Time management is critical in every industry and for all organizations. Budgeting employee resources, managing workflows and hitting deadlines are all part and parcel to doing business. But in the accounting world, time management isn't just important — it's elemental.
CPAs and accounting firms live (or die) by calendars and clear communication, with daily and annual deadlines — and many more intermediary checkpoints in between — dictating their day-to-day activities and priorities. Most of you in the field have an intrinsic understanding of this standard, and you have likely adapted your work rhythms to meet those demands.
But here's a thought: What about your clients?
No matter how meticulous your team may be about managing time and meeting deadlines, clients can always be counted on to complicate the process. A CPA can only work as fast as their client does, and every delay and missed deadline has the potential to shift workflows and introduce new complexities that threaten to affect business — including that of other clients. Pick your metaphor — slippery slope, snowball effect, house of cards. None of them bodes well for an accounting firm trying to stay on task and satisfy a plurality of clients whose tax and accounting needs often culminate simultaneously.
So what's the answer for accountants and auditors hoping to reduce work stress, promote smarter time management and reliably communicate deadlines and workflows to all stakeholders, especially when industry-related chokepoints inevitably arrive?
Start with communication best practices
The office can be a wild place, with a diversity of cognition and communication patterns — not only among colleagues but also clients. It's an ecosystem like any other. But without rules in place to dictate how, when, why and to whom we convey information to one another, much of that communication is at risk of being lost in translation.
For instance, who handles your firm's social media account? It may be a single employee or a team, but everyone involved must be on the same page about the goal, or goals, of social media. (For instance, is it community outreach? Marketing? Lead generation? All of the above?) That includes a plan that outlines precisely what information should be communicated, what forms they will take and clear direction about voice and tone.
At the end of the day, the crux of a firm's communication best practices should be overcommunication. Careful consideration should be given to what needs to be covered in every face-to-face, Zoom call, email and marketing campaign. After each client interface, for example, a bullet-pointed list of next steps that includes key dates and deadlines can be a useful reminder to all stakeholders that also helps appropriately prioritize workflows for all. Building in regular communications, often via automation, through email updates, social media, SMS and text messaging helps ensure that clients are aware of and striving to meet the deadlines that are so critical to your business.
Create a better calendar
Hopefully you're no longer relying only on the old-school broadsheet calendar tucked into the vinyl corners. There simply isn't a desk big enough to hold the paper calendar you would need to denote every task and deadline coming down the pike. But even the standard-issue digital calendar built into your computer or handheld device likely isn't sufficient when it comes to maintaining your busy schedule, let alone aligning it with those of a team and a long list of clients. In the mission of time management, streamlining and simplifying is the name of the game — and a truly dynamic calendar is your game-changer.
The key: high-quality calendar tools — including add to calendar widgets and subscription calendar features. A quick look under the hood reveals the kind of horsepower delivered by what could be mistaken as standard or basic offerings:
- Help CPAs, auditors and their teams stay organized by easily adding important deadlines and events to their personal calendars.
- Add events to clients' calendars to help ensure that all stakeholders involved in a project are on the same page, while reducing the risk of missed meetings or deadlines.
- Subscription options that allow for clients and teams to follow those calendars and receive synced updates, making it easier for teams and clients to stay informed and manage their workflows.
Does this feature seem like something nearly every business and individual employee could benefit from? Quite likely, yes. Especially considering the time crunches accounting firms routinely face at specific points every year, like everyone's favorite — tax season.
Given the full-stop necessity of receiving client paperwork within deadlines, dynamic and easy-to-use calendar features are a CPA's and auditor's best friend.
Sweating the small stuff to avoid chronic stress
You may be sensing a theme here: a monastic attention to the details of work communication. And while the approach might be cynically viewed as micromanagement, the alternative — leaving stones unturned — is the quickest path to a snarl of missed deadlines, long nights of making up for lost time and a work-life balance for an entire staff that feels like a never-ending case of collective vertigo.
The best antidote to that worst-case scenario is a blend of established communication goals, best-practices development and the organization-wide employment of tech-based communication tools. In the case of CPAs, the old adage of failing to plan holds true: Take decisive and deliberate steps toward building a communication infrastructure that can be understood and adhered to by all involved stakeholders, or you might as well be planning to fail.
