Effectively Managing Change

The axiom used to be that change is constant. But in today’s world, change is not constant, it is accelerating. There is a great You Tube video you can find by typing “Did You Know” that illustrates how fast change is accelerating in our new century. If you don’t know what You Tube is, you may already be left behind. The video illustrates the quantum shifts in the world today, including demographic changes, technology changes, and economic shifts.

As accountants, we tend to hang on to processes that work for as long as possible. There are good reasons to hang on to what works, instead of embracing new processes and technology, such as:

1. Managing Change Can Be Time Consuming- as accountants we sell our time, and we are all busy-maybe even too busy, and taking time out to specifically manage change can create questions of ROI.
2. Managing Change Can Be Painful- especially if you don’t carefully plan the implementation, or adequately provide for the right amount of training for staff and do a formal calculation of the savings and benefit realized from the change. As we get older, re-tooling is more challenging. Unless we adopt a mindset of continuous change.
3. Managing Change Can Be Costly- just ask a firm who has gone thru a tax software conversion. The first season you won’t complete as many returns as you prepared the prior year when you deeply understood the program. Firms often underestimate the cost and time required to adequately manage significant changes.

But effectively managing change is absolutely necessary to compete and survive in our accounting industry today. Standing still is only an option if your firm is on a glide path to retirement and dissolution.

All that said, effectively managing change Can Be Tremendously Rewarding! Learning something new, becoming more productive, is intrinsically valuable and energizing. And defining a better workflow that is more productive, is also more profitable.


Change Management Recommendations
Some firms manage change better than others. Let’s take a look at some best practices.

1. Identifying a champion of the change greatly increases the likelihood of success. Partner advocacy is key to a successful and much more rapid implementation of change. Getting shared vision up front about the reason for the change makes it easier to agree and determine success at the end.
2. Incremental change is easier to manage. Having a paperless office is a nice ideal, but also very threatening to partners who have dedicated their lives to shuffling papers. On the other hand, making an initial commitment to print file copies of tax returns this season to PDF instead of the paper file, doesn’t disrupt their current habits, while putting the firm on a path to paperless and greater productivity over time.
3. Proper planning and training are keys to successful execution. Accounting firms tend to be partnerships of multiple small businesses with each partner having his or her own way of doing things. Referring to #1 about getting sponsorship includes planning to train and include everyone in the new process. It may not be on day 1, and the change may be cascaded wider as the new process is tested and confirmed, but ultimately, we need everyone invested and participating in the new process.

Finally, think evolution, not revolution. Learn what works and evolve. Being able to manage change in your own firm is a great practice lesson before you begin managing change in your client’s business.

Automating Tax Workpapers

As accountants, we have a deep-seeded need to have our workpapers organized, tied down, and consistent across every engagement. Some of that is driven by our nature (does your spouse use descriptors like neat-freak, anal-retentive, rigid?) and some if it is driven by the regulatory nature of our industry. And as much as we value that level of orderliness, most non-accountants do not value it, which makes billing for ‘workpaper time’ challenging.

Fortunately, technology has evolved to automate those tax workpapers in a neat, consistent way, which saves us hours of non-billable organization time.

Most firms are on the paperless journey, including scanning tax source documents to archive workpapers electronically. To super-charge your process, scan those documents at the beginning of the preparation process, instead of the end, and use a solution like Intuit’s Document eSort to automatically organize the documents.

Unorganized Workpapers:
Scanning source documents provides an electronic PDF that facilitates electronic storage, but can make it tedious to find the source document you need in a large PDF.


Versus Organized Workpapers:
Electronically organizing the workpapers labels the documents by type (W-2, 1099, etc) and payor, and automatically sorts the documents in the input order- making those PDF’s much more usable in the tax preparation process.



Here are the top 10 reasons practioners use Document eSort to automate workpaper organization:

1. Transfers the organization step from the preparer to technology, saving an average of 20 minutes per return
2. Reduces training time for new personnel and provides a bookmark map to enter the data into the tax return
3. Standardized workpapers for all clients
4. Consist workpapers across all preparers and staff
5. Faster data entry using an organized, bookmarked PDF
6. Faster review with organized PDF available at the point of need
7. Quickly access archived source documents and eliminate hunting down lost and mis-filed documents when clients call
8. Electronic storage is safer, easier to backup, and far more cost-effective to maintain than traditional paper storage
9. Work remotely and have access to the entire client file
10. Share the organized source file with clients to increase the value of the client deliverable.

Like anything worth doing, adopting new technology involves effort. Defining the office processes to support new technologies will require planning. In addition to scanning at the beginning of the process, you will want to equip preparers with multiple monitors and make sure you have a high quality, sheet fed scanner.

The benefit of this effort is increased productivity during your busiest time of year. And of course, satisfying your inner neat-freak.