Accounting and professional services firms

How work moves in an accounting or professional services firm

Most of the work is recurring. A client signs an engagement letter for the year's tax return, a monthly close, payroll, an audit or an advisory retainer. Each engagement has a due date, a staff member who prepares, a manager who reviews and a partner who signs off.

The work starts with what the client sends: source documents, bank and card statements, payroll reports, answers to a list of questions. Staff prepare the return, the close or the deliverable. Review notes go back and forth until the reviewer is satisfied. The work product goes to the client for approval or signature, gets filed or delivered, and the engagement is billed. Then the next period starts and the same requests go out again.

Seasons shape everything. Tax deadlines, year-end closes and audit cycles stack the year's work into a few weeks, and the firm's capacity is set by how much of that time is spent preparing versus chasing.

Where it usually breaks

Engagements wait on the client and nobody can see it

The return cannot be prepared until the last brokerage statement arrives. The close waits on three unanswered questions. The status of each engagement lives in a manager's spreadsheet or inbox, and the partner finds out an engagement stalled when the deadline is close. That is the invisible queue. The guide on project status that lives in one person's head applies directly.

Client documents are requested, received and retyped

A request list goes out by email. Documents come back through a portal, email and the mail. Staff key figures from statements into the tax or accounting software by hand. That is the re-entry trap.

Review notes and client approvals travel by email

A reviewer leaves notes in a file, an email or the margin of a workpaper. The preparer clears them, or thinks they did. The client approves the final return by replying to a thread. Who signed off on what, and when, is reconstructed later. That is approval drag. See email is the approval system.

Every client is a special case

Each client has its own chart of accounts, its own quirks and its own way of sending things. The knowledge lives with the staff member who has always done the work, and when they leave, the next person starts over. That is the exception swamp.

Working inside the rules

Before we arrive on site, we learn the rules the firm's work runs under, and the build is designed inside them. For a firm that prepares tax returns, that includes section 7216 of the Internal Revenue Code and its regulations, which limit how tax return preparers may disclose or use tax return information; the regulation at 26 CFR 301.7216-1 sets out the penalty for disclosing or using it for a purpose other than preparing a return. It also covers the professional standards the firm's licenses carry, the firm's engagement terms and its own policies on client data.

That shapes the design from the first day. Client information moves only between the firm's own systems and the people on the engagement. The Spec records which information each step needs, and the build carries that and nothing more. Every design choice that touches client information goes to the partners who own those decisions.

The first workflow we usually look at

Usually the path from an engagement opening to the client's documents being complete: the request list, the follow-ups, the receipt and the first pass of entry. It repeats for every client every period, it is where most of the waiting happens, and every gap shows up as an engagement that started late or a preparer chasing instead of preparing. Sometimes the review cycle or billing is the bigger leak, and the Spec says so.

We sit with the staff who send requests and the managers who track engagements, follow a set of recent engagements from opening to delivery, and count where each one waited and for what.

The systems in the picture

An accounting or professional services firm usually runs some mix of these:

• Practice management for engagements, due dates, time and billing
• Tax preparation, audit or accounting software, often several products
• A client portal and a document management system
• The clients' own accounting systems, logged into on their behalf
• Email, which carries most requests, questions and approvals
• Spreadsheets for engagement status, request lists and busy-season tracking

What a Workflow Spec looks like here

A Workflow Spec for an accounting or professional services firm is priced by deployment, and takes up to five business days on site, scheduled outside the firm's deadline peaks. We sit with staff, managers and the people who send and chase client requests, follow engagements from opening to delivery, and interview the partners who sign off. You get the workflow map, the business case, an adoption design built for the staff who would use the tool, and a fixed proposal for the build. The answer can be not to build. Details are on how we work.