turn the staffing shortage into a new opportunity.
by frank stiteley
the relentless cpa
charles dickens had to be writing about the accounting profession when he wrote, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
clients are plentiful. i met a new client coming out of the restroom at our office complex. we get four to five inquiries a day – out of tax season. during tax season, we turned down four out of five prospective clients.
more on staffing: tax and accounting jobs and salaries show strength | olympics of outsourcing and offshoring for accountants | new study: strong and steady growth for accountant jobs and salaries | can’t recruit? retain! | is tech causing both cpa shortage and low salaries? | staffing tops list of woes at cpa firms | to replenish the talent pipeline, go back to the classroom | whole person retention: when it’s not just the money | more big firms shut their doors to new college grads | seven enticements to keep talent on board | employee retention is easier than attraction | let interns fix the staffing shortage? | disruptors: talent crisis? what talent crisis? | firms culling clients as staffing woes persist
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staff are not plentiful – at least not good ones. i’m getting two or three resumes a day, but they’re the warm body sort most of us learned the hard way not to hire during the pandemic. you’ve seen these resumes too. they are people with six employers in eight years. you are certain to be number seven in nine years. they claim eight years of experience, but you can see from their job history that it’s really two years of experience repeated four times. and – they want $100k for those two years of real experience.
cut clients, raise rates
there are three ways to thrive in the era of limited capacity.
first, raise fees and select clients carefully. do i really have to explain the logic behind raising fees? we have something valuable in our knowledge and experience, which is in very short supply. if you won’t raise fees in the good times, when will you? plumbers have no problem with this concept. why do we have a problem?
raising fees is also essential to keeping the capacity you have. recruiters contact our staff daily looking for unhappy employees. surveys show that people don’t leave primarily over money. surveys are what people say – not what they do. i was young and stupid once. arguably, stupid still applies.
i absolutely would have left my employers for a 10 percent raise. that’s the difference between affording a rent increase and having to move to a cheaper place. ten percent is a lot of craft beer and maybe even a vacation.
raising fees helps you fairly compensate your good staff.
we have limited slots during tax season. why waste one on a client who offers no revenue opportunities after tax season? define your acceptable client. i didn’t write “ideal client,” because the ideal client pays us to do nothing. i don’t think many of those exist.
only accept great new clients and cull out the old ones, who gripe about fees and cause issues. we decided to focus on businesses and business owners who will pay us for advisory services. we view advisory services as necessary to educate business owners to become knowledgeable users of our services. how many longtime s corporation owners do you have who still don’t get the concept of reasonable compensation?
we are gradually eliminating the individual tax clients, who only come in annually. they take up tax season slots and generate too many irs notices, for which they fight paying us to respond.
we were up front with our clients over the past year about our focus changing. during tax season, we prepared 70 fewer personal tax returns but nearly 40 more businesses. our revenue was up nearly 20 percent.
manage the processes
second, become ruthlessly efficient. this means automation and better time management.
end-to-end automation in tax return workflow is the holy grail, and we aren’t there yet with the tools available. for example, we struggle with scanned client documents that come in many formats: bmps, pngs and cell phone pictures. i know from the cell phone pictures that many clients need to replace their granite countertops. they are so 10 years ago.
the search for end-to-end automation drives incremental efficiency improvements. we squeezed more revenue out of the same capacity by changing a lot of little things.
many cpas have trouble organizing their days. firms try to automate bad processes in their search to recover time. they believe software tools are the key to great time management. automating bad processes just makes the bad outcomes happen faster.
organizing the work is key to great time management. prioritize projects closest to completion. this removes clients from your system faster. fewer clients in process means fewer calls and e-mails about project status. fewer client contacts means more time to get work done. teaching staff this principle is essential.
great software certainly helps in organizing the work, but understand how tax return projects differ from the general project management you maybe learned in college.
in tax season, specifying completion dates for tasks is fruitless. it works for steps early in the process before clients get involved. however, when a client takes two weeks to answer questions, how good are the downstream task completion dates that are based on a two-day client response?
workflow management software should assist you in determining what’s next. for partners and managers, “what’s next” means tax return reviews and moving projects forward in your workflow process. can you easily determine what needs to be reviewed and what’s hung up in process?
teach staff the principle of prioritizing work closest to completion. this isn’t an all-or-nothing concept. obviously, new returns must get started at some point. can your staff easily determine what’s next for them without your constant involvement?
leverage, leverage, leverage
finally, squeeze the most from your limited staff resources. move more tasks to admin staff and give them authority to change processes. you don’t have to be involved.
this year, our admin staff stopped giving me folders of documents dropped off by the few clients who still do that. they didn’t even tell me this was happening. admin organized the documents and started the tax return workflow process. they weren’t as efficient as i delude myself into believing i am. however, efficiency wasn’t as important as freeing up my time. it is all about me.
outsource tax preparation to overseas talent. finding great talent in the u.s. is nearly impossible. when you find it, do you really want them typing in w-2 and 1099 forms? you want great talent doing high-dollar-value tasks such as advisory services. however, as more of us mine india and other countries for talent, the talent is becoming more difficult to find and more expensive.
operating in a limited capacity environment can be frustrating, but the rewards are great – both financially and emotionally. most pundits see little future relief in the employment market.
thriving means getting the most from our existing resources. accept that we are not every client’s solution. fewer, but higher-dollar, clients can bring great success.