Free consult & free copy of book

E-Myth – “Why most small businesses don’t work & what to do about it”

Contact Us

Stars

Most 5 star CPA Google reviews in Canada

Read Reviews

Chartered Professional Accountants E Myth

1 Fixed Monthly Fee - Planning | Accounting | Taxes | Consulting

Helping Canadian businesses beat the odds!

Edmonton Small Business Accountant | How Technology Can Impact Accounting Firms


When entrepreneurs think of hiring an Edmonton small business accountant to work in their business, they do not often think to consider how technologically advanced those accounting firms are. However there is one accounting firm that is proving that the advancement of technology can help them develop better products and services to their clients and actually change the way that their industry is doing business. At Spurrell and Associates, they have embraced technology and introduced a new way of billing clients with a flat monthly fee, that can benefit both the accountant as well as their clients, to give them a consistent bill every month and allow them to continue to get world-class accounting services.

Many accounting firms do not have the emphasis on technology, because they build their clients on an hourly basis. This puts them in a strange situation of benefiting from working slower. At Spurrell and Associates, this Edmonton small business accountant wanted to change that model, so that they can provide the best service that they could for their clients, at a consistent price. As they explored that option, they saw that in order to make it work, they should embrace technology. The faster they were able to work, meant that the better this model ends up working.

In order to facilitate fast working accountants, they ensure that they were upgrading the hard drives for every computer that every one of their accountants was working on. By purchasing it to terabyte hard drive, that was a solid-state, they could ensure that not only did they allowed their accountants to store large amounts of information on their hard drive, but they could also pull it up and work on it fast as well. Many accounting offices are moving towards a cloud-based technology, which relies on the speed of the Internet to work efficiently, so by ensuring that everything is kept in-house, spiral and Associates can ensure that there able to consistently service their clients quickly.

Another important aspect of the fast Edmonton small business accountant office, is having enough monitors. Studies were done to show the productivity level between one monitor and three, and for almost all businesses, there is an extremely large jump in productivity from one monitors to two but none from 2 to 3. The only exception for this were accountants, who saw the same level of productivity jump from one monitor to two as 2 to 3. Therefore, when spiral and Associates wanted to create the most productive environment possible, he made sure to get three monitors for their accountants to work on.

By embracing technology in their accounting office, spiral and Associates are able to get the information to their clients in an extremely timely manner, that can help their clients operate their business this allows them to bill their clients flat fee, and to provide world-class service to their clients. By changing the way their office does business, there changing the accounting industry, and improving it.

Even though most Edmonton small business accountant offices do not put the emphasis on technology, there is 1 Accounting Firm in Edmonton called spiral and Associates that is embracing technology. As Jim Collins has said in one of his six business books, ìtechnology is important, you cannot remain a laggard and hope to be great.î Spiral and Associates have been able to completely change the way they do business, by embracing technology and developing workstations that allow their accountants to collaborate with each other so that they can continue delivering world-class services for their business owner clients, and to do so at a flat monthly fee that is consistent and help them manage their cash flow.

They discovered that these world-class workstations can allow them to train top-level accountants in their office, automate tasks so they spent less time doing smaller activities, which allows them to use that time that they save to continue to help their clients develop business strategies to help them grow their business, minimize taxes and be successful.

One of the most important aspects of these world-class workstations is high-resolution monitors. Edmonton small business accountant offices read about a study where they saw the productivity of accounting offices jump significantly by going from one to two monitors and 2 to 3 monitors. The reason for this, is because accountants need three extremely important components visible at all times in order to do their job. They need to have the report, that as they make journal entries can show the effect of those journal entries. They also need to have the screen showing the journals they can make that entry, and they need the documents from their clients in order to help them make the journal entry. Those documents can be receipts or invoices or bank or credit card statements. By being able to have all of these components visible at all times, accountants are able to work extremely productively.

By having three monitors per accountant at this workstation, the Edmonton small business accountant office also saw the importance of ensuring that those monitors were large enough so that all three accountants could easily read each otherís computer screen. That allowed the accountants to be able to collaborate whenever necessary, and even if they were not collaborating, it allowed for an intuitive workflow. Therefore it was important that these computer monitors were large enough for other accountants to read from their desk so spiral and Associates ensured that they bought 42 inch monitors their accountants. They also discovered the importance of having a high-resolution computer monitor, because even at a very large size, if the resolution was not large enough, it be hard to read the small text and numbers that accountants need to look at in order to do their work.

By developing these collaborative workstations in their accounting firm, spiral and Associates are able to ensure that they have efficient output of workflow, which benefits their clients significantly.