Five Proven Ways for Accountants to Overcome Staffing Challenges

Are you, too, facing a talent shortage?

From the time pandemic hit, accounting firms have expressed staffing as one of the top three challenges facing firms of all sizes. In a couple of recent posts, Accounting Today shared findings from some recent research about the talent shortage in the accounting profession. "150-hour requirement seen as significant barrier" and "Barriers to entry: Why they're not becoming accountants." Both these posts shed some light on the key reasons why there is a talent shortage.

While AICPA and others are doing what they can to address these reasons over the long term period, for you, the accountants in practice, the talent shortage problem is real, and the problem needs to be solved now.

Talent shortage is a CAS-killer.

When I asked firms what is stopping them from offering client accounting services (CAS), their top response was that they don’t have the staffing. This #1 CAS killer that emerged from the CAS survey results is, unfortunately, also the most misconceived perception. It is a myth.

The CAS survey results showed that even solo practitioners offer CAS. The number of firms that provide CAS is significantly higher than those that do not offer CAS for firms of all sizes. CAS firms provide about twice the number of services compared to non-CAS firms. “Staffing shortage” or “lack of relevantly competent staff” are not the reasons why you should not offer CAS. Let us see why.

When can you feel you don’t have the staffing for CAS?

You may be a solo practitioner or have less than a handful of staff. You may be predominantly offering tax preparation services, and you get the books done just to keep clients’ financial data tax ready. You may be offering low-cost write-up services because most of your clients are (very) small businesses and mom-and-pop shops. With a business model like that, your staff’s competencies are limited to basic services. In such situations, you can feel either you don’t have enough (number of) staff or your team is not trained enough, or both, for your firm to provide CAS.

What steps can you take to overcome staffing challenges (perceived or real)?

The CAS survey results clearly indicated that smaller firms are far more active in offering CAS. Over the years, I have personally interacted with hundreds of firms that make much higher revenue and profit per staff than firms that struggle. And the key reason is that such successful CAS firms have optimized their technology, processes, and staff competencies. In many cases, the number of clients serviced per staff is about two to three times more compared to that served by similarly sized non-CAS firms.

Five proven ways to overcome the CAS-staffing challenges are:

1 – Automate your processes. Successful CAS firms minimize manual data entry and duplication of data entry across multiple solutions. They do so by leveraging newer, intelligent software solutions and also by implementing integration between the various solutions they use.

2 – Look at each stage of your work processing steps. Identify at each process step if there are opportunities to automate, e.g.:

• Can you fetch source documents and information instead of receiving those by mail or email from your clients? For example, bank feeds, sales data from the point of sales (POS) systems, employee data from human resource solutions, employee time and attendance data from time clocks, etc.

• Can you process some work automatically? E.g., bank feeds integrated with accounting software, HR and time clock solutions integrated with payroll software, etc.

• Can you automate reports and insights generation? E.g., alerts and notifications based on threshold values set up in the software, automated system reminders for upcoming payrolls or overdue receivables or cash balance going below a certain amount, and so on.

• Can you automate client service delivery? E.g., automatic mobile and email delivery of relevant alerts and notifications to clients, automated emailing of standardized yet customized reports on completion of some process steps, use of client portals and client mobile apps to let clients self-serve to reduce the workload of attending to routine, recurring information demands of clients, etc.

In essence, examine the end-to-end cycle of each service you offer and find opportunities to minimize manual work. The time so freed up will help your team to acquire more knowledge to become more competent in providing more and higher value, higher-priced services.

3 – Remote working and work-from-home culture is here to stay after the experiences with the coronavirus-impacted world. Not just are accounting firms moving much faster to the cloud, but the so-called “old-school” clients have also experienced self-service technologies and are coming to expect it going forward. Self-service is a non-intrusive experience that clients (humans) feel in control of. When you provide your clients with the ability to do so, you enhance their customer experience. Remote staffing, including outsourcing/offshoring, can not only reduce your overhead costs (e.g., no need to pay for office space) but also expand your firm’s service hours because such remote staff can be in different time zones. Also, remote staff can already be experienced in multiple services and can reduce the time it takes to expand your CAS offering.

P.S.: Please click here to take this one-question quick poll to share your thought about the talent shortage.

4 – Many small business clients use “accounting” software to do just basic business functions, i.e., write checks, issue invoices, and, in some cases, review financial dashboards. Collaborative cloud solutions can enable your firm to provide such clients only those functions so they do not mess up the books (clients are not professional accountants). It means your staff need not do the processing of such basic transactions. The same goes for payroll. In my experience, several business owners want to control how many hours the staff should get correctly paid for (entering the time and attendance data into payroll software). No wonder many payroll firms provide clients such collaborative access to “offload work back to the clients.”

5 – And one compelling thing that many firms do not do to reduce manual processing steps is that they do not question the very need for each process step. Some process steps can be completely redundant or are used to create data records that are not legally required to be kept or are not of any material use to anyone. If asking the question, “Why do we do this step?” gets you answers like “because it has always been the process” or “because my manager told me to do so,” it is time to dive right in and fix it.

P.S.: Please click here to take this one-question quick poll to share your thought about the talent shortage.

I have shared several practically implementable insights in "The Definitive Success Guide to Client Accounting Services (CAS)," - the CAS book bought by accounting professionals from 15 Countries across five Continents.