Whether you’re working independently or with a firm, maintaining good productivity is essential, especially for accountants. To be able to maximize your productivity, you need to develop some form of workflow planning and management. When talking about workflow, it involves a defined sequence of tasks that are planned and repeatable. Such a concept can be crucial to making your firm much more efficient. Read on to learn just how vital workflow planning is for professionals in the accounting industry.

Why Utilize Workflow Planning and Management?

Workflow management at its very core is a system of effectively transforming all your resources, including money, time, and staffing, into services. By clearly defining your firm’s workflow, you know just how much time, money, and effort you invest and where it all goes. The following are some components where workflow management is considered crucial and can result in better improvements in your organization’s operations.

Communications

In any professional environment, managing communications between you, your staff, your clients, and vendors is the first building block of good practice management. If you are to overhaul or implement a workflow in your organization, communication will play a key role in it. You should focus on establishing a way to communicate in real-time so you can all coordinate in a timely and efficient manner.

When choosing communications systems that will fit your workflow, consider their accessibility and ability to document essential communications in your team. Your communications system should be accessible to all the parties involved, including your employees, vendors, and clients. It should also be self-documenting, which allows you to record your meeting sessions and have a way to backtrack what you talked about.

Task Management

After communications come task management, which is where you need to focus on managing resources to complete tasks. If you want to be efficient in managing tasks for your team, building a workflow is the key. When you have a clearly defined workflow, you can match available staff hours to client responsibilities. It will also help you ensure that your staff has completed all the assigned tasks on a timely basis. Task management also includes providing resources to communicate with the client and other team members, reassigning activities to others, and viewing previous activities for a client.

Practice Management

Practice management consists of allocating company resources, time tracking, and management. Billing and monitoring of KPIs are also under it. As you can see, it’s a crucial point in your organization where you need to establish a good workflow using an accounting workflow management software. This system needs to be able to sync well with your accounting system or CRM. Otherwise, you’ll be re-entering data manually from one system to another, which only increases the risk of committing errors and also consumes a lot of time.

Conclusion

These three components in your organization should be the focus of your workflow planning and management. Without deliberate planning, you could end up with an inefficient and fragmented workflow that will guide your organization for years to come. This can be avoided by developing a well-thought-out workflow planning and management system.

Firm360 gives you an intuitive platform that solves disorganized filing, lost billing, and other accounting mishaps. We offer you a workflow software for accountants that can help you streamline your practice and help your team get more work done in as little time as possible. Contact us today to learn more about Firm360s features!