In my experience, many small practice owners know there are things they could do differently.
The problem is that those things rarely feel urgent.
A process takes ten minutes longer than it probably should. You spend time every week doing something that could perhaps be automated. You deal with an admin task yourself because it seems easier than explaining it to somebody else.
None of these things feels particularly significant on its own. But they accumulate. And so do the benefits when you start finding better ways to do things.
For sole practitioners in particular, practice administration has a habit of growing. And the more established the practice becomes, the easier it is to accept certain ways of working simply because that’s how you’ve always done them.
Changing them can feel like yet another job.
Will the change be time-consuming to implement? Can I rely on someone else to do it properly? What if the AI gets it wrong? What if my assistant gets it wrong? Wouldn’t it be easier just to carry on doing it myself?
Perhaps. But there is a cost to that decision too.
And the real cost isn’t always the extra time involved. It’s that you gradually lose the freedom to decide how you spend your working day. The more you become accustomed to doing everything yourself, the harder it can be to imagine the practice operating differently.
I’ve written previously about ways to make practice administration less burdensome, including charging appropriately, delegating tasks and making better use of technology. But before deciding what to change, there’s a more fundamental question worth asking: why are we still doing things this way?
What if there were a better way?
Simplifying how you deal with practice and client admin doesn’t have to involve major projects.
It might mean a quicker process, clearer messaging, a smoother client experience or a different way of packaging something you already do.
Small changes can make a disproportionate difference, particularly when they affect something you do repeatedly.
The difficulty is spotting them. And I’m a big fan of the old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
But if you are feeling increasingly frustrated by all the time you feel obliged to devote to admin work, it’s absolutely worth spending at least a little time considering how you might do things differently and, in so doing, reduce the time, effort and frustrations involved.
At a recent meeting of the Sole Practice Club, when we were discussing this issue, there were a lot of wry smiles when I asked the question: If you were starting your practice today, would you be doing things the way you do now?
Look for the friction
One place to start is with the points of friction in your practice.
Look at your processes and the client journey. Where do clients get confused or potentially frustrated? Where do enquiries stall? Where do you find yourself answering the same question repeatedly?
And where are you wasting time? This is a particularly important question for sole practitioners. Time spent on unnecessary administration isn’t simply an inconvenience. It is time that cannot be spent on client work, developing the practice or simply getting away from the desk.
But sometimes the friction isn’t where we initially assume it is.
If clients are slow to respond to requests for information, we might conclude that they need chasing more often. But perhaps the original request was too long, arrived at an inconvenient time or wasn’t sufficiently clear about what was needed.
During recent Sole Practice Club discussions, members considered whether shorter requests, better timing and clearer deadlines might produce better responses. One example involved thinking about when busy clients who aren’t based at home might actually have time to read and respond to emails, rather than simply sending them when it suited the accountant.
None of this is especially complicated. But it does require us to question whether the problem is really the client, or if it could be partly due to the way our processes have evolved.
Which admin tasks are taking up your time?
It can help to start by identifying the administrative tasks that take up most of your time or cause you the greatest frustration.
For example:
- Managing emails, messages and phone calls
- Arranging appointments and managing your diary
- Requesting and chasing client information
- Onboarding new clients and completing administrative checks
- Preparing and issuing engagement letters
- Updating client records and practice management systems
- Raising invoices and chasing unpaid fees
- Maintaining AML, CPD and other compliance records
- Filing, organising and retrieving documents
- Managing software subscriptions and suppliers
- Coordinating work with staff, subcontractors or clients
- Other repetitive activities that interrupt your day.
Not all of these will be an issue for you. Some may already be working perfectly well. The point is to identify those that are worth questioning rather than assuming that every administrative task needs improving.
For example, the time taken up by tailoring engagement letters may seem like less of an issue for someone who rarely takes on new clients than for someone bringing on new clients every week or every month. Or is more time wasted trying to remember how to do something correctly when you only do it occasionally?
Could technology make things easier?
There is an increasing range of available software tools promoted as available to help with many of these administrative tasks.
Practice management systems, client portals, appointment scheduling tools, electronic signing platforms, automated reminders and document management software can all, in theory at least, reduce the amount of routine work you need to do yourself.
And, of course, you can also make use of AI tools such as ChatGPT or other large language models (LLMs).
These can help you draft and simplify emails, create templates, document processes, review how you’re currently doing things and explore alternative approaches. They can also help you work out which tasks might be suitable for automation or delegation.
But the existence of a tool doesn’t automatically mean you need it.
New software often comes with costs, a learning curve and the need to change established processes. And AI-generated suggestions and outputs need to be checked, especially where accuracy, confidentiality or client information is involved.
Sometimes the best solution will be to make better use of software you’re already paying for, rather than adding yet another subscription.
The important thing is to start with the task or problem you’re trying to address, rather than being distracted by what the latest technology promises to do.
As I frequently point out, there is never a generic ‘best solution’. The only question is what approach is best for you, your clients and the way you want to work?
Look outside accountancy
You don’t have to come up with every idea yourself either.
Sometimes useful ideas come from looking at how businesses outside the accountancy profession do things.
Think about clients you work with in hospitality, retail, manufacturing or subscription businesses. How do they communicate with customers? How do they make purchasing easy? What have they automated? How do they deal with routine enquiries?
You don’t have to copy what they do. But looking beyond accountancy can prompt you to question practices that you have stopped noticing precisely because they are so familiar. This is something that i do and my clients benefit from my wider exploration of how other types of businesses deal with administrative-type issues
This approach may also help you recognise that something you’ve always regarded as an unavoidable administrative burden could be handled differently, incorporated into your fees or even offered as a separate paid-for service.
The objective isn’t necessarily to do less. It may be to make better use of the time and resources you have.
Find someone who will challenge your thinking
Fresh eyes help. When I’m mentoring an accountant, I often (but not always) find they want me to challenge their thinking. I hope it always feels like a supportive and gentle challenge, but sometimes the most useful question is simply: why are you still doing it that way?
There may be a perfectly good answer – because everyone is different!
Equally, there may be no particular answer beyond, “That’s how I’ve always done it.”
I’m rarely likely to encourage a particularly sophisticated solution. I’m more interested in understanding what my clients are trying to achieve, what’s frustrating them and what they may be taking for granted.
Sometimes the right answer is to change a process. Sometimes it’s to stop doing something altogether. And sometimes, after considering the alternatives, we conclude that the existing approach is perfectly sensible.
The value is in making that decision consciously, rather than simply carrying on through habit.
The alternative views that members express during and between meetings of the Sole Practice Club can have a similar effect. They are shared in a non-judgemental way because there is a recognition that everyone is entitled to run their practice in the way that suits them.
What works for one sole practitioner won’t necessarily work for another. And nobody has to make a change simply because somebody else thinks it is a good idea. But hearing how somebody else has approached the same problem can open up possibilities that you hadn’t previously considered.
That is often the value of having your thinking challenged. You still make the decision. You just make it having considered a few more possibilities.
Don’t dismiss an idea too quickly
Too many ideas disappear because we judge them almost as soon as they occur to us.
- “That wouldn’t work.”
- “My clients wouldn’t like it.”
- “It would take too long to set up.”
- “I couldn’t trust somebody else to do it.”
Perhaps all of those things are true. But you rarely need to make a decision immediately.
There is a useful distinction between generating ideas and evaluating them. Give yourself permission to do the first before you start doing the second.
Take delegation, for example.
It’s easy to dismiss the idea because explaining a task to somebody else would take longer than doing it yourself. And the first time, that may well be true.
But what about the tenth time, or the fiftieth?
The question then becomes whether you could document the process once, in sufficient detail, so that somebody else could take it on safely.
At that recent meeting of the Sole Practice Club, we discussed members’ approaches to managing admin work, both practice-related and client-related. In addition to the ideas shared by members, I offered a number of practical solutions. Afterwards, I worked with ChatGPT to create a detailed prompt designed to help members identify which administrative tasks in their own practices might be worth delegating, automating, simplifying or stopping altogether.
The point isn’t that AI can tell you how to run your practice. It can’t. But it can help you explore possibilities, ask questions you might not otherwise have considered and organise your thoughts before deciding what to do.
Of course, delegation doesn’t mean abdication. You remain responsible for the outcome. That means choosing appropriate tasks, the right delegatee, providing clear instructions and retaining suitable checks.
And there will be some tasks that simply aren’t worth delegating. The time and cost involved in explaining, supervising and checking the work may outweigh the potential benefits.
But that’s a conclusion to reach after considering the possibilities, rather than an assumption that prevents you exploring them.
You don’t have to implement every idea. Indeed, you shouldn’t. Some will be impractical, some won’t save enough time to justify the effort and some simply won’t suit the practice you want to run. But give an idea time to breathe before dismissing it.
Start with what’s taking up your time
It’s always best to start with those administrative responsibilities that are most time-consuming and/or frustrating. Then ask the questions.
- How could I do this differently?
- Can I automate it?
- What if somebody else did it?
- What would I do here if I were starting again today?
See what emerges then prioritise the ideas that appear worth pursuing.
- Which would make the biggest difference?
- Which would be easiest to implement?
- And which might free up time or energy to tackle something else?
Of course, recognising an opportunity and doing something about it are two different things.
You can come away from a discussion with half a dozen useful ideas and still find yourself doing everything exactly the same way a month later. Not because the ideas weren’t good, but because client work and immediate deadlines tend to take priority.
This is one reason I encourage accountants to choose something they can actually get done, rather than starting with the most ambitious improvement on their list.
A process documented this week, an email template improved tomorrow or a task delegated next month may not sound especially exciting. But changes that actually happen are worth more than grand plans that never get started.
You don’t need to transform your practice overnight. Very often, a better-run practice is simply the result of lots of sensible changes made over time.
And sometimes the difficult part isn’t coming up with another idea. It’s having someone help you question what you’ve always done, work out which changes are actually worth making, and then make sure they happen.
If there are parts of your practice that you know could work better but never quite seem to change, that might be a useful conversation to have.
