In virtually every survey of accounting firm managing partners and human resource directors they rate the difficulty in finding and retaining professional staff as their number one challenge. Yet the work environment in most professional accounting firms is the same ‘sweat shop’ it was 50 years ago when there was an unlimited labor pool. Read more…

Coming from the marketing side of our firm I spend some of my time browsing other firms sites to see what they are doing different, what information they have put on their sites, how they update them, etc. What is very interesting is that almost all of them have one thing in common, “They are different!” Different from the typical accounting firm. Read more…

One of my sincerest hopes for this blog is that it will provide a forum for a discussion of alternatives to traditional practice management philosophy and practices by service firms in the United States. One such debate compares the relative merits and shortcomings of the billable hour. We have written much about this subject. For whatever reason, likely cultural in nature, our Australian and British counterparts seem to be much more engaged and progressive. Read more…

The most recent Beta Alpha Psi conference occurred this past weekend in Los Angeles, California. The topics were very similar to prior years; Work/Life Balance, Your First Year in Public Accounting, and From Student to Professional. I’ve heard all of these topics before, but the last time I have heard them was about six months ago. Read more…

I love the fact that we don’t have to keep track of every minute of every day (one of the biggest problems with time sheets) because it frees up time to take care of the little (or not so little) things – like reading the latest tax updates (something that is not so little for me or our clients, but a necessity that has always eaten into my “billable hours”) and sharing information with clients and other people I know who may be interested (a “little” thing to me, that I thought about doing before, but never found the time when I was conscious of where all my “billable hours” were spent). Read more…

Several months ago I suggested to my management team that we invite engagement team members to participate rather than assign them (Choices). At about the same time I suggested to our Director of Professional Personnel, Dr. Jeanne Yamamura, that we consider eliminating annual performance reviews. Read more…

We do not believe the ‘benefits’ of a system based on time sheets justify the ‘costs’.

So how much does a system based on time sheets and the billable hour cost?

-Did the amount of time you spent at an arbitrarily guesstimated rate reflect the value of the service (even after you wrote it up) that would have been agreed upon with the client at the beginning of the engagement? We both know the answer. That’s a cost.

Read more…

When I ‘retired’ from Arthur Young and Company a couple of years ago, (1978) it wasn’t because I didn’t love the profession, or the work. It wasn’t because the compensation was inadequate. It was the job. It was my employer. I wasn’t trusted. I was given an annual quota of time to fill, monitored by a semi-monthly report submitted on my time sheet in quarter hours. Annually, there was a summary of my hourly performance in comparison to my peers and to employees that I had never met, who had served before me. We complied with an arbitrary standard we had no input in setting. The majority of my waking hours were planned for me, without my input. Read more…