Many accounting and auditing firms seek to maximise revenue through venturing into new investments, hiring new resources and adapting to the latest technology. While these methods can increase your revenue, they increase the company's expense sheet as well. However a more cost effective method can be undertaken. With human resources proving to be both the largest overhead cost and source of revenue for an accounting and auditing company, it would only make sense to utilize these resources efficiently. Thus through effectively organizing and assigning the company's staff to the right jobs and projects, an accounting firm can extract maximum revenue. But how will it achieve this? Is there such a solution?
Firms that provide professional services manage resources that are highly skilled and trained, meaning that every resource is critical. So when resources in an accounting and auditing firm aren't efficiently allocated to the right job then the loss of utility is felt as a greater pinch then if it were in a lesser skilled arena. So we would firstly need a solution that has the ability to allocate the right resource to the right job. It should the accounting firm to easily plan and schedule resources by quickly identifying the right resource. This should be simple to use and easy to understand visually so that you can find the right resource from a big pool based on skills, training, role, quality, availability etc and allocate it against various projects, milestones or tasks. Managers should be able to create and address resource requests and share resources across divisions and teams with little hassle. Finally, you should be able to plan your resources in whatever metric your company desires be it hours, days, shifts or percentages and should also be able to integrate leave, holiday, planned and unplanned tasks.
Accounting and auditing firms would want the right balance of its supply of staff to the demand of their skills. Creating the perfect balance is what can enable a minimal loss in expenditure but that is not always possible as future demand patterns are highly unpredictable and difficult to read. Therefore the solution should be able to forecast accurately excess and shortfall of specific type of employees based on skill, role, department, team, location etc. This helps in hiring the right number of accounting staff at the right time in the future, reorganising your workforce and retraining existing employees with a new set of skills as per changing business demands across the organisation.
So back to our original question, how will we resolve this? The prime solution is finding the right resource planning and scheduling software. Such software holds all the required information on your employees: their skills, their line manager, relevant details of their employment status etc. It also has their availability and schedule for work for the past, present and future. Hence, as far as transparency of your work is concerned, a line manager can easily track those things for administration, budgeting and career development purposes. Simultaneously, project managers are happy because they can get the best resource without having to pay for the wages of hiring a new staff member – all they need to do is simply search through the resource scheduling database and assign available resources to their jobs. Finally the company's overall bottom line is happy, because the increased efficiency with employee allocation has enabled them to maximise profit, and they can easily track all this information through intuitive software that provides them with powerful, graphically based reports.
This leaves us with the final question, do such tools exist out there that can maximise profits for an accounting firm that are cheap and easy to use? Yes there do. There aren't many tools out there, however SAVIOM Resource Planning and Scheduling software fits all these criteria perfectly, so make sure you have a look and make an investment for your company that you won't regret.
Author Resource:
SAVIOM is market leader in Resource Planning and Scheduling Software . This software is quite affordable and easy to use.