teaching the meaning of ‘done’

not to be confused with the dreaded “done but.”

by frank stitely
the relentless cpa

in my last book, as with this one, i recommended hiring younger staff. in that book, i cautioned that you might have to teach very simple tasks like breathing and using the bathroom to your newbies. www.g005e.com posted an excerpt with my advice.

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one reader posted that she didn’t believe it was the responsibility of an admin department to teach bathroom use. she was new to this hot new writing technique called sarcasm. she did a great job making my point that you have to teach your staff a lot of really basic things.

one of those teaching tasks is the meaning of “done.” here’s the scenario. you have a client meeting on friday to deliver and review an income tax projection. you assigned the projection on monday. today is thursday. you ask the newbie staff member if he will be done in time for the client meeting.

newbie: “yes, it will be done for certain.”

translating from newbie language into partner language, this means he hasn’t started yet.

friday morning, about an hour before the client meeting, you ask if he will get the projection done.

newbie: “yes, it’s done, but i didn’t know how to do three things …”

those of us from planet real world know the projection isn’t done. however, our magnificent system of education teaches kids that it’s the effort that counts, not the result.

you hurriedly complete the projection as the client walks in the door. there’s no time to teach the newbie the three things he needed to know. you get the worst of all worlds – a hurriedly produced, unreviewed client deliverable and a newbie who won’t be able to complete the next similar project.

i wish i could state that this only applies to millennials, but we have had to teach pretty much every new employee walking or crawling through our doors the meaning of “done.” we have a phrase for this:

“there are no done buts …” it’s done or it’s not.

when we interview our next potential newbie, i have an interview technique in mind. we’ll come up with a reason to get the newbie to go to the restroom. there will be no paper towels in sight.

if the newbie asks where we keep them, he/she is hired on the spot and immediately promoted to manager. i can only wish all of our managers in company history had been capable of this level of bathroom competence. the ones who make partner can even replace toilet paper rolls.

sadly, i will not be able to use the above interview technique. we just moved, and our new office space shares bathrooms with other tenants. our bathroom performance problem is solved.

how does bathroom performance relate to our topic of reducing wip or increasing capacity? thanks for asking. when a newbie delivers 80 percent done work to you and you are forced to complete the work, you are performing tasks that should be done by less expensive staff. thus, wip increases as does turnaround time to the client.

that’s bad enough, but even worse, “done buts” decrease capacity. because you are jumping in to save the day at the last minute, the newbie isn’t being properly trained to complete the work for the next time. so your firm’s capacity is reduced – not to mention that you aren’t working on the high-value-added tasks that you should be working on.

there is no good news to “done buts.” they are a double whammy to your firm, and probably cause most partner suicides during tax season.

let’s examine how we got a “done but” society. a lot of this will sound like, “back in my day, sonny …” old man nonsense, and a lot of it is. however, i promise you a solution after my sociological exploration of 21^st-century culture. you won’t need a degree in sociology to understand this.

i didn’t graduate with an accounting degree from college. it wasn’t sociology either. i double majored in economics and finance, a mostly useless course of study that mainly qualifies me to troll target stock boys on facebook. you know who they are. they offer sage advice on world trade when they should be worried about the cleanup in aisle seven.

i ended up in an accounting job after college and thought knowing some accounting might be a good idea. i took a cost accounting course at night, while i pursued my accounting education. when was the last time you heard someone use the term “pursued” in a conversation about education? education used to be a pursuit. somewhere it became an entitlement. and, “stay off my damn lawn!” sorry, i just slipped into an old man trance. i hope i didn’t offend any millennials. that would make me sad.

my cost accounting professor told us that he preferred to teach evening courses with adult students over the normal day courses. when he assigned 10 problems for homework, adult students would return to the next class having attempted to complete 10 problems. younger students blew off most assignments.

what’s wrong with this very nice sentiment directed to evening students like me? it rewards effort, not results. out on planet real world, do we get paid for “effort”? will clients accept, and more importantly pay for, an attempted tax return? of course not.

i’d like to blame schoolteachers and professors for this shortcoming in our educational system, but i can’t. they reward effort theoretically as a way station on the train trip to competence. however, the train never leaves the station and moves on to the final destination. why? i’m guessing that failing 75 percent of the students in a college course isn’t the path to tenure anymore. but back in my day, sonny …

so we end up with newbies, who think they get partial credit for partially completed tasks.

because we live on planet real world, we get to solve the problem if we want successful practices. training is the solution.

teach newbies that starting a project the day before it’s due won’t work. you’ll need a practice management system to track this, assuming you have a number of cats (employees) to herd. i know a guy – actually that guy is me again. what a funny coincidence. i just happen to run a practice management software company.

second, teach newbies that asking questions is good. we have never shot an employee for asking questions. my aim is bad. teach them to ask questions early in the process, not the day before a project is due.

how do you teach this? while i don’t condone shooting employees, threatening them with a loaded gun seems to fall within our profession’s ethical guidelines. it’s a grey area, or a loophole if you’re a tax partner.

reinforce the good behavior. kind words stick. i don’t think i would go with:

“nice job, newbie. now i won’t have to reload the gun.”

maybe:

“thanks for asking while we still have time to address this. we have time to ask the client, and they have plenty of time to respond. great work.”

finally, instill a culture of training in which staff have access to the knowledge people in your firm. finding time to teach about dependent care benefits on march 16^th is painful, but finding time to correct it multiple times the first week in april is worse. each answer you give is an investment in not having to answer multiple times in the future.

do i practice this? i try. but as i’m writing this, i’m maybe an hour from an assault charge for beating a newbie who has messed up yet again and given me garbage near a delivery deadline. for the third time, the federal tax withholding on a tax projection remains uncorrected and the work papers even have the wrong client name at the top. i’m wondering if our firm’s hit man is available on short notice.

how will i avoid arrest? a few days ago, i asked his manager to schedule a meeting with him this afternoon. she’ll discuss this and find out why he’s having trouble with tax projections.

sometimes accounting personalities have trouble grasping the concept of tax projections, where we make up the numbers. however, the numbers must square generally with reality. it’s a big mental leap for people accustomed to stressing over rounding $.50 up or down to the nearest dollar.

he’s a bright newbie, but seems to have brain lock lately. a beatdown isn’t necessary – yet.

posted on november 10, 2020