Edmonton Small Business Accountant | Helping Accountants Embrace Technology
One of the reasons why Edmonton small business accountant offices may not embrace technology is because they do not see the benefit of accomplishing their tasks quickly. The reason that may be, is because most accountants charge an hourly fee, which means the faster they work on file, the less they bill. In order for accountants to make money by being efficient, is needing to attract a large number of clients. When accountants cannot do that, they can make up for its by working a long time on a file, and being able to charge a larger amount. There is one Accounting Firm in Edmonton called Spurrell and Associates chartered professional accountants that did not like this model, and wanted to do something about it.
By working towards charging their clients a monthly fee instead of hourly, one thing that this Edmonton small business accountant office needed to do was get very efficient as quickly as possible. In order to achieve this goal, they had to embrace technology. While most accountants do not consider the need to get a superfast computer, accountants that is Burrell and Associates each caught Ed to terabyte hard drive. This means that they can store a lot of information on each of their computers, while most other accountants are moving towards working from the cloud. Cloud-based files mean that they have to be very dependent on the state of the Internet at the moment, but by ensuring that Sperling Associates have extremely large computers, mean that it does not matter how quickly their Internet connection is.
Also, having an extremely large memory in their computer will not help accountants be efficient unless that computer can also process information extremely fast. So in addition to having a large hard drive, this hard drive also needed to be a solid-state drive that did not need a core and plug directly into the motherboard. Those two components meant that the computer is able to process information very quickly, which allows accountants to get information processed very quickly. This level of speed on those accounting teams to work very efficiently for their clients.
It is not just enough that the Edmonton small business accountant team with Sperling Associates had faster hard drives, they also needed to upgrade their monitors to work efficiently as well. The way they did this, was to get three monitors all stacked on top of each other. Studies have shown that accounting offices that utilize three monitors can work even more efficiently then if they are using to monitors. Therefore having three is vitally important.
Not only is it important to just have three monitors, but this Edmonton small business accountant office needed to ensure that the monitors were large enough to be useful but also high-resolution enough to be able to have the small text be able to be read on it easily. Therefore they were able to get 42 inch monitors that each had a resolution of 4K on it. This way, not only can accountants work quickly, they can use all of the monitors and read it very clearly in order to get their work done quickly.
When entrepreneurs think of embracing technology, they often think of new computers and monitors, but that is not everything, this Edmonton small business accountant office with Sperling Associates understood that upgrading their technology was more than just increasing the power of their computers. As Jim Collins said in one of his six business books, ìtechnology is important. You cannot remain a laggard and hope to be great.î In addition to upgrading their computers, Sperling Associates decided to create collaborative workstations to help their accountants work together in order to increase efficiencies an increase what they were able to do for their accounting clients.
The way these workstations are set up is extremely important to this Edmonton small business accountant office. Each workstation has three desks side-by-side to allow up to three team members to work simultaneously. Every client that comes into the office is assigned team of two people. Typically these two accountants work one on the left side and one on the right side of this workstation, which allows the office manager or chartered professional accountant in the office to help train the staff review files and help with client information. The reason this is important is that this office hires accounting students who still have to complete their articling. There able to get trained up, andís Burrell and Associates are able to save on accounting fees, something that they pass onto their clients by ensuring their only paying a monthly fee instead of hourly.
Another important aspect of these workstations is that the monitors are able to be viewed by anyone at any given time. This lends itself very well to collaboration, and being able to see what the other accountant is working on to allow for intuitive workflow. This Edmonton small business accountant office has found that not only has it allowed them to increase their efficiencies for their client, but the accountants loved working on this so much, and have seen their own productivity skyrocket. By working efficiently, accountants are able to help Morgan clients, and ensure that they are getting the best work possible done for these accounting customers.
By embracing technology and be willing to change the way they do things, Sperling Associates chartered professional accountants are leading the way in ensuring new efficiencies can be found within the field of accounting. By experimenting and coming up with this great way of working, not only do clients benefit from great accounting, lower fees, and ensuring that they have a team looking out for them, but accountants also benefit greatly from this, by being able to learn more by collaborating with the large number of accountants in their office. This can help all involved increase the efficiencies, and benefit both the accountant and the client.