New Year’s Resolutions for Your Accounting Department

With the start of the New Year well under way, the majority of business owners adopt a variety of personal and business New Year’s resolutions.

While technology and compliance systems have improved many tax departments, there are still numerous areas where the corporate tax director, and/or public accounting tax departments can improve the systems used for both tax planning and tax compliance. Here are some New Year’s resolutions to help your public accounting tax department.

Get More From Your Employees.
Why not resolve to get more out of your people? But instead of focusing on simply asking everyone to “do more,” why not find ways to help the entire company be more effective? Focus on improving resource capacity management. Having the most appropriate people available means more billable capacity and higher margins. Ensure planners have easy visibility to the company’s entire workload. Such visibility usually comes by marrying the pipeline with actual work-in-process, so capacity is updated as work is completed and as new work is won.
The Two W’s: What and Why.
Most companies accurately measure profits by client, location, service-line or industry. Yet many find it much more difficult to understand why an engagement was (or wasn’t) profitable. Why is the “why” so elusive? Oftentimes, the data necessary is siloed in different systems that not all staff can view. This poses various challenges. Most importantly, data-gathering is complicated and often time consuming. Resolve to provide better information, so anyone can easily reveal which combinations of client-partner-staff-task led to expected results, and which ones didn’t. This will lead to better overall communication throughout the company.
Publicize Expectations, Show Results.
Resolve to motivate staff with open communication about expectations. Go beyond sharing strategy and objectives and instill a culture of accountability into the daily operations. Staff can be demoralized by hidden expectations or unclear status and this doesn’t help the company “after the fact”. Prevent this by making key performance indicators widely visible, and publish performance status as it happens. If staff is to make proactive adjustments, KPI status can’t be outdated– so you need constant updates. To do so, have all key information connected in a single environment. Key information can include leveraging technology and clarifying expectations; these are two great places to get you started.

PrideStaff Financial knows how important it is to set goals for the New Year. Our experienced staff will help you set up and maintain your 2014 New Year’s resolutions for your company. Contact us to learn more!