Edmonton Small Business Accountant | Collaborative Accounting Firms

The Edmonton small business accountant office of spiral and Associates have discovered how working collaboratively can help them service their clients. They have developed world-class workstations that can allow them to train high-level accountants, automate tasks that they do not need to spend as much time on, which can give them more time to help them develop business growth strategies for their clients. The first thing that they did, was to create workstations that allowed three accountants to sit side-by-side. Every client that they have, is assigned one team of two accountants. They sit at this collaborative workstation and work on the files for the client the same time. This way, the accountants are able to problem solve, collaborate and bounce ideas off of each other.

Even though these collaborative workstations allow three accountants to sit side-by-side, the reason why each client is assigned a team of two, is because the Edmonton small business accountant office at spiral and Associates hire accounting students to work in their firm. Training students is a huge part of running and accounting practice, and by employing students, they can get an extremely high level of knowledge, while they help them obtain their designation because they need to complete three year articling in an accounting firm. That means, that a team of two accounting students will need to have a chartered professional accountant or manager sit with them on occasion to review their files, train them and oversee their information.

By hiring students in their accounting practice, this Edmonton small business accountant office can ensure that they are delivering an extremely high level of service, a much lower rate. If an accounting office had hired all chartered professional accountants designates, they would have to charge their clients an extremely higher fee. But since spiral and Associates charge all of their clients one flat monthly fee, there able to do so, by utilizing students.

Not only is it extremely important for these accountants to be able to work collaboratively, is also extremely important that there able to do so in a way that they can see each otherís workstations. Because of this, as the accountants sit side-by-side, they have a bank of three computers directly in front of their desk. These monitors are mounted out in front of the desk, and one on top of each other, so that each one of the accountants can easily see the others monitor. Even if they are not collaborating at the time, see what the other is working on can allow an intuitive workflow.

By embracing the collaborative work environment in their accounting office, spiral and Associates are delivering world-class services to their clients at a monthly flat fee that can allow their clients to budget and plan that payment every single month.

By embracing a new way of doing business, Edmonton small business accountant spiral and Associates can change the way their accounting firm typically does business, and see the benefits that this way of operating affects not only their clients but their own staff as well. Not only did they discover that by creating collaborative workstations that they impacted the workflow in their office, but it allowed them to embrace technology in a way that accounting firms typically do not do, which is what makes their accounting firm so different than everywhere else. As Jim Collins, the author of six business books has said in the past, ìtechnology is important. You cannot remain a laggard and hope to be great.î By embracing technology and collaboration, they have been able to greatly impact the way they do business.

While many accounting firms are moving towards being on a cloud-based system, the Edmonton small business accountant firm spiral and Associates invested in ensuring that every single one of their accounting computers is even larger than they had been in the past. By purchasing to terabyte hard drives for each one of their accountants, allows them to be able to store a large amount of information on sites. Cloud-based technology necessitates a fast Internet connection, and if it is not consistent, it will impact the ability of their accountants to work quickly. However, having an extremely large hard drive would not impacts their accountants unless they can compute information very quickly. Because of that, they ensured that their hard drives were solid-state that plug directly into the motherboard. They work more like cell phones, without the spinning disk in the center, and plugging it directly into the motherboard without needing a core means it can process the information extremely fast. This will allow accountants to be able to pull up all the information they need quickly make the changes and save them just as fast so that they can get onto the next task.

Another important aspect of these collaborative workstations was the need for great monitors. Not only is it important that they had three monitors at each workstation at this Edmonton small business accountant office, but the size and resolution of those monitors is just as necessary. In order for easy collaboration, these computer monitors need to be large, so that all accountants could see each monitor easily. They settled on a 42 inch monitor, and they stack the three monitors on top of each other. In order to be able to see clearly everything that is on computer screen, spiral and Associates ensured that they had extremely high resolution monitors, using 4K resolution, this allowed accountants to be able to see each otherís monitor and read even the finest print on it.

By utilizing technology in this way, this Edmonton small business accountant is able to ensure that their staff could work quickly for their clients, allowing their clients to have the work done in a timely manner, that allow them to charge a flat monthly fee.