staffing

5 tips to managing and motivating virtual team members

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by sandi smith leyva, cpa
accountant’s accelerator

it’s not uncommon for even the smallest of businesses to have employees and contractors all over the world.  right now, i have an employee in the ukraine, two employees in san jose, a virtual admin in orange county, a warehouse team in indiana, a transcriptionist in las vegas, partners in new york, chicago, missouri and atlanta, and a coach in sydney, australia.

in the last few months, i‘ve moved from san jose, calif., to plano, texas, while my team stays put.   and it won’t hurt my business one tiny bit. here are five tips to help your virtual team play at their best. read more →

accounting firms launch new war for talent

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firms are hiring, and many staffers are thinking about a job change.
get more details, join the survey.

by rick telberg
卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间

now five years since the banking crash that forced record layoffs at tax and accounting firms, new survey results from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 research show intensifying competition for talent, with more than 42% of accountants reporting that their firms are hiring and about half of all staffers ready to make a move.

chris hatcher
chris hatcher

“there’s a labor shortage out there,” according to chris hatcher, a partner at louisville, ky., baldwin cpas. “finding good talent is hard.” hatcher says baldwin cpas is looking for professionals with ambition, which he defines as an “owners  mentality.”

in this report, 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 research:

– reports the percentage of firms hiring, cutting or holding steady on headcount in the next six to 12 months;
– gathers comment from a representative sample of professionals on key economic and business trends; and
– analyzes latent discontent in the ranks of staffers,
– propensity to seek a job change, and
– overall confidence in the job market. read more →

six great online places to find talent

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by sandi smith leyva, cpa
accountant’s accelerator

when you need to expand your team, the good news is there are many options available today:

  • full time vs. part-time
  • your location or theirs
  • contract or employee
  • permanent or temporary
  • project-specific or recurring
  • and many more options

thousands of people are looking for work, and thousands more are looking for small tasks that they can do on the side.  to find the perfect person for you, here’s a list of sites that help match you to the perfect person for your task, project or job. read more →

cpas salute the people who shaped their lives

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today’s best career advice: join the survey; get the answers.

by rick telberg

at 20 years old, the world was a blank canvas with vast opportunities for sal inserra. he thought he knew exactly what he wanted in life.

“until,” he once told me, “i was set straight.”

like many cpas, sal owes much of his career and success to a few key mentors who guided him early on.

today — as the kids head back to school and college, and as the rest of us wind up our summers and look ahead to the fall — it may be a good time to salute the mentors who help steward a great profession to the next generation. read more →

crowdsourcing for accounting practices

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going beyond outsourcing and virtual workers.

by sandi smith, cpa
accountant’s accelerator

the days are long gone when the only way to build your business was by hiring full-time employees. now there are so many more choices. many employees are interested in part-time work. some prefer to work virtually, which frees a company up from being limited to local talent. and then there’s crowdsourcing, a whole new way to tap into talented labor on a project-by-project basis.

crowdsourcing is a special way to outsource a task. with outsourcing, you know exactly who will be doing the task. with crowdsourcing, you don’t; people just show up and contribute. wikipedia calls it “distributed problem-solving.” read more →

hire experienced people, or train them yourself?

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how to invest your mentoring time where it matters most.

question: we were looking for an additional experienced person since september and hired someone with five years experience in mid-november, but she said she couldn’t start until january.  she said she had work she had to finish up.  two days before christmas she called to tell me her firm made her a “better” offer and she decided to stay there. it meant we had to enter busy season short a person.  this seems to happen a lot.  what do you suggest? read more →

‘unprecedented demand’ for accounting grads

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cpa firm hiring tops 40,000 for first time ever.

by rick telberg

bolstering reports of a suddenly surging profession with a high demand for top talent, a new survey of colleges and firms by the aicpa shows that cpa firms are hiring a record number of graduates.

at the same time, the pipeline of accounting students is bulging, suggesting to some that the continuing high demand for new recruits can be met by newly minted graduates for the next few years.

this will come as good news to firms facing growing new-business opportunities, tougher competition and a growing need for entry-level staff.

it does not, however, help alleviate the catastrophic stall in growth dating back to the 1990s with the spread of the so-called 150-hour rule that has left the profession with a gaping hole in its succession and business continuity strategies. the profession, already facing a succession crisis due to the aging-out of the baby boomers, now finds itself with a dearth of 40- and 50-something senior managers and junior partners to take over management and control – a fact that a record supply of new graduates won’t correct for 10 or 20 years, if ever.

 

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the good news for hiring: pipeline fills with huge supply of talent.

the report shows: read more →

back to the future: staff shortages re-emerge as top worry for cpa firms

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a sign of economic recovery and increased competition.

bringing in new business and finding top-notch staffers to handle anticipated growth are emerging as the new, most pressing challenges for cpa firms today.

with a rebounding economy, the aicpa says in its new pcps “top issues survey” that client retention, which had been a significant concern for firms in the 2009 survey, has been overtaken by a tilt toward growth issues.

“finding qualified staff” was a top issue from 1997 to 2007 for all but the smallest firms, but disappeared entirely from top 5 lists in 2009. now it’s back.

read more →

trends in temporary staffing

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rationalizing a broken system and recapturing two-thirds of lost value.

dan gaffney
dan gaffney

with cpa firms and corporations rushing to staff up with a suddenly warming economy, finance and accounting employment agencies are booming. but it can’t last. sooner, rather than later, the internet will change everything.

dan gaffney, a cpa, cia, cisa and a 20-year audit veteran, in both public accounting and in corporate, is positioning himself to take advantage of the paradigm shift. he’s out to revolutionize the finance and accounting temp business.

his chicago-based incubation-stage start-up, vouchedin.com, is seeking to do to short-term staffing placements what monster did to newspaper classifieds and what apple did to the recording industry: leverage the internet to cut out the middleman, re-channeling profits to both the worker and the employer. it could change a big part of the accounting profession as well. – the editors read more →

when staffers don’t listen to you

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15-item checklist on effective staff management.

ed mendlowitz, cpa, abv, pfs
author of “implementing fee increases”

question: my staff doesn’t listen to me.  to be able to manage and control my business i need them to prepare a monthly schedule of what they plan on doing that month.  i further need to know each morning if they did what they were supposed to do the previous day, and whether there was anything not done, or anything extra that wasn’t planned on.  my problem is that they don’t give me the schedule and then don’t call or email me to tell me what they did. i really need to know this stuff and can’t figure out how to get them to do it.  what can you suggest? read more →

amid industry expansion, cpa firms remain cautious in hiring

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the good news: 10,700 accountants hired. the bad: profit pressure.

the u.s. tax, accounting, and bookkeeping industry added a seasonally adjusted 10,700 jobs in march, the ninth straight month of year-over-year expansion, according to 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 sources. women and non-exempt employees are making up the bulk of the workers returning to the industry, but not, it seems, to cpa firms, where caution seems to be continuing. at the same time, 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 finds renewed pressure on fees and pricing while utilization rates and salaries continue to increase.

– rick telberg
卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 research

in this report:

  • overall hiring trends
  • women employment
  • cpa firm hiring
  • overall trends in pricing and billing rates
  • cpa firm pricing trends
  • tax prep pricing
  • pricing for bookkeeping and compilation
  • number of hours worked per week
  • trends in wages and earnings

 

the 3% increase to 932,900 full-time equivalents from the year-ago month represents the biggest jump in a year. still, the rise left the industry’s head count 14,100 jobs shy of the month’s record high of 946,700 in 2008.

all employees, thousands

read more →