How Can I Get My Team to Step up?

🎄 Season’s greetings! The most-clicked articles from the Accounting Apps newsletter📧 during w/c 11.12.22:

How Can I Get My Team to Step up? | (ACCA Global)

Many business owners are power-hungry control freaks, and it’s not just accountants, of course; this is true across all sectors. They feel that unless they make all the decisions, everything will go wrong. As a result, the team learn not to use their initiative or to suggest new ideas. So they end up having to ask the owner for help whenever anything goes wrong. And of course, that means the business owner becomes a bottleneck and the business has no capacity for growth. It’s no wonder they don’t step up. But as a business owner, you can change this situation. This extract from the book, Putting Excellence Into Practice, explains how it works.

5 Steps to Automating Approvals for Your Xero-powered Accounting Function | (ApprovalMax) 

In this guide, you’ll learn how automating your AP and AR processes save time, reduces effort on manual tasks, eliminates human error, and gets bills paid faster. Inside, you’ll find the answer to technicalities such as why automated accounting systems are transformative for finance teams, 5 steps to automating approvals for your accounting function, what are cloud-based approval workflows, and why you might use ApprovalMax instead of Xero’s built-in approval feature.

Could Payroll be a Profit Center for your Firm? | (CPA Practice Advisor) 

According to a survey completed by Sure Payroll, 42% of small businesses still use in-house, do-it-yourself methods to process payroll. So payroll can be a pain point for many small business owners who are overwhelmed with the many legal and tax requirements that managing payroll requires. Add to that the time it takes to fix payroll mistakes, and a small business owner can quickly become overwhelmed with processing payroll in-house. Therefore, If you’re looking for a new profit centre for your accounting or tax firm, this is an area you may want to consider.

6 Ways to Reduce Back and Forth emails in Your Clientflow| (HoneyBook) 

Sometimes it can feel like an entire project consists of checking your inbox and waiting for client responses. We’ve all been there before where we’re scouring long email threads for the one answer to a question we asked weeks ago. Unfortunately, clients can often be the biggest roadblock to delivering successful projects on time. But, there’s a better way to do business so you don’t have to get stuck in an endless loop of back-and-forth emails. With these six tips, you can communicate professionally, incorporate a personal touch, and guide your clients to respond on time. 

4 Steps to Building a Successful CAS Practice in a Traditional CPA Firm | (Journal of Accountancy)

Client advisory services (CAS) is one of the fastest-growing practice areas in the accountancy profession, with consistent double-digit revenue growth in recent years. However, a CAS practice functions differently than the traditional compliance-based practice and can’t be built or managed the same way. That means CAS practice leaders may encounter challenges when trying to grow a successful practice within a traditional full-service firm. Kalil Merhib, vice president of growth and professional services at CPA.com, and Matt Gardner, CPA, the CEO and co-founder of hiline, suggest the following four tips for integrating a CAS practice into a traditional firm.

Which one of these highlights have you enjoyed the most during this week? 📋