YOUR WORKFLOW ISN'T WORKING
Does your CPA firm have a workflow? Have you ever asked this question? Have you ever actually examined what this question means? In short, your CPA firm probably does not have a workflow, or at least what you call a workflow is not effective.
You probably bristle at this notion.
“Of course, we have a workflow! We wouldn’t be able to WORK without one.” And by a broad definition, you’d be right, you have a workflow. Your firm likely does have a consistent flow of how you assign, process, and complete projects. But is that the sole purpose of workflow, just to help get the job done? Or is it to IMPROVE how you get your job done?
We would all agree that it’s the latter. You must examine this, does the workflow you utilize help you improve the way you do your job, or at least help you do your job effectively?
We like to break this down for CPAs like you are baking a cake. If you were a world-famous baker, and you have a client that wants you to bake a cake, what would be the best way to handle that process? You would likely source the ingredients yourself, and being a high-quality baker, you’d want the finest, most raw sources too. Quality and fresh chocolate, vanilla, milk, and eggs. You do all this gathering and prep to ensure that you deliver your client the best possible product.
But what if you had a client that said: “I want you to bake me a cake, but I am going to prepare all the ingredients, mix it, and put it in a pan – I just want you to bake and decorate it.” You agree, knowing that this won’t work, and it tastes terrible. The client is furious, and so you must deconstruct the process and start from the beginning, going back to the raw, quality ingredients, to put them together the right way to deliver a quality product. Now imagine if you were that baker, and you had 200 clients who wanted to do that exact progress, and all of them wanted a cake on the exact same day.
This unsustainable situation is exactly what happens with CPAs every year. CPAs are reliant on their clients to deliver them quality ingredients in the form of balances on balance sheets, income statements, and trial balances. CPAs have no semblance of control over these balances.
- They can’t control how they are delivered: mail, email, fax, hand-delivered, cloud access
- They can’t control how they are formatted: pdf, excel, print out
- They can’t control how they are styled: at least 84 different accounting platforms utilized by clients.
- Worst of all: they can’t control when they will get that info from their clients.
CPAs have over 14 months to gather all the pertinent information for the filing deadline for a tax return, but since they are reliant on clients to gather and deliver that information in the form of balances, they must wait until after the year is completed and end up having just a few weeks to process every return or file an extension.
For a CPA to have a true and effective workflow, they must gather that raw data in real-time themselves. What is that data? Transactions. Balances are locked in, frequently they are incorrect, and always an incomplete picture, and the underlying transactions are needed to complete the picture. Transactions are the raw ingredients that make up every function of accounting.
“But I don’t want to have to worry about gathering those transactions and translating them for all my clients, that’s a lot of work.” You’re right! It is a lot of work, but BaCo Tech does that for you and delivers them to you in a patent-pending workflow that produces a Living Trial Balance, built with the transactions produced from a client’s accounting software.
We speak accounting. We communicate with their software every day, pulling in transactions, creating rules and notifications to help you work on their books in real-time, and in a consistent, easy to access format. You can be notified when fixed assets are purchased, or when tax significant items are entered into the workflow - and you can clear them easily. Most importantly, it helps you create a standard firm workflow for tax prep and financial statements and have your client's data ready to push to tax returns at year-end, easily and efficiently.
You also have a workflow that allows you to see problems and trends to call your client and be on the same page they are, this year’s page.
Looking at the workflow like we were baking a cake, it’s easy to see how busy season ends up so busy. No baker would agree to that and none of their clients would want to do it all themselves, however, the accounting industry has accepted this workflow for far too long.
The CPA industry, at long last, has a workflow solution that can deliver them the information they need in order to become more effective and efficient, all while providing their clients with what they always wanted: help with this year’s tax returns and accounting this year.