What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #145

Author

Jason Staats
July 25, 2024

🤖 How To Prioritize Automation Projects

I recently learned about the excellent Automation Process Impact Worksheet from the team at Automata Practice Development.

It’s a straightforward way to document the processes in your firm that could be more automated, and score them on various factors to determine what to prioritize, while factoring in the relative difficulty to automate.

The grading factors they recommend:

  • Frequency - How often does this process happen

  • Staff Time - The volume of time the team spends on it

  • Step Count - Inputs required to complete the task that a bot would otherwise have to mimic

  • Stability - How often the process changes

  • Simplicity - How much human logic or reasoning goes into it

  • Annoyance - Is it something people just despise doing?

  • Implementation - How many apps are involved and how easy it is to automate those apps

Oftentimes we lose track of solid ideas because we don’t have a place to collect them. Swipe the spreadsheet, and here’s an email to send to your team to start collecting ideas:

Team,

We’re developing a prioritization system for automations we plan to implement. Step 1 is to collect your best ideas for processes ripe for automation. Going forward, please put those [location].

Look for high volume processes that don’t change very often, but also consider what tasks we just despise doing. We’ll use factors like annoyance, time spent and others to work out where best to invest in process automation in the coming months.

💎 This Week's Sponsor

Check out Jason’s demo 👇

📅 This Week

  • Great seeing a bunch of you at Bridging the Gap 🙂

  • If you’re a Mac user this app has changed my life the past 2 weeks

  • I recently put together a big ole resource to help your firm develop a flexible service library across 19 of the most common firm services

    • This week I published a high level explainer of how it works (now one of the most watched vids I’ve ever published)

    • And if you’re thinking of implementing, we spent a week on the podcast digging into the right way to build this into a firm

    • Early feedback has been super positive ❤️

  • HeyGen’s new Interactive avatar streams an AI avatar of YOU live for any number of people to interact with on your website

  • Meta’s new open source LLM arguably outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o

  • I’m by no means a value pricing enthusiast, but I’ve spent the week going back through the core value pricing canon and we’re discussing its application for small firms on the pod this week:

    • My most and least favorite bits Video Audio

    • How to overcome customer price resistance Video Audio

    • A step by step approach to selective implementation Video Audio

    • My goal is to unpack the most actionable bits for folks running small firms, since the application still feels out of reach for many

🔮 Q&A

How can you make an accounting firm more attractive for potential buyers? Link
Remove yourself from client management, update your tech stack, and increase your prices.

Fetching bank statements still sucks. Any tech I’m missing here? Link
1) Check whether QBO pulls statements for that bank, if not 2) see if LedgerSync pulls them, if not 3) acknowledge the task for what it is: Something that needs to be done each month (that’s probably above your paygrade). Develop an explicit "pre-accounting" process, as we outlined on the pod last year.

I require clients to complete a form on my site before I follow up with a price. Good or bad idea? Link
Bad. It may be slightly better than having no pricing information on your website, but I’d argue you lose a large number of prospect when you aren’t willing to offer any info. Consider what your resistance is to doing so. Don’t be so afraid to filter out potential clients that you don’t will into existence the ones you actually want.

What's the best way to send a proposal after completing the discovery process? Sales gurus say to close over the phone. Link
It depends what you’re selling. If the whole deal can be understood over a phone call, that feels best. But in our case most engagements are complex enough that clients need to visually see it during the discussion. IMO in most cases your best bet is to send over the proposal and tell them to book a call once they’ve reviewed it.

😍 From The Community

My private peer networking community Realize for firm leaders, and it’s now reached its cap of 500 members 🎉

▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ 500/500 members