How to Develop Your Infrastructure to Scale Your Firm

It’s a new year, and while that means another tax season is upon us, it also means a renewed sense of energy and interest in the goals you envision achieving this year. For many accounting firm leaders, one objective that’s top of mind is growth—that is, more clients, a bigger team, more lines of service, and, of course, an increased bottom line.

Here, we’ll discuss five steps you should take on the back end to develop your CPA firm’s infrastructure and scale your business for bigger and better things.

1. Implement actionable KPIs and metrics and focus on continuous improvement.
   Key performance indicators (or KPIs) are simply objectives a business is working to achieve. For an accounting firm, that might be anything from “add five new clients a month” to “start offering client advisory services in addition to tax prep by July.” To ensure your practice experiences meaningful growth, it’s important to identify a few KPIs for yourself and your team so everyone understands exactly what they’re working towards. Once you have a written, actionable goal, it will be much easier to create and implement a strategy your firm can follow to achieve it. And that “actionable” component is crucial: Objectives shouldn’t be nebulous, vague things. Make them clear and set up timelines when and where you can!

   Additionally, remember that growing a tax practice or CPA firm takes more than just setting up and working towards one goal. It requires cultivating a culture of continuous improvement. Adaptability and innovation are keys to helping your firm develop and compete, as well as to responding to new challenges. To ensure your accounting practice is improving continuously, communicate your firm’s objectives for the year to your team and make sure everyone understands how their individual contribution makes an impact. You can also try scheduling quarterly team meetings where the firm’s decision-makers and leaders work together to identify smaller goals—in line with the bigger-picture objectives you’ve come up with—for themselves and their staff that they want to reach next quarter.

2. Make sure you invest in communication channels.
   Effective communication is crucial to ensuring the team understands your vision for your accounting firm, working well with clients, operating smoothly on a daily basis, and much more. Prepare for a bigger tax practice or CPA firm—whether you’re just onboarding more new clients or intend to start actively hiring and growing your departments—ahead of time by investing in flexible communication solutions. These should include project management and communication platforms that facilitate smooth workflow processes between two or more people and can be easily adapted as your client roster and/or your team grow. Look for tools that are user friendly, improve time management, and increase clarity on different aspects of an assignment.
3. Adapt your workflow processes to your new goals.
   Now is also the time to start preparing for your near future in terms of your workflow processes. At the moment, the ones you have in place likely only meet your current needs, that is, the needs of a smaller firm. And, they may have inefficiencies that you’ve decided to overlook because you’ve found ways to work around them. Unfortunately, these inefficiencies will become problematic as your accounting practice grows, and you’ll need new workflow processes that are more suitable to a larger client base and more team members. Start addressing this area of your business now. Look for places where work gets siloed and find a scalable solution to address these. For instance, if all the tax return review work tends to fall on the shoulders of one person, consider implementing a better project management solution or outsourcing other, non-essential work to free up your team members’ time.
4. Invest in employee training.
   As you adapt your workflow processes and add or replace software in your tech stack to accommodate a scaled-up tax practice, remember that for each change you make, you’ll have to ensure your employees and, in some cases, your clients alike are both informed of and trained in working with it. For example, if you decide to purchase new document management software, for instance, you’ll not only have to spend time learning how to use it yourself, but you’ll also have to make sure anyone else you expect to use it knows how. Training can take up quite a bit of time, and sometimes, accounting professionals shy away from making any changes at all because they’ve encountered frustrated clients or bogged-down employees who struggle to learn something new. Fortunately, this is also a potential issue that can be addressed proactively, and it absolutely shouldn’t stop you from making changes that will allow your firm to grow in a positive way. Many tech vendors offer free training on their websites. You can also make how-to memos or even videos and email them to any clients and team members to educate them on the new software.
5. Leverage scalable accounting software.
   Do a quick audit of the accounting software in your tech stack. Even if it’s working for you now, consider how well it will support a growing CPA firm. Can it accommodate a tax practice that has multiple lines of business? Would it still work well with 50 more clients added? How about 100? Additionally, consider how well it integrates with other software. Many accounting professionals who have recently and successfully grown their firms cite integration as one of the most crucial components they look at when selecting accounting software that supports a practice that’s growing. Integrations mean data is seamlessly and securely transferred between the apps in your tech stack, ensuring accuracy, safety, and a more efficient workflow.

Scale With a Document Management System for Accounting Firms

“[SmartVault] solves so many common problems we have with document creation, distribution, signature, and filing,” Brian Tankersley, CPA explained on an episode of The Technology Podcast with Randy Johnston. “When you look at it, [SmartVault] is deceptively simple…You can make it as simple as Dropbox if that’s all you need. But,” he continued, “you can also make it as sophisticated as a… high-end tier for a document management system.”

And let’s not forget about the integrated, customizable client portal. “A single client portal is one of the most productive things you can do for your team members inside your firm and for your clients,” Randy claimed.

Schedule a quick demo today to see why SmartVault is the right document management system and client portal for you.