How is it that some firms produce 25% to 50% more billings per person than others?  These firms are dealing with the similar personnel, clients and tools, but they are able to utilize them more efficiently and effectively.  While there is a lot to say about having niche expertise, even in firms that are not doing as well, there are individuals that have figured out how to optimize their production significantly more than others.  The challenge here is learning how to capture that “edge” and promulgate it in the rest of the firm, which we feel is the learning opportunity. It’s been said that a firm’s ability to learn and implement best practices is the last sustainable competitive advantage that firms have, as virtually everything else in regards to applications and hardware can be quickly copied.  But in today’s extremely busy and understaffed world, how can this realistically be done? 

The beginning step is to identify every step of tax or audit workflow and determine the bottlenecks and areas of greatest discrepancy in production.  Staff and managers can do this with a survey asking which steps do some personnel do extremely well and where are the biggest areas of opportunity for improvement to create a prioritized list.  In each of these firms they can usually point to that individual that is measurably more productive at each step, as these are usually the people that are the busiest and everyone wants on their jobs.  By allocating a manageable amount of time to allow this person to document and educate other users, the firm will evolve towards the efficiency of that person, and those procedures will be captured for future hires.  Firms should target between two and four hours per week, where this individual would work in an undisturbed environment and where they can focus on the one process until complete.  By including instructions with screenshots and the firm’s own directories and naming conventions, the processes can be highly personalized.  Attending AAA conferences and working with other AAA Member Firms that have already resolved the firm’s issues or developed procedures manuals can be extremely rewarding and introduce the firms to better solutions than they currently have in place. 

Please note it is important to give these individuals chargeable credit for the time so they are not penalized for improving firm processes and for owners to allocate the time for the rest of the firm to learn the utilize these new processes.  Over time the individual steps will grow and link together to become the firm’s procedures manual for tax, audit and client services.  The saying: “if you don’t have time to do it right the first time, when will you have time to do it again?” can be changed to “by doing it the most effective way the first time, we will all have more time to do the things we need and want to do.”  Take advantage of the learning opportunity by focusing on those things that will make your firm great! 

Roman H. Kepczyk, CPA.CITP is President of InfoTech Partners North America, Inc. and an Advisory Board member to the Association for Accounting Administration.