4 metrics to stop your accounting practice wasting time and money

Improve organisational efficiency with MYOB Practice Management or MYOB Advanced Professional Services

Metrics turn client requirements, operational, and management issues into numbers – and for accounting practices, that’s what your leaders need to improve processes and strategy, grow your client base and improve your bottom line.

Good metrics give your leaders oversight and the data they need to make better decisions, but growing practices are often too busy to analyse numbers themselves. That’s where MYOB Practice Management and MYOB Advanced Professional Services come in.

Let’s look at the top four metrics your firm should be focusing on:

• Employee efficiency
  The more information you have about what reduces your billable time, the easier it will be to run your business profitably – you can improve employee efficiency and get a better return on your wage spend. Consider the financial impact on a company of 100 accountants overseeing $10 million per year. A 2% loss of employee time is significant, costing potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. The data that would highlight these inefficiencies is critical, but managing a large workforce can make it difficult to keep track of all the detail.
  
  MYOB Practice Management is a cloud practice management platform that allows your firm to track staff productivity and efficiency. With its integrated Advanced Planner, project time and statuses are live tracked, and – using BPA (Business Process Automation) – key staff members can be notified of imminent overruns while staff have planned time available to be booked to their timesheets.
  
  MYOB Advanced Professional Services is an all-of-business management platform that also makes tracking employee productivity simple, clearly showing staff data from timecards, employee leave and billable amounts through to projects, invoicing and client work. With the MYOB dashboard, you can easily see when a key staff member is on leave, which then better enables you to plan projects and manage client expectations. Without an interconnected system, these issues continue to be mismanaged.
• Average WIP lockup days versus average debtor lockup days
  These metrics indicate how client work is moving through the business, helping you predict your cash flow and meet your goals. Without a clear view, it’s easy to let delayed payments go unchecked and unpaid for too long. Tracking these two metrics lets you spot bottlenecks early and make changes to keep cash flowing. Both MYOB Practice Management and MYOB Advanced Professional Services allow firms to report on data real-time using its extensive reporting capabilities, integrated PowerBI options or BPA.
• Client work lead time
  The faster you can turn a prospect into billed work, the better for your business. But that’s easier said than done, with an onboarding process, work completion time and billing lag. Tracking this lets you spot any restrictions in workflow and lets leaders know exactly how to improve the process.
  
  With MYOB Advanced Professional Services, your production dashboard shows new leads and who’s responded. And because it’s customisable, you can decide what data you want to see across departments or production lines. It also shows how well production is going and the time it takes to complete each stage. Leaders can see the places needing improvement, click in and drill down to see all the data.
• Real-time client budgets to actuals variance
  Often, practices can only see how they tracked against project estimates after the fact – there’s no way to change things if you discover you’ve spent too much or too little time on a project. With real-time metrics, that all changes. Leaders can compare estimated time to actual time spent on a project, catch and assess under- or over-servicing, make changes, or warn the client that costs will be higher.
  
  MYOB Practice Management and MYOB Advanced Professional Services make this easy by letting you track budgets automatically – timesheets are baked into the system, so you see actual time spent as you go. You can even set alerts to go out at different budget milestones.

Get easy access to crucial metrics

Tracking and using the right metrics is simple with MYOB Practice Management or MYOB Advanced Professional Services. For accounting practices, they add valuable intelligence and insight to power your growth strategy and ambitions. Your customised dashboard gives leaders the chance to identify the root causes of problems in your processes, guaranteeing improved efficiency and all-round better decision-making. Ready to identify where your processes are blocking you from more profit? Get started now by submitting the form below and our MYOB experts will contact you soon.