Perfect the process to drive success (Pt 1)

As somebody that spends a lot of time with accounting firms discussing how we help to navigate the waters of process improvement, one area continues to come up. Process improvement is critical if we want to change.
If you take the book “How to make the boat go faster” by Ben Hunt-Davies and Harriet Beveridge as an example. The Rowing 8’s that won Gold at the 2000 Olympics didn’t measure the success but perfected the process and thus achieved success. This translates perfectly into business. They worked from a team charter and knew exactly what had to happen to be successful. That was perfect the process and success would follow. They went from being average to Olympic champions in 2 years. They focused hard on perfecting the rhythm in the boat and training and practicing hard.

Now let’s look at an accounting firm. We’ve heard more and more lately about not putting all eggs in one basket or we need to support multiple platforms as we may get clients that want to use other systems. Now that makes no sense to me. I do also appreciate that I work for Xero and having a single platform is in my interest but bare with me whilst I explain.
It’s inefficient to support multiple platforms equally. Yes, you may not wish to turn potential clients away that want to use a different product, note I said “may”, some do and do it with good reason. If you take a look at your client base, you’ll have a range of different engagements with different clients from compliance only to a virtual FD type service with lots of other connotations in between.
For your internal bookkeeping clients and in this I include those jobs that come in at year end with lots of records to process, that’s basically bookkeeping right? Now it’s completely inefficient to service these clients on different platforms as what you’re looking to do is perfect the process to achieve the success you require. If you can perfect the process so records turn up in the right format, doesn’t have to be in one format as the process can support a few, but you do need to understand the bucket each of these clients sits in and train staff to adhere to that process. If the process is perfected then all team members become competent pretty quickly. What we’re striving for is for the process to become subconscious and natural and we then become faster and better at it.
Now lets look at clients that do their own bookkeeping. Do you as a firm have an onboarding process for new clients that gets them up and running and competent with the new software? If you’ve read “Black Box Thinking” by Matthew Syed, he refers to learning from failure repeatedly, like airlines do. What are the typical mistakes your clients make, do you record and track these so you can assess why these common mistakes are made and address them. With clients that do their own bookkeeping it’s easy to let them choose the product they want but surely being a business adviser means you help small businesses with the whole of their business, we see time and time again in surveys that SMBs trust their accountant more than any other adviser. So if that’s the case, surely it’s a responsibility to advise on their software selection and part of that decision making process should include how you as their accountant will be able to support them and give advice based on the data. We know that as the years go by the fees generated from compliance are likely to decline more and more and modern accountants are transitioning to ensure they provide enough value to their clients, outside of just compliance.
The more time I spend with firms, the more it validates my thinking that if we can perfect the process, the opportunities are endless. It’s too common in an accounting firm to have two similar jobs being completed in different ways with different recovery rates. This is a large part of the reason at Xero UK , we have our open platform approach. We recognise we can’t own the whole process from bookkeeping to accounts production but we can work with the accounting practice software companies to make the transfer of data simple and enable Partners to put robust processes in place to create efficiency and up sell opportunities.
To conclude, we see that it is absolutely possible to have one platform, if that’s a step too far for you then seriously consider which is your platform of choice as our experience is that firms that go multi platform end up with 90% plus of their clients on one platform. Remember that SMBs want guidance on software, give them the necessary guidance to make an informed decision. With robust processes that you can train existing and new staff on you become a well oiled machine. Any business that has 50+ clients has the challenge of dealing with scale, without the required processes it becomes likely you’ll drop the ball somewhere.
What are the key takeaways
- Perfect the process to achieve success.
- A single platform is the most efficient way.
- Put your clients into a number of buckets and create the processes around these.
- Learn from failure. What are the challenges currently and how can you address them.

