eight things to stop doing now

sometimes work belongs in other hands.

by penny breslin
it’s not just the numbers

a firm we worked with in philadelphia has a dedicated administrative assistant for their teams.

more: keep the accountants focused on accounting | which kind of team do you have? | 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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she is not a bookkeeper. however, she is very organized and a dedicated team player. after she had been doing it for a while, i asked her what she now saw her function to be. her answer is:

1. i schedule all the tasks in the workflow.
2. i contact all third-party vendors when setting up clients on any type of software access
3. and answer clients’ phone calls.
4. i work with one of the back-office supports to ensure we load-level tasks correctly so that we are not overextending ourselves and underproducing.
5. i reset priorities, re-assign tasks or change due dates when emergencies occur.
6. i keep the onenote procedures clean and updated with any firm standards.
7. i make sure the weekly and monthly meetings for internal staff are scheduled, and all attendees are notified, and
8. i handle all internal firm work reports that are needed from the workflow system

by taking administrative work away from the other team members, the client work is completed faster and with a bit less stress on the rest of the team.

for a single-person firm, some of the functions can be provided by virtual assistance using an ai app such as calendly.

case study: let admin do the tasks no one else will do

at one firm in the midwest, they had little movement on their attempt at bos types of services. they wanted to do it, but they needed to bring all the clients up to date with clean data to start. this is always a good first step. after struggling for some time, i was asked to fly out and meet with the whole staff. it took about 15 minutes to figure out the bottleneck.

the account managers were tasked with obtaining source document information from the clients. each of them cringed when the workflow showed that the task was stopped and left in a holding pattern because of this. they hated doing this work. they were extremely vocal about it.

i walked out of the conference room and brought in the receptionist. i asked her if she would like a new task. she had been out in the front tidying the entry. i showed her how to work ledger sync in 15 minutes, gave her a little speech to give to the clients and set her to work getting ledger sync working. the firm had purchased ledger sync but had never used it. she left the room. we returned to another issue they were having: workflow use or lack thereof.

thirty minutes later, more than half of the required documents that were on hold had started to come in. when i left the firm later in the day, the two account managers said that was the best thing that happened to them of that whole day.

one person’s dog is another person’s pony!

posted on october 5, 2022