With more accounting firms buying into bookkeeping practices, or hiring their own bookkeeping teams, it’s important to understand how you will manage merging the two services. Whether you already have your own outsourced or internal bookkeeping team, or you’re currently in the process of acquiring one, there are a few things to think about.
You can start by asking some simple questions about your current business practices:
- How will you manage the team in a way that’s efficient and productive?
- Do you have simple visibility across your bookkeeping team’s workflow?
- What are your workflow processes? Can you track progress easily?
- How do you monitor the accuracy of work?
- If you don’t have the answers (or you have them, and they scare you a little) then we can help.
Some tips for accountants managing, or looking at managing, in-house bookkeeping teams:
- Implementing AI Audit
Let’s be real, loads of time can be spent cleaning up inefficient work…once you find it, that is. There’s a reason Brendan Lucas from Hopscotch Accounting describes XBert as ‘The Gatekeeper for human error’.
Part of the big issue of having to manage a bookkeeping team if the desire to constantly check and audit their work. Of course, data integrity is everything and it’s necessary you run across any issues, errors or inconsistencies as they arise (rather than after the fact). But as one person, with your own workload – the reality is, this holds up work and is a major bottleneck for productivity.
Enter: AI Audit. Working faster than the human brain, with no margin for human error – implementing an AI audit tool on your practice is a no-brainer. Think of it as a safety net for everyone’s work (including your own) on top of saving hours manually trawling data. Forget going in and manually cross checking all of the ledger files. AI Audit does it for you, multiple times a day, alerting you to any errors as they arise.
- Clarity is key: streamlining your processes
How long does it take you to figure out who’s doing what, and what needs to be done? Would it make your life easier if you could just click one button and have it all your fingertips? We know it would!
When you’re talking about managing teams, you need to consider your task management system and communication methods. How will you assign and communicate tasks? What about flagging issues? Adding or reassigning workloads? And even tracking whether your team is doing the right tasks, at the right time.
Email can only get you so far. For Jolene Lutman of Centegrity, and hundreds of others managing teams, working with XBert has helped navigate these issues with ease.
“XBert has given me the reassurance that tasks are being managed and work prepared consistently for all clients irrespective on which staff member works on the client. XBert has saved my business, time and money while giving us confidence in our business data.” – Jolene Lutman.
XBert’s Work board has been designed for bookkeepers as the holy grail to get through your work day. Less clicks, no more jumping in and out of individual client files. Here you get total visibility over all clients and what tasks you need to do, access all clients XBert alerts, see work queues of your internal and outsourced teams, or tasks you have assigned your clients. You can even prioritise your work for yourself and your team, so nothing gets missed.
- Make the most of your investment with insights at your fingertips
The whole idea of bringing a bookkeeping service in-house in an accountancy firm is to ensure consistency across work, and offer a holistic service to your clients, right. When you’re using the right tools, this should be quite seamless and accurate client data from your bookkeeping team should be accessible for you, in just a click or two.
At XBert, our users tell us this is true. And that’s why we have reporting features designed to help you access insights, trends and key metrics in your client’s data at the click of a button. This allows you to open meaningful conversations with your clients, have access to handy reports like the Activity Count (which tracks how much work has been done for each, helping you with billing and onboarding). Using the White-labelled Client Console to collaborate with your client, you have a place to collaborate and communicate, show easy-to-understand metrics that allow you to grow your service offering and build trust and integrity with your clients.
Where to next?
XBert has set out to be the best productivity tool for accounting professionals.
Reduce the effort required to get through your work with XBert’s AI Audit keeping your data clean and your clients tidy.
Streamline and standardise your processes with our templates and client schedules. Easily manage and prioritise work for you and your team with visibility like never before.
Engage with White-labelled Client Consoles to collaborate and communicate with clients easily.
Scale up your advisory with analytics and business intelligence reports
Start a free trial today by clicking here and one of our Customer Success Team will be in touch.
