How Does a Typical CPA or an Accounting Firm operate?
Before you understand the reason why getting a professional services automation software for CPA firms is crucial, it is essential to understand the working style of CPA/Accounting firms like you in the United States. Post our experience of working with several sophisticated CPA firms, we are aware that you are going through a tremendous paradigm shift these days.
You are struggling hard to survive in a hostile environment where the taxation process is constantly changing, recruiting and retaining process of staff is getting more difficult. Losing experienced employees, remaining cost-effective in the competitive industry, and fulfilling client’s demand has become a real concern for existing and new CPA firms. Getting professional services accounting software is the only way to overcome these hurdles.
The Journey of a CPA Firm
- Create Engagement Letters or Contracts.
- Create Projects and Allocate Team Members
- Time and Expense entry including mobility.
- Mobility is a big requirement for ease of time and expense entry.
- Time Entry Approval and Adjustments.
- Invoicing and emailing invoice from within PSA.
- Integrating the invoice to your choice of Accounting platform.
The Biggest Concern Today for any CPA Firm is Resource Utilization
Let’s get it straight. CPA Firms like you are burdened by siloed, difficult-to-use business systems that complicate processes and hamper operations. Unknowingly, you are losing 20 to 30 percent in revenue every year due to these inefficiencies. How? That’s because CPA firms are not managing their resources well. So how do I manage my resources? Let me explain to you how.
Resource Allocation = Increased Profitability + Productivity
Resource Allocation is the ability of a Professional Services firm to allocate their team members on client projects for upcoming work, thus being able to forecast resource utilization for next week or next 3 months or as far into the future as possible based on confirmed project work. On average Professional Services firms are able to increase productivity by 5-10% and Profitability by 15-20% by being diligent about their Allocations.
"On an average,
their profitability by 15%
by using a Professional Service Automation software"
Experience the Magic with Colorful & Interactive Allocation Report!
The following billable allocation report will give you (the top management) an overview of all the resources (employees) at work and determine exactly for how many days and hours they are billable (occupied). The figure demonstrates the billable allocation report for future weeks. The green, red and yellow colors determine the percentage of the allocations where you can set your own criteria. For example, here the criteria is green color for more than 80% allocation (for that particular resource), yellow color for allocation percentage between 50-80% and lastly, red color indicates the resource is allocated only below 50%. This indicates the red ones can be allocated with new tasks.
Benefits of Allocation Reports
"Drive Higher Utilization and Never Miss an Hour of Billable Revenue"
Get the Project Status Update Report Weekly, Daily or Monthly.
The clients keep asking you about the status of the work and you have no response apart from just some usual random thoughts? Okay, now is the time to pull and show them the data. The adjoining figure shows the exact project status report of the client tasks and accordingly, keeps you, your management and the client updated every day, every week and every month of the task duration.
Manage your Resources, Projects and Client Expectations well. Wondering How?
For any Professional Services organization, successful project delivery is at the heart of the business. We don't make pens, chairs or phones, we deliver services based projects. Efficient Project Management requires good tools and best practices that are honed over time.
Our Project Managers have delivered Projects of various sizes, from 2 week QuickStarts to 6 month projects that span various industry verticals. Engage us for Project Management best practices consulting and setup of your PSA solution.
Club PSA with F&O to Leverage 360-Degree Benefits
D365 PSA + F&O provide you the complete platform from Sales to Contracts to Project Management to Billing. The sophisticated capabilities of PSA to enable different types of projects/engagements like Milestone/Fixed Price or Time & Materials to Resource Allocation to Time & Expense Entries and Approvals allows any (Professional Service Organization) to monitor their Utilization Rates and plan for success.
Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (F&O) is a sophisticated, enterprise GL platform to manage your AR/AP, Multiple Legal entities with Intercompany postings and Consolidations and rich Financial Dashboards and Reports with integrated Power BI analytics.
Want to Repeat the Same Tasks Next Year? Do it with Roll Forwarding Feature
Yes, you read it right. Most CPA firms manage their annual tasks keeping the financial year in mind. So be it a financial year or a calendar year, with roll forwarding feature, you will be able to drive the same tasks and resource allocations next year with the same dates. The adjoining figure represents the same.
Let’s Start your Journey to Higher Utilization and Profitability
CloudFronts is a Professional Services organization and we have deep expertise in deploying easy-to-use Professional Services Automation solutions designed specifically for CPA or Accounting firms. For many organizations, post-deployment training is an afterthought. But we strongly believe that for a platform to be successful, training the end users needs to be a parallel process. Above all, we use the same D365 PSA platform that we implement for our clients.
Case Study
See how BPM, a California based CPA firm, partnered with CloudFronts to streamline their processes by deploying Dynamics 365 PSA.
