How Accountants Can be More Efficient and Productive

Source: Insight Magazine

Completing engagements on time and getting good performance appraisals are not enough to ensure progress along your career path. You must also pay attention to the following:

• Evaluate your productivity. Here are two tools that can help you:
  • Halogen e360 (www.halogensoftware.com)
  • Success Factors (www.successfactors.com)

List your goals for each week. These goals should promote the firm’s goals (as distinguished from mundane tasks like filing and calling clients). Then measure your success in achieving them. Then you can determine what you might have done to improve on the outcomes, turn failures into successes, get jobs done ahead of time, etc. Consider delegating certain tasks to make you more productive on the crucial goals.

• Create priorities, allocate time, and plan your days. Don’t deviate from the plan.
• Accountants tend to get obsessed with details. This can reduce productivity. There are times when approximations are as valuable as precise answers. This can create discomfort for accountants because it is antithetical to their nature. It also involves risk. But it can also make the difference between mediocrity and eminence.
• Focus on the firm’s strategic vision and align yourself with it. Make that a part of your everyday activities. Get involved in the firm’s strategic planning.
• Think of accounting as a way to solve problems rather than as a mandate to play by the rule book.

For the complete article, click here, select the March/April 2008 issue and the article "Are You Productive Enough?"

From Insight Magazine, Illinois CPA Society, March/April 2008, http://www.icpas.org/insight.htm.

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