Chasing clients for paperwork and ensuring their teams run effectively is an age-old headache for any accounting/bookkeeping practice. With clients increasingly looking to their advisors to provide more value outside the standard service offerings, it’s more important than ever for accounting and bookkeeping practices to streamline their working processes. Data insights can provide a simple answer.
Think about this scenario:
You have several clients you’re struggling to get paperwork from. Your team spends too much time chasing these clients, and this leads to delays in getting the work done and a last-minute rush to meet deadlines. From there, workloads mount and clients start to question your ability to deliver.
Many practices have faced a similar situation simply because their processes are not streamlined. Yet, in their day-to-day work, there isn’t a lot of time for accountants and bookkeepers to reflect on how they can improve their procedures and ensure their team is working to full effect.
This is largely because accountants and bookkeepers don’t have access to data which can help them identify these practice inefficiencies. So instead it becomes a manual, trial-and error process to discover where there may be room for improvement.
However, this haphazard approach is no longer adequate — particularly when many repetitive manual tasks can now be automated. The need to streamline a practice is growing as clients look to their accountants and bookkeepers to provide value outside standard service offerings. In other words, they simply cannot afford to be chasing paperwork from clients, discovering incomplete data sets, and not prioritising the most important, high-value client tasks.
Crunching the data
The solution to these longstanding problems has begun to arrive in the form of technology — more specifically, using data cleverly. Nowadays, performing a data analysis can provide a snapshot of an entire practice, producing insights that can help it run more smoothly. These metrics assist a practice in staying in control of workloads, both within their own team and in their dealings with clients.
Practice Insights is a unique feature within Dext Prepare that provides actionable data via a dashboard. This industry-leading tool brings several insights together, including benchmarking clients against each other based on their efficiency in Dext Prepare, giving them a clear view of jobs that need to be done. This helps to allocate team time and manage workloads more effectively, as well as facilitating important client conversations.
Crucially, it allows them to identify where there is room for enhancement, such as when a recurring task can be automated. Some insights shown on the dashboard include:
The cost of not identifying areas that need streamlining can be high for all stakeholders. Poorly allocated staff resources means less hours billed, while any delays or inadequacies in data collection can lead to clients not receiving the levels of service they are seeking.
Is it time to make decisions for your practice based on data insights?
If you would like more information on streamlining and automating repeatable processes and getting the right technology within your business, register for Dext’s upcoming Webinar to hear directly from our experts.
Ready to see what Dext’s solutions can do for you? If you have any questions or you’d like to find out more about our products, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch here or call 1800 107 451 and one of our friendly team will be in touch shortly.
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