How to battle budget-write
offs and deliver more profit

Andrew Bone - CEO and Co-founder of Dayshape

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.
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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

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“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”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“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”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“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”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“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”

Delivering consistent engagement performance has become an increasingly complex nut to crack. Accounting firms of all sizes are battling against budget write-offs, cost increases, skill shortages, and "the Great Resignation." These pressures mean that inaccurate forecasting and lack of visibility and control over engagement financials is a key challenge for firms.

Evidence from the Big Four accounting firms in recent years supports this by showing cost overruns in up to 50% of audits. This, and the fact that budget write-offs in the hundreds of millions are now commonplace, suggests that the standard approach to engagement performance is in need of transformation. So how can firms keep their engagement financials on track?

Andrew Bone, former Big Four chartered accountant and CEO and Co-Founder of Dayshape shares his insight.

“Despite profitability being a top priority for accounting firms, many continue to track the financial progress and performance of their engagements using manual spreadsheets or siloed software. This means engagement information is static and changes to resource plans are not always accurately reflected in predicted totals. Managing engagements in this way means true performance only becomes clear after the engagement is complete.
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To deliver profitability, engagement teams need the ability to accurately plan, predict, and prioritise engagement performance and proactively prevent projects from going off track. Dayshape’s AI-powered engagement planning and resource management software solution, has developed unique engagement economics functionality to help firms to evolve beyond spreadsheets and static engagement management.”
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Dayshape’s engagement economics can help to deliver more profitable engagements in 4 key steps.

1. Plan accurate and optimal engagements
For optimal profitability, engagements must be planned accurately, managed efficiently, and use the right people and skills at exactly the right time. When firms go through their planning cycles, tens of thousands of budgets may need to be scheduled for the coming year. This often results in many hours being consumed by endless iterations and meetings. It’s in this scenario that engagement economics can offer immediate and significant efficiencies.

Dayshape provides firm-wide visibility of resources, the ability to create engagement plans, make resourcing requests, and manage budget approvals in the same place. Using existing or past engagements as a template, engagement managers can also take engagement plans for similar projects, roll them forward, and save valuable time during the planning stage.
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2. Prioritise people, profit, and client service objectives
When scheduling, engagement managers must make key decisions about which objectives to prioritise to maximise performance. Once the engagement is in progress engagement teams also need the ability and autonomy to reprioritise and make the right adjustments to keep projects on track. Dayshape’s engagement economics can allow these decisions to be made confidently by surfacing the impacts resource changes have on both utilisation and profit in real-time. This visibility empowers firms to make decisions which are more consistent and aligned to the area they need to prioritise.

3. Predict engagement performance in real-time
Without insight into dynamic project conditions, it’s near impossible to accurately monitor and predict engagement financials in flight. Settling for reporting against month-old forecasts means it’s too late to take action to rectify issues. Dayshape provides engagement managers a crucial advantage by allowing them to compare actuals against their forecast in real-time. With easy access to the forecast and recovery-rates across projects, engagement performance becomes more predictable. Engagement performance can also be analysed year on year, this allows teams to better predict performance outcomes and make adjustments to optimise as necessary.

4. Prevent overruns and budget write-offs
When engagements are taking up more valuable resources than anticipated, and costs are rising higher than planned, the earlier this is flagged, the better. A key benefit of engagement economics is the ability to automatically identify which projects are underperforming, are likely to overrun, or have the greatest recovery rate. This insight enables engagement managers to prevent problems from emerging at the last-minute, avoiding unnecessary write-offs and reduced margins.

With greater control and awareness of how engagement financials are tracking, teams can spend less time firefighting and more time delivering the best possible engagement performance for their clients.

Download the full guide to learn how to use engagement economics to enhance visibility, control, and profitability across your firm’s engagements.

May 2022

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Accountancy Practice Management
for Future-Fit Growth: part I - the power of KPIs

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.

Accountants in IT stimulating collaboration

For all general enquiries:

audrey.brown@aituk.co.uk
07506 861 417
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