one system, resourcing decisions are aligned with margin and other engagement goals. In addition, engagement managers receive real-time, configurable alerts if engagements are going off track. This ability to track and monitor actuals against the budget is not possible in less mature firms with siloed finance and scheduling systems.
5. Increased talent retention
Maturing your resource management function leads to proactive planning through the creation of stable and well-balanced workloads. Adopting firm-wide allocation opens doors to diverse learning and development opportunities and the integration of modern, user-friendly technology makes work an enjoyable experience. Together, these aspects collaboratively foster a people-centric environment that aligns operational activities with the career aspirations of employees, encouraging them to remain with the firm and flourish in their professional journey.
6. Improve strategic decision-making
Mature resource management systems use data not only to optimise resource allocation but to provide reports powered with real-time data to assist with operational decisions and strategies. With reliable engagement management information and reporting in one place, or exported to a system like Power BI, it’s easy to visualise what is happening in the firm and give your team the tools needed to make important decisions.
Take the first step in your resource management maturity journey
Maturing your resource management will boost your firm's performance and for firms aiming to thrive, it’s a crucial route to achieving success. Improving your resource management function empowers you to expedite decision-making, optimise outcomes, minimise risks, and ultimately optimise your firm’s growth. For an indication into how close or far your firm is to realising these Stage 4 to Stage 5 benefits, Dayshape has created a resource management maturity quiz to help you assess which of the five stages of maturity your firm’s resource management function is currently at.
Find out where you are now. Take our interactive resource management maturity quiz.
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