How high-performing accounting practices
can manage employee productivity

If your accounting firm has the ambition to grow, you’ll know productivity is key – and for service businesses, that starts with understanding how your people are spending their time. Are seniors focussing on higher-level work and leaving the simpler tasks to juniors? Are staff completing work efficiently and meeting deadlines to keep clients happy? Are you optimising your staff hours by looping in the right people at the right time?

Getting all that right means you maximise the return on your wage spend – and, ideally, relieve stress and pressure on staff too. But that’s easier said than done if you’re trying to plan your staffing manually.

That’s where MYOB Practice Management and MYOB Advanced Professional Services come in – drawing data from across your business, these systems can plan work and staff allocations for you. This means you’ll know in advance where time and resources would best be spent.

MYOB Practice Management and MYOB Advanced Professional Services: the key to productivity

Robust staff utilisation is important for protecting your profit margins and can have a dramatic impact on other success indicators such as client satisfaction and future planning. Here’s how MYOB Practice Management and MYOB Advanced Professional Services can make that simpler.

• Optimised staffing
  Plan where your team should be spending their time currently and in the near future – this lets you see any gaps in skill or time, and whether you’re wasting senior people on lower-level tasks. MYOB Practice Management and MYOB Advanced Professional Services makes that easy by letting you assign staff to different stages of the workflow for each project or client. It also integrates directly into timesheets on either product. This means planned time can be immediately added to a timesheet with a few clicks of a button, for instant tracking of budget vs actuals and better visibility over staff.
• Real-time information automatically delivered
  Business process automation in MYOB Practice Management and MYOB Advanced Professional Services lets you set up automated alerts and key reports to be delivered to staff at specific times or critical data moments – when they’ve used 80% of a budget or have hit a key project milestone, for example. Instead of spending time searching for information or reports, your staff get the information they need, when they need it. This improves their efficiency and day-to-day business processes while freeing their time to focus on the work that needs doing.
• A single point of truth for each client
  So often, you’ll find staff are wasting time double-checking client data across multiple systems or walking back errors created by incorrect data. MYOB Practice Management and MYOB Advanced Professional Services deliver a single point of truth for each client, automatically updated in real-time. This gives staff one place to access client information and reassurance that it’s up to date and correct. It works even when viewing information across multiple third-party systems to centralise data and data management.
• Efficiency gains with best-in-class integrations
  With its open ecosystem, MYOB Practice Management and MYOB Advanced Professional Services lets accounting practices choose and seamlessly integrate best-in-class products. This means you choose the right systems for your practice and swap them out as your needs change.
• Availabilities at a glance
  In MYOB Practice Management, a graphic dashboard brings together client work and employee capacity to give you an instant view of what your people are working on and help you reassign work if staff become ill or have overruns on other projects.

Image: MYOB Practice Management staff availability map

If you’re using MYOB Advanced Professional Services coupled with MYOB Advanced Payroll, this view will automatically show upcoming leave requests, public holidays and other known non-productive periods.

MYOB Practice Management also provides a view of a job as a timeline, showing the days dedicated to each task and who is assigned. This allows key staff members to see dependencies and proposed timelines for their projects and helps identify possible risks and blockages if work is not completed.

Image: MYOB Practice Management Kanban board

A Kanban board shows your projects and their status. This feature lets key staff members track the progress of each project quickly and easily while identifying hold-ups and bottlenecks.

Oversight is your best tool

Left unchecked, misguided hiring, training and oversight can result in the ineffective use of your employees’ time and capabilities. This can slow productivity, decrease morale and damage the bottom line. For accounting firms, every staff member makes an impact on the company’s health. This means the way you allocate them to tasks or projects is crucial. But effective resource allocation is part science and part art. To assign the right employees to multiple projects, you need to know everything you can about each project and be able to accurately predict the knock-on effects your decisions will have. This is where a single view of your clients, employees and workload becomes incredibly powerful.

With MYOB Practice Management and MYOB Advanced Professional Services, you can make sure your client’s work is assigned to a team member who has the appropriate skills, experience and familiarity with the client. Forward planning client deadlines is easy and becomes part of an ongoing strategy.

Ready to see how one of these two systems will help your accounting practice improve productivity? Get started now by submitting the form below and our MYOB experts will contact you soon.