How to Synchronize Your Team Efforts

Tired of the chaos during busy season? Missed deadlines, overworked employees, and too many things slipping through the cracks are clear signs that your firm needs to synchronize your team’s efforts. It can be challenging to manage a team when you’re not quite sure how to implement practices like flow task management to synchronize your team and workflow. Whether it’s utilizing an all-in-one platform like TaxDome, created specifically for CPAs, bookkeepers, and accounting firms, or simply understanding which key areas to focus on when optimizing processes, there are many ways to approach this problem. In this article, you will gain insight into how you can stop the chaos and get better control of your accounting and tax business to increase efficiency, profitability, and peace of mind. Are you ready to take control of your firm and get the most out of your team’s efforts?

Critical Areas of Effective Practice Management

Whether you’re a solopreneur or a small accounting and tax firm, there are four critical areas of effective practice management to keep in mind. Focusing on these four key areas will ensure that your firm is working in sync for greater consistency and efficiency. These four critical areas of effective practice management are as follows:

• Capacity
• Communication
• Consistency
• Control

Capacity

Do you clearly understand the amount of work that you and your team can handle with 100% accuracy before things start to go wrong? You’ve likely found that the amount of work that you need to manage and complete during busy seasons can increase significantly compared to your normal workload. In fact, most of the time you can’t predict how much your workload will increase, which can leave you feeling overwhelmed and underprepared. Although you may have technology on your side to assist you, increases in workloads can really impact the quality of your work and your ability to meet deadlines.

Communication

In any organization, big or small, when effective communication among team members ensures that everyone knows what needs to get done. When team members aren’t communicating well, you can find yourself in a situation where not everyone is on the same page, leaving things to slip through the cracks.

However, communication isn’t only important within your team. When you communicate with clients, you need to be as clear and timely as possible. In both cases, without specific communication processes in place, you risk missing deadlines, misplacing critical information, and making clients feel as though they’re not getting the service and attention they were promised.

Watch Brittnie Eiden of Eiden Tax & Accounting on streamlining client communication vs sorting through spam emails: 

Consistency

When team members work together consistently, quality work is produced on a regular basis, allowing for greater productivity overall. However, since your team is made up of individuals with different opinions and experiences, you may often find that those team members all want to do things their own way. While this may not seem like a big problem at first, it can be amplified during busy times of the year. When chasing deadlines and trying to get things done, they may revert to their default processes, which may not be correct and can impact the whole team’s workflow and work quality.

Control

As the leader of your firm, maintaining control of your team and your business means focusing on delivery, compliance deadlines, revenue, sales, and cash flow targets. Additionally, you need to be sure that systems are followed consistently and that communication between your team and your clients is clear and prompt.

How to Stop the Chaos: Simple Systems for Success

So, how do you stop the chaos? By setting up simple systems for your firm. In fact, the simpler your systems, the simpler it will be to manage your team during any season. This is especially true when it comes to project management for remote teams. One of the simplest, most efficient systems for accounting and bookkeeping firm success is as follows:

People + Process + Technology = Unified Effectiveness

But what exactly does that mean? Let’s break down each element and see how they apply to each of the 4 key areas of effective practice management that we already covered.

People: A Cornerstone of Your Firm’s Success

When it comes to team project management, the “people” element of your firm goes hand in hand with communication. By selecting a method of communication that keeps your entire team on the same page, you can avoid mistakes, miscommunication, and missed deadlines. This is where cloud-based practice management solutions typically shine.

Process: Streamlining Capacity, Communication, and Consistency

Putting a significant focus on flow task management will ensure that certain processes are done as efficiently as possible. These processes also help you manage your workload capacity effectively. To help optimize your process, review your capacity hours and compare them with your firm’s current production output. From there, you can make informed decisions regarding the processes in your firm and where they need to be improved.

Technology: Automating Your Accounting Firm’s Processes

Thanks to technology, automation can support consistency within your accounting firm. Selecting the right remote team management software for your team will help keep processes streamlined and team members on the same page. Practice management software that has built-in workflows, like TaxDome, can significantly improve adherence to processes within your firm.

When managing an accounting and tax firm, it can be challenging to delegate tasks and keep an eye on every part of the business. However, with a little help, chaos during the busy season can be minimized by synchronizing your team’s efforts. By implementing flow task management, you’ll be on the path to increased efficiency and profitability.