"It's déjà vu all over again" was originally said by that famous philosopher Yogi Berra. I was thinking about this last week while I was cleaning out a bunch of old accounting publications and saw that many of the concerns covered there are still with us and wondered why?
Here is a list of some major concerns:
- Staff shortage and reduced pipeline.
- "Today's staff are not as good as yesterdays' staff."
- Staff make too many errors.
- Clients continually complain about fees.
- Our staff members are not developing the skills they will need to take over from us.
- Staff turnover is too high.
- A fear that technology that will replace us. It was always something new. Today it is AI.
- There is too much new information overload.
- The tax and financial report deadlines are killing us.
- Workload compression.
- Reducing overtime by staff.
- Paying staff for overtime.
- Wealth management is not for CPAs.
- Niche skills are becoming more important.
- Making the move into advisory services.
- The timesheet model needs replacement with a subscription model.
- Growing with clients and also leading that growth.
- Expanding efforts in diversity, inclusion and minority representation.
Some of these date from ancient times and some are more recent, but these are all problems that keep cropping up and never seem to go away. My suggestion is to pick one of the most bothersome for you and start doing something to make it go away, or to at least relieve the pressure from it.
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