Once upon a time, Accountability Services looked like every other traditional CPA firm. We were reactive, transactional, and consistently found ourselves overserving some clients at the expense of others.
Those others included our team, firm leadership, and the business owners we served – leading to a cycle of frustrated clients and burned-out employees.
How did it all happen?
We were simply following the mold of every accounting firm before us.
In 2020, we decided to build something better. Better for our clients. Better for our team. Better for ownership. And better for the future of accounting.
Here’s how we flipped the model, built a new way of working, and designed a scalable system for helping entrepreneurs get more out of their business.
Scope first: Engagements as a foundation
All great CPAs want to help people. It’s in our nature. Which is why it’s incredibly difficult to hold back when facing a client request that’s out of scope.
But all those last-minute asks and quick questions add up at scale. To deliver consistent service for everyone, you must define scope and stick to it.
The first transformational shift we made was to reimagine our engagement process. Instead of treating engagement letters as formalities, we work closely with clients to write engagement letters that accurately outline the expectations of our agreement.
This makes it easy for clients to engage the exact service package they need to succeed and allows us to properly allocate resources to deliver on those services.
A well-written engagement letter is better for everyone:
- Clients have a clear understanding of the promise we’re making
- Our team knows their role and the workflows they need to follow to fulfill that promise
- Prepaid or monthly fixed-fee billing simplifies budgeting and cash flow for both the firm and our clients
Our engagement letters also communicate important deadlines, lead times, and service guidelines. This makes it easy for clients to be served even better, and more quickly, by prioritizing those who are actively working to foster a collaborative partnership.
Departmentalize to specialize
When we first started as a five-person team, everyone wore multiple hats.
Over time, we figured out that a smarter way was to run our firm like a big business, with different departments covering well-defined roles and responsibilities.
First, we pulled out the operations team, then we separated tax from accounting, finally we built a Client Accounting Services (CAS) team. Today, CAS makes sure client books are tax ready before the tax team even sees them. This simple change has elevated both teams and opened the door to deeper advisory services, including Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A).
Our leadership team learned to departmentalize, too – and by handing off tasks one by one, we were able to remove workflow and legacy knowledge bottlenecks to make space for strategic planning.
As we have grown and acquired other firms, this framework has simplified the process of merging teams, getting people in the right seat, and then hiring/training new staff to meet specific needs.
When the scope of each department, role, and leader is defined, you no longer need to rely on unicorns who can do it all. You can find specialists who can do one set of tasks better.
Tech that supports scale
After establishing systems for making and keeping promises to our clients, the next logical step was to figure out how to do it more efficiently and how to prevent things from falling through the cracks.
This meant combatting tool bloat and rebuilding our tech stack from scratch.
No more hanging on to legacy tools because that’s “how we’ve always done it.” No more patchwork systems created by installing one software on top of another to fill in missing applications.
Ensuring our tools worked for us and not the other way around required addition by subtraction. Fewer tools with more capabilities.
Here are the key requirements we used to weigh our options:
- Open APIs – No tool can do everything, so this ensures they all play nice and reduce the number of places where we’re storing data.
- Fully cloud-based – We wanted browser-based tools to avoid updates and logging in to virtual offices.
- Scalable – Easy to onboard team members and clients quickly.
- A tech roadmap – Confidence that the tools we choose will grow with us.
- A true partner in spirit – Partners who take our input to heart when planning product development.
These dealbreakers showed us where to invest, who to invest with, and how to build a technology infrastructure that can keep up with aggressive growth.
Firm of the future
Accountability Services used to be just like any other accounting firm. Today, we’re a leading example of how a modern firm should operate.
As an example to other firms looking to break out of the old, broken CPA model, we’re proud to be making a real impact on the accounting industry. With the right operational strategies in place, clients, employees, and firm owners can thrive.
