Like every office-based function, accounting had to rapidly transform daily operations during pandemic lockdowns. The regulatory and business pressure to ensure proper accounting continuity didn’t stop when teams suddenly found themselves working remote. Audit firms and internal accounting teams reacted with urgency to maintain continuity but missed a huge opportunity to outpace their competitors.
How did financial audit and internal accounting teams respond? Physical processes were quickly codified into digital solutions, bad habits and all. Accounting teams took existing processes and filled in gaps and few, if any, looked at the entire process chain as a value stream or looked for constraints. A golden opportunity in baseline process improvement was missed. The easiest or simply most obvious solutions were unintentionally clumsy by virtue of using standard, off the shelf productivity tools like Microsoft Excel, Box, Dropbox, Google Workspace and Outlook leveraged to “make the best of it” yet they lack any real workflow refinement or meaningful evolution in process.
This is not any surprise. Accounting and financial audit teams were not asked how to “make it better”. Nor were they given the opportunity to reimagine more ideal workflows. They were not asked (or equipped) to think about how to manage operations in a new way. To compound the issues, process analytics when using general purpose productivity tools are nonexistent for custom workflows. Therefore, driving insights for improvement or managing constraints lacks the basic inputs to consider. Ongoing process optimization is completely manual. We relyon individuals to test and measure hypothesis without any simple and reliable way to measure the process across these general-purpose tools. Accounting and financial audit teams deserve kudos for keeping the lights on and were not well served by the lack of available options in SaaS process management.
Improved processes, greater transparency into ongoing work and accountability frameworks to keep high performers happy and to root out inefficiencies. Other industries have adopted process management tools en masse. When we look at other professions such as software engineering, there is no shortage of process management tools that are either process agnostic or process opinionated. There are enormous gains in productivity as the companies employing such tools realize massive growth in market capitalization. Adoption rates of these tools in other sectors, from manufacturing to marketing, is extremely high. Meanwhile, public accounting and industry accounting are lagging. There is a fundamental need for process management in the accounting industry and a lack of mature tools able to support operations for internal accounting teams.
Hybrid work environments will be the norm for some time to come. Requiring employees to work a full week from the office will continue to be a competitive disadvantage as employers who meet their talent in the middle will attract and retain the top talent and garner a clear advantage in talent. Employers looking for a competitive advantage from highly skilled employees will need to create this middle ground to support the ways employees prefer to work while finding operating models and process management tools that accommodate their teams – while still allowing employers the necessary oversight and transparency to run the business.
Larger industry organizations can adopt general-purpose process management tools, but this is not for the faint of heart. The overhead of adapting these tools to the accounting profession requires professional services support or a dedicated IT team. Organizations can use extremely capable platforms like Jira to manage workflow, task management, scheduling, estimates and more to suit their internal processes with the help of internal IT resources. Simple… for a software company already using Jira with resources dedicated to supporting Jira. But for smaller companies or companies of all sizes such complex solution won’t work and requires ongoing support. Often, the complexity of these tools is overwhelming for nontechnical users. There is a training and education burden that comes along with them, which makes turnover even more painful than it already is.
There is a certain type of work common to accounting. General purpose tools fail to capture these common constructs and processes. Additionally, most workflow management tools do not account for recurring tasks or the cyclical nature of accounting where most tasks will repeat on varying cadences. This points to the opportunity for a process and workflow tool that is designed by accountants for accounting process management.
How do hybrid teams of today manage to track work and create the requisite transparency? Adoption of a simple SaaS solution for workflow management that is designed with accounting professionals in mind seems obvious. Leaving behind error prone and latency laden task management in Excel and Outlook for purpose-built tools that make teams more productive while improving employee experience is a reality with better tools. Keeping employees happy with flexible work conditions while providing insight into process analytics is available today.