As an accountant, how many times have you missed out on attending something important? From school plays to a friend's birthday meal, accountants are used to missing key events, especially as tax deadlines loom. And the unfortunate truth is this: you can't buy time.
Despite many businesses now promoting a healthy work-life balance, many accountants at large firms are still working well into overtime. And then you also have the vast numbers of self-employed bookkeepers and small teams who feel a need to work long hours to keep up with submitting tax returns before deadlines and steer clear of damaging fines.
So, how do you avoid such scenarios? What you can do is adopt new strategies to reduce your workload and optimize your time, making the leadup to deadline day much more manageable.
The importance of a work-life balance, especially before tax deadlines
Burning yourself out to keep up with business can trigger both short- and long-term consequences. It can cause stress in your work and personal life, with the two subsequently impacting each other, quickly rolling into a downward spiral and affecting well-being and productivity. This period is particularly acute before tax deadlines.
It's of course much easier said than done, but if you feel overburdened with work, it's better to take a break and prioritize other things rather than trying to soldier through. Working smart is everything here. You can create task calendars that help you plan jobs efficiently in line with optimum productivity working hours and personal commitments. Setting earlier deadlines and time limits to complete activities will make upcoming tax deadlines a far less "dreaded" period.
More broadly, choosing who to work with is also a key factor to achieving a healthy work-life balance, impacting both business value and quality of life. It's better to have a smaller list of clients you work well with than entering relationships that are harder to manage, reduce your time to business value ratio and negatively impact morale and burnout.
And when it comes to the clients you do have, adopting healthy year-round processes is crucial to alleviating burnout.
How client timing can ease the pre-deadline rush
The joys of chasing clients. For any business, it always seems to be an item firmly on the to-do list. You need clients to not just see you as an accountant but as a business partner. By being an approachable source for sound advice, understanding their business needs, and creating an open line of communication, you can cultivate relationships with clients that go beyond just numbers and submitting tax returns. That way clients are more likely to reply sooner and submit relevant information before deadlines when requested.
But, as we all know, life is busy; there will always be those who send their information over at the last minute regardless of how often you communicate with them. People often don't act until the deadline is staring them in the face. So for accounting professionals, what becomes essential is to relay the benefits of real-time data collection to clients to improve workflow.
Adopting a system and technology that automatically stores information means that you can swerve last-minute stress. It enables you to leverage data to provide better tax planning advice, budgeting tips and incur no late submission fees.
How technology creates "energy efficiency"
The main trait of accounting technology is that it's a time saver. The ability to automate processes, be that fetching sales transactions, financial data or uploading receipts in bulk amounts, frees up valuable and value-adding time for your business.
People often talk about cost and time efficiency with work, but these should be joined by "energy efficiency." It's not buying time, but using the same time much more sustainably and effectively, redirecting energy into client relationships and meaningful business tasks.
This core quality of accounting software is accompanied by simplified sophistication — which makes the complex simple, streamlining tricky tasks into manageable and profitable processes — and automated data checks, which ensure a data accuracy of over 99%. So much time can be consumed by multiple sanity checks and anxiety over data accuracy; technology removes this stress and helps to instill confidence in compliance and your numbers. Time is saved, processes are streamlined and confidence is generated.
Give time a new meaning
Rather than seeing time vanish before a deadline hits, reshaping how you use it can redefine your work-life balance. It's all about being smart, setting boundaries and prioritizing tasks. Sometimes overtime can't be avoided, but understanding that priorities fluctuate and creating a balance will enhance both your work and personal life.
Valuing who you work with and going beyond in your role as an accountant will also help relieve added stress and keep clients on your side. But what it really comes down to is having the tools and technology to optimize your time and create "energy efficiency." Removing the need to input data manually, streamlining processes and ensuring numbers are accurate means energy is transferred from draining tasks into productive ones.
Time isn't bought, but it's reworked for a much smoother and rewarding process, especially in the run-up to deadline day.
