five non-accounting aspects critical to success.
by penny breslin
it’s not just the numbers
before you can build a back office support (bos) practice, you need to assess what kind of team you already have. let’s look at two similar and at the same time uniquely different accounting and tax businesses who contacted me for help in outsourcing some of their bookkeeping.
more: you don’t have to do everything | what do you want advisory services to be? | meet the new bos | why ai is not the enemy
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both businesses have multiple offices; both have multipartner owners; both do taxes, accounting and bookkeeping; and both list client advisory services. both have ownership and employees of a similar age. both exist along the same coast. both of these accounting businesses appear successful. one business is full of happy employees, owners and cooperative clients. the other business has the word no figuratively imprinted on their front door.
business 1
this business has three offices in the same state. when they first contacted us, they were interested in utilizing our back office support. they had their own servers, a saas-based workflow tasking product. this business has four tax specialists, a payroll clerk, one bookkeeper and three administrative staff members. their clients are a variety of businesses who primarily run their own quickbooks, hand deliver bank statements to the various offices, and send accountant copy files quarterly or annually. a few clients pick up manually printed payroll checks once a week. they also manage individual tax and financial planning. when we were first contacted, it was through the primary partner in the business. his goal was to have us take over all the excess bookkeeping, as it was not getting done. they have 160 monthly bookkeeping clients.
while this firm has a cloud-based workflow tool, less than half of the firm employees use it. they do not use zoom, teams or any other virtual conferencing, even during covid-19, at all. training for team members is focused on tax training. their website lists the names of team members with their education and the number of years they have worked at the firm.
according to one of the partners, their clients are happy with the way things are. accountants at the firm are too busy to call and talk to their clients. after several months, only a quarter of the clients’ bookkeeping has been provided to us to work on; 20 percent of that is delayed because of the inability to obtain both transactional data and statements. the rest of the clients have not had any work done for six months. everyone is too busy to get the work ready to allow someone to work on it. but they did set up a hosted server that we and one other person in one of the offices uses.
business 2
this business has three offices in two states. they have a fully managed server with 24/7 tech support. they have two tax specialists, two bookkeepers and three staffers to do admin and some bookkeeping. their clients are primarily focused in three verticals. they also provide the profit first methodology to clients. although some older clients still come to the office for annual tax returns, the majority of the day-to-day work is done in cloud accounting systems. their hosted quickbooks is on the same server farm where they have the tax software. they also use a shared dms. when they first contacted us, they needed additional bookkeepers and also, they were purchasing their third location and wanted to convert all the clients that fit the model to qbo.
all team members use a cloud workflow and tasking tool with separate, well identified user profiles and functions. prior to the pandemic, they met with some clients in the office as well as using zoom. they publish a quarterly newsletter that profiles a client working with the profit first system and spotlights a team member. team members are certified in the applications they use daily. for training, team members are sent to conferences. in addition, the firm sponsors a weeklong retreat, at a destination location, where they do a deep dive into what is working and what is not working at the business level. they utilize two full-time bookkeepers with us and an additional floating bookkeeper when needed. we assist in updating any new procedures that occur as the clients change in their business and we also assisted them in converting their workflow and client communication tools.
if your firm looks like business 1, transforming to bos services will be as likely as stockpiling snowballs in the desert. not only do you have the wrong team members and attitude, but you also have a lot of the wrong clients.
where would you want to work? which firm do you think has the most potential for growth? which firm do you think has happier employees and owners?
providing bos is not a one-person job. my brother was a c-level engineer for an international cybersecurity company. when i first explained this to him, he asked me how many clients i could serve if i did this alone. i laughed and said you mean even without apps? about 5-6, not enough to build a business. but with ai and apps – about 50-75, a nice size gig.
who’s on your team?
for small firms, it is a plus that all the people in your office become part of the team. for larger firms, it may be a group that chooses to become the team that provides these additional flat rates and value-added services. regardless, team is the operative word.
not everyone on the team needs to know accounting
when i was a kid in school, i remember a story that was told by our teacher after an event at recess. you know the kind, an allegory. it was a very short story and it related to an incident that occurred when a group of kids ignored someone in a game under the assumption that this person was not capable. and truth, not too nicely either. by not thinking that this person was worth including, what was the whole group missing? i am not sure what others got out of the story but what i got out of it was that it takes all kinds, and it takes a team effort to get something done. i will say that there were other factors in my existence that pointed me in this direction, but this one allegorical story often comes to mind when i hear those oh so common words, “i don’t have time to …”
on that day, after recess, sister ann sat all us sixth graders down and told us a story of an accident. no one was harmed, this was a sixth-grade catholic school – the only person harmed was you if you were out of line. heck, even if you were not out of line and just the closest one to the nun ready to strike. but sister ann was different; she told stories instead. anyway, i digress.
she told the whole class about a delivery truck driving under the bridge down off mcgrath highway where it crossed into east somerville. we all knew the spot where the bridge had been renovated a few years prior. it was too low. well, on that day, as sister ann told us, a truck that was too tall attempted to pass through. yep, it got stuck. this was before osha and height warning signs. so, this delivery truck was stuck and the driver, a police officer and two other men walking along the road all looked up at the place where the truck was hitting the bridge scratching their heads on how to get it out. just about that time a small boy, all of 10 years old, walked by. the boy takes one look and says, let the air out of the tires.
my takeaway? well, there were several, 1. it does take a team, 2. one never knows where the sound of logic will come from. 3. perspective is everything and 4. adults should listen to kids. now that last one was not, i am sure, an aspect that sister ann intended, but hey, like i said each person discovers their own moral to a story, do they not? and i was number six of seven and learned to duck quickly at a very young age.
why you need to build a team before you find the clients
when i first wrote my book on cfo services for accounting firms in 2013, the second step in the process was picking the right clients, and the third step was building your team. but after eight years of working with a myriad of businesses that provide accounting, bookkeeping and tax, i decided that building a team needs to happen before picking the client.
over the last eight years, i have worked through this process with quite a few client firms. we asked people in the firm to look around and to discover what they really liked versus what they did not like to do, and to ask everyone. we put in team-building discovery tools and made it step number two. your team will include not just the people but also the applications that deal with debits and credits.
an article in inc. had a story of how google builds teams that reaffirmed my takeaways from my trip down memory lane with sister ann, and the need to assess everyone as possible members of a given team. when you build your team these five non-technical, non-accounting aspects are critical to success:
- psychological safety
- dependability
- structure and clarity
- meaning
- impact
including non-accounting staff into a team can be beneficial for their perspective and diversity of thought on the process of getting the work done. and for getting things done that another may not have time to do.
many firms have administrative staff. these folks do not perform any accounting, bookkeeping, tax, audit or advisory service. rather, they are a support team to make sure the lights are on, the phones are answered, the break room has snacks and drinks, the doors are locked and unlocked, and everything else is in place so that the accountants and bookkeepers can focus on doing what they do best.
consider adding your admin and your front office people to your tasking application. when a bookkeeper or account manager gets bogged down because they don’t have time to get the data from the client, assign the task to the admin. let the admin be the ones hunting down the missing source documents, not the accountants and bookkeepers who really don’t have time for that. even make it part of the overall workflow to always assign those tasks to an admin and make them part of the onboarding.
with a bit of training, your admin people can be the ones who teach the clients how to use the client-facing apps. how many times have you signed up for an app with the intention of getting all your clients on it and then …? nothing? by assigning this to your non-accounting team members, you can get your clients to use those shiny new apps that were going to revolutionize your interactions with your clients.
when the time comes to discuss how a client’s work is moving through your firm, and that time should be more frequent than you probably are doing now, listen to the admin staff who was the first point of contact. they may have some useful insight as to the pressure gauge on the tires.