Nowadays, every industry relies on project management to plan, coordinate, and execute processes and workflows — and accounting firms are no exception. Invariably, this leads to one question: which project management software should accountants use?
In this guide, we’ll explore the challenges, benefits, and techniques of project management for accountants. Plus, we’ll highlight seven essential features to look for and how staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can revolutionize your accounting business.
Why do accountants need project management software?
Accounting can be complex — it involves multiple variables, operations, and processes. The right project management software can help you make sure nothing slips through the cracks while improving your productivity.
For example, let’s say you manage an accounting practice that specializes in tax returns.
By adopting a project management solution, you could design a tax preparation workflow to use. Even though each client has different needs, having a predefined sequence of steps your team can follow will make the job easier.
Besides, having a system that controls your most crucial steps automatically helps you mitigate risks and reduce human error. And this is just a simple example of what project management software can do for your accounting business.
What are the benefits of project management for accountants?
Building on the previous section, here are some more benefits of adopting project management software for accountants:
- Empowering team collaboration and transparency: Keep your accounting team aligned with your goals and make clients feel more comfortable by showing them exactly what you’re doing and how you’re managing their financial information.
- Identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies: Find where your team spends most of their time and help them maximize resources more efficiently. For example, monitoring how much time your team spends collating a client’s financial data.
- Automating client and team communication: Streamline team communication and keep clients informed during the entire process. For example, sending automated financial statements at the end of each month.
- Communicating in context: Reduce wasted time by adding context to each message or notification. For example, helping your team stay in the loop when working with a particular client’s tax return.
- Creating customized and repeatable workflows: Project management helps accountants create streamlined systems, from bookkeeping to tax management, payroll management, and even client onboarding.
8 project management techniques for accountants
Here are eight tips and techniques to help you master project management.
1. Arrange an initial setup meeting
Before anything else, meet with clients or internal customers to discuss project requirements, including project goals, scope of work, duration, deliverables, and planned outcomes.
2. Choose your project management software
Choosing the right project management software will help with the following steps, so go ahead and make your selection now based on the key features highlighted below.
3. Create a project plan
Based on the initial setup meeting, start planning your project. You’ll need to create a project schedule (start and due dates), add and assign the relevant tasks (and subtasks), establish the order that tasks should be performed (dependencies), and set milestones.
4. Communicate frequently
It’s important to keep communication channels open throughout the project, from sharing the plan to assigning resources to tasks and informing clients of progress. With the right software, you can keep everyone up-to-date directly without relying on emails or other methods of communication.
5. Document everything
Aside from your project management master plan, you’ll need to document and store everything securely. Project management software with file versioning is really beneficial here and also helps with auditing at a later stage.
6. Make contingency plans
Even the best plans can hit roadblocks, so ensure you build contingency into your project plan. You need to consider resource availability, additional client requirements, and delays with external parties like the tax office.
7. Review progress
Make a point of reviewing project progress daily. Tracking the open tasks lets you monitor the overall progress and notice anything that might have slipped. With the right project management software, you can check dashboards and generate reports to keep on top of things. Also, set up regular review meetings to discuss progress and any potential bottlenecks with your clients.
8. Evaluate team performance
Aside from reporting to clients, you’ll want to ensure you evaluate your team’s performance and give them timely feedback. Discuss what worked well and where they can improve next time to make your next project even more successful.
Top project management challenges for accountants
Project management for accountants comes with its own set of challenges.
1. Poor communication
Poor communication leads to confusion, human errors, and missed deadlines — the last thing you want when you’re working on a project.
On the other hand, effective communication breaks down organizational barriers, enhances clarity, and facilitates teamwork so that accounting teams are up-to-date and aligned with project goals. It helps accountants maintain strong client relationships, easily share files, and invoice smoothly.
The right project management software should let your team and clients communicate and collaborate with real-time notifications, so you keep everyone in the loop.
2. Scope creep
Defining the scope of a project — and sticking to it — is always a challenge.
Scope creep occurs when clients request changes or more deliverables than originally agreed without following a change control process. It’s hard to keep a project on track once out of scope requests sneak in — this can be best managed by setting clear scope from the get go and using it to evaluate requests that come up.
3. Client information access
Effective project management requires accurate information. It’s important to organize client information in one place and make it accessible to relevant team members whenever they need it to avoid delays and keep everyone focused.
Using the right client relationship management (CRM) software will save your accountants time and energy. Instead of scouring your firm’s data in multiple places, they can find what they need in one central location.
4. Project visibility
If you can’t readily see all project-related information, it’s difficult to understand where projects stand, who’s working on which task, and what deadlines are looming.
Using project management software gives you quick access to this information, empowers you and your team with all the necessary details, and avoids anything slipping through the cracks.
7 essential features accountants should look for in project management software
It’s clear already that project management software can improve the way accountants manage projects — so what should you consider?
Let’s cover seven crucial features:
1. Financial reporting
Keeping track of your clients’ financial health is the cornerstone of any accounting firm. That’s why you should look for a system that helps you analyze any type of financial data, including:
- Expenses
- Revenue
- Taxes
- Assets
- Debt
- Credit
For example, with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you get access to powerful reporting dashboards you can customize at will to visualize the information that’s most relevant to your business.
With staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can turn any board into a custom reporting dashboard in just a couple of clicks. Our system “pulls” data from boards automatically and turns it into an intuitive dashboard. That means every team member can visualize the information more effectively, and you can share it with clients.
2. Governance and security
Governance and security are especially important for modern accountants, as you’re dealing with clients’ sensitive information. And staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud offers enterprise-level security that is certified by some of the most rigorous standards in the security industry.
With some plans, you can also set permission levels to make sure only the right people can access your information, with roles for administrators, members, guests, and viewers. You can also control access to workspaces and board types with board-level permissions and column-level permissions.
3. Collaboration with external stakeholders
Accountants have to collaborate with internal and external parties, including clients, service providers, third-party auditors, and any other stakeholders.
With staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can bring your entire team, clients, information, and documents together from the start. You can easily make relevant files available for specific team members or clients and add context to each task, so everyone’s always on the same page.
4. Data history
As a project accountant, you should be able to explore not only current information but also the entire history you’ve had with a client. Otherwise, you might end up losing relevant information for reports that analyze data from longer periods e.g., annual financial statements, annual business tax returns, etc.
With staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s “Audit Log,” for instance, you get access to the entire history you’ve had with specific clients, auditors, and teammates, including conversations, financial information, tasks, projects, and more.
This helps you have more control over your team and clients and oversee who made what changes and when.
5. Integrations
To make sure no cost or expense slips through the cracks, you need to ensure that the software you select offers native integrations with the tools that you already use.
For example, with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can seamlessly access more than 72 integrations in just a few clicks.
This helps you make sure you get access to more accurate data without needing to collate information from many different sources.
You can build “If this, then that” automations to streamline any type of accounting workflow in our Automations center. For example, you can build an integration with Stripe so that every time one of your clients makes a sale, you import that information into a specific staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud board in real time.
And this is just a tiny fraction of what our integrations can do for you — check out this short video overview:
6. Payroll management
Most accounting firms offer payroll management services to clients, but it’s equally important to manage your internal team’s payroll in the same place. And the right project management system will help you manage this process more efficiently.
For example, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud Work OS allows you to accurately track every billable hour to calculate employee payroll and measure your team’s performance.
7. Automations
Automation is the competitive advantage of modern accounting professionals. It helps you streamline repetitive tasks and business processes, reduces time spent on mundane tasks like data entry, and improves productivity.
Nearly 52% of companies automated their accounts payable processes in 2022, compared to just over 32% in 2021.
For example, you can automate more than 250,000 human actions from the staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud automations center, including:
- Repetitive tasks and processes
- Deadlines
- Notifications and messages
- Status changes
- Task creation and management
- Task dependencies
- Invoicing
- And much more
For example, you could create an automation that sends an email to a specific team member every time a client makes a purchase. Or set up another automation to create automatic reports at the end of each month.
How to choose the right project management software for your accounting firm
When it comes to selecting a project management platform for your organization, you should consider the features above, as well as these four factors:
- Budget: Before choosing any software, you should have a budget in place. In most cases, that will be a monthly figure to cover subscription fees. But it’s also with factoring in time and money for the implementation, setup, and training of your new project management software.
- Scalability: Next, consider your current team size and any future expansion plans. Whether that’s from sole trader to a small company or from midsize to a large enterprise. The point is, you need to choose software that can scale with your plans so that you don’t have to go through the selection process again.
- User reviews: With those factors in place, check out user reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra. Also ask for recommendations from fellow accountants at other firms. Currently, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud rates 4.7/5 stars from 8,060 reviews on G2.
- Free trials: Most software vendors offer a free trial and/or a demo of their product. Make the most of this opportunity to test the software in your team and ensure it covers all your current and future requirements.
Why staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud is the perfect project management software for accountants
Currently, over 186,000 customers use staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud to manage their projects and teams, including many CPA and management accounting firms. Even though staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud provides powerful project management features, it offers much more.
You can use our platform to manage all your accounting operations, from bookkeeping and income tax returns to payroll management and financial reporting. This is a nice alternative to Excel spreadsheets or other basic accounting project management software because it offers so much more flexibility and customization options.
Other important reasons why staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can help your accounting business include:
- Templates: On staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can build a custom template to speed up your clients’ quarterly tax reporting processes or get started quickly.
- Team and task management: Assign tasks and responsibilities for multiple projects, track progress, and measure your team’s performance.
- Advanced reporting: Build custom reporting dashboards and get access to the most important information at a glance.
- Seamless integrations: Integrate your favorite tools and apps in a couple of clicks — staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud includes 72+ integrations and 217+ apps to keep your work synced.
- Multiple visualizations: Visualize your data 27+ views, including Kanban, calendar, workload, timeline, Gantt chart, and more.
FAQs
Why is project management for accountants important?
Project management is key for accountants managing clients and resources, such as staffing and workload, and ensures everything is delivered on time and on budget. It allows accounting firms to establish consistent processes and workflows for tracking, approving, and updating client activities to streamline everything from timesheets to taxes.
How does project management benefit accounting firms?
Project management benefits accounting firms by centralizing all work, processes, tools, and files into one platform. It connects teams and clients, bridges silos, and maintains one source of truth, which keeps firms more productive and profitable.
Is there project management in finance?
Yes, project management in finance involves the planning, implementation, and monitoring of projects from initiation to execution. It ensures project activities are completed on time, within budget, and to satisfaction.
Revolutionize your accounting business with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
Finding the right project management software will depend on what “success” means for you. If you’re looking for a Work OS that adapts to your exact needs and helps you streamline any accounting workflow, then staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud is probably the right option.
Why not try our fully customizable project management template for a taste of what to expect?
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