3 STEPS to Automate Your Accounting Practice WITHOUT Fancy Software

If you have a tax and accounting practice with at least 5 full-time members and you're still tracking leads manually, chasing after clients for documents, and entering data manually into a bunch of spreadsheets, you need to watch this video. You see, the more inefficiencies there are in your firm, the more your financials suffer. Projects are delayed, decreasing your revenue. Your team is less productive, increasing your costs. And clients become unhappy, making you question your ability to deliver. But it shouldn't be that way. Other small firms have figured out how to keep clients happy, stay highly profitable while growing their firm, and you can too. Hey, my name is Isaac Perdomo, and I'm a tech consultant and process automation expert here at Alster Delco. And over the last four years, my team and I have helped small firms with no technical staff and no free time. automate more than half a million tasks. Also, my father was an accountant and my mother worked in technology, so I've been exposed to both industries from a very young age. And in this video, I'll walk you through a 3-step process that you can start implementing in your firm today to go from chaos to a well-oiled, efficient practice. Let's get started. Everyone likes a good story, so I'll discuss these 3 steps with an analogy that sounds strange at first, Will make sense later. Donuts. Yep, you heard me right. We'll talk about donuts. See, businesses like Krispy Kreme has mastered the art of efficiency. They have small shops with like 10 people, yet produce thousands upon thousands of perfectly cooked, delicious donuts every single hour. What can small firms learn from this? I'll tell you right now. Step number 1, choose your tools wisely. Wisely. Krispy Kreme has huge machines, and I bet you that they thought through exactly what they needed— not what they wanted, but what they needed— before purchasing one. They thought about temperature, they thought about size, they thought about capacity, price point, support, ease of use, everything. And I bet you that they compared machines to make the right choice. Yet it's crazy the number of small firms— firm owners I talk to that are looking for software tools to run their firm more efficiently. Well, when I ask them, what are you looking for? What do you need? What options haven't you considered? They haven't given it much thought beyond, oh, a friend told me about TaxDome or Zapier or whatever tool they have heard about. And I'm like, is that it? And I get it, you know, you have other priorities in your business. So to help you, I'll share actual examples of the software comparison we guide firms through So follow me to the screen and I'll show you how. This is an example of an accounting firm client that was looking for a new CRM to track and see their sales numbers. And their most important criteria was reporting. There was a list of metrics they wanted to keep track of. Pricing was important. This was just one founder making the sales. So it was just one user and the automation capabilities of the platform. At the time, they were considering ActiveCampaign, and we helped them map out ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Freshsales. Ultimately, given that the reporting, the pricing, and the automation capabilities were their priority, you can see how just looking at this chart, the option becomes obvious. Freshsales had reporting capabilities very custom to exactly what they needed. The pricing was very affordable, and they had all the automation capabilities that they wanted, on top of very good ratings on ease of use, quality support, and ease of setup. That made Freshsales the obvious choice, and that's the choice we recommended and the choice the client moved forward with. Another example I can show you here, it's a proposal software where this client was using Ignition and wanted to explore options to see if there was a better solution out there. We outlined some of the popular choices out there, including PandaDoc, which was the most promising one. But after analyzing the fact that this client, uh, the, the most important criteria was the credit card and the bank transfer fees, as well as having instant bank verification so that the clients could pay with ACH as quickly as possible, and integrating with their QuickBooks so they didn't have to reconcile some of these transactions later and it would be easier to track. Ultimately Even though the PandaDoc had slightly lower fees, slightly better price point, and had other integrations on top of the accounting software like Zoom and Google Workspace, which the client used, ultimate recommendation for them was to simply stick to Ignition just because the increment, the slow, the slightly lower rating in fees and some of the other slightly better features were just not there. Every option available felt about the same or marginally worse in certain aspects, and in our opinion, It was, it was not worth the change, and this particular client also followed our recommendation. The tough part really is identifying what matters to you and your firm. As such, I encourage you to consult with other people, whether that's your team, your colleagues, or consultants like us, because once you have your criteria pinpointed and nailed down, choosing the right tool becomes a simple exercise, as you just saw. Step number 2, let's talk about writing down your processes. I'm sure you've heard about the importance of writing down your processes, and you bet that big franchises like Krispy Kreme have their systems well documented. But there's always the misconception that you need to write absolutely everything, or that you have to sit down for hours to write a manual, and that's just not true. You simply need to know what to document and how. So we'll dive into each. Start with a simple question: what are you or your team spending the most time on? What are your most time-consuming and manual processes? The answer for many firm owners might be tax returns or bookkeeping or whatever your most popular service is. If your team is spending a lot of time on these and these are not very high-revenue activities, they might be driving down your profit margins. So you better start off with those. The answer, depending on the firm, might also be sales if it's the owners that's making the sales and it's taking a lot of your time. It's not rare for firm owners to find themselves talking to unqualified leads all the time, following up manually, and creating proposals from scratch. You can actually streamline or fully automate some of these things so you can spend more time actually closing deals. Once you know what processes to document first, start by simply writing down what you're doing. That's it. You don't need to get fancy. Don't make the mistake of thinking about what you should or ideally would do. Just write down what you and your team do today. Start there. Some of our clients like to use spreadsheets to write down their processes. There are spreadsheets, gigs, and way— others like to use whiteboards, but we found the most success with visual flowcharts with tools like Wim Hof or Miro, and then you use those flowcharts to link to simple documents with clear headings and bulleted lists. Now, for the privacy of our clients, I won't be sharing their processes, but I'll share an internal process instead. Let's go to the screen and I'll show you. Okay, so we're here and I'm going to quickly show you how we actually document processes internally. We have this business structure, it's like a business brain of all of our departments and the different processes we have within each. For the sake of this video, I'm going to show you the process of service delivery that we follow. And we have, as you can see here, links to different documents depending on what step of the process we're talking about. We have even an overview that we can see from end to end how everything flows, from client onboarding to the platform and process that we walk them through platform setup, workflow setup, training, et cetera. And within each one, you can see the objective of that process, the steps within that process, and even the assets or the tools that we use within that process. So in this case, we have certain forms that we use internally to help clients and guide them through exactly what it is that they're looking for in a tool. Which relates to the first step that I talked about. So this gives you an idea of how you can use and document your processes in a way that for us has worked very well. As you can see, the entire process end to end is easily understood, and that's the goal. That's how you find opportunities to eliminate, simplify, automate, or delegate certain steps easily. Now let's talk about step number 3. Just automate and integrate. This is where the rubber meets the road. You take the tools you chose and the processes you wrote down, and you'll automate as much as you can. This is where tools like Zapier come in. You've probably heard about it, but I guarantee that you're not making the most out of it. And now with technology, the line between what can or cannot be automated is becoming more and more blurry. For example, we recently semi-automated the support inquiries for John, an account of a homeowner. He was manually writing emails, often forgetting to reply to certain clients, and that was leading to several complaints. With the help of AI and ChatGPT, we now take every support inquiry and create tasks from it. Then the AI gives it a priority score from 1 to 5 based on what the client says, and it also drafts 3 potential responses. So now John only has to log in, he sees all the inquiries already organized by priority, he clicks, reads the 3 drafts that were automatically generated, picks the best one, edits it slightly, and then sends it over. So now most inquiries are resolved in seconds, and John is saving time, and his clients are happy. Another example is we automated personalized videos for Alexis, another accounting firm client. As the founder, she was recording Recording a personalized video for each prospect every time. Of course, this was only when she had the time, and since she runs a firm with about 100 clients, that was almost never. Now, instead, she records one single video, and that video is sent to every prospect moving forward, using their first name and having her mouth move accordingly. Crazy, I know. And I promise you, that in your firm there are manual tasks today that can be automated, even if you don't think it's possible. Process automation and artificial intelligence tools are growing, and they're only going to get more sophisticated over time. So before you go, if you have at least 5 full-time members in your firm but no technical staff and virtually no free time, I have an offer for you. I want you to talk to one of our tech strategist to help you choose and automate your most time-consuming processes. If you're interested, click the link below this video to get our free process automation scorecard. We'll meet for 20 minutes and help you pinpoint the processes in your firm that, when automated, will deliver the highest ROI. No strings attached. Oh, and keep in mind, we only take a limited number of clients per month, and we may have a waiting list depending on the time of the year. So click the link below right now to get your free evaluation, and let's make sure we transform your firm into an efficient machine. I thank you for your time. I look forward to speaking with you soon. Thank you.