As all accountants know, running a profitable practice means having good gross margins, and because your highest cost is your team, it's critical to ensure your team is busy doing billable client work for engagements that don't go over budget.
Your company relies on being profitable to stay afloat. Even if your accounting firm has a healthy legacy, it's important to consistently track your profitable utilization and make sure your team has the resources they need in order to keep up your thriving trajectory.
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Make strides toward better utilization by equipping yourself with powerful tools, such as a Utilization Dashboard to efficiently manage all the main aspects of your firm.
Here are four ways your firm can sustain and grow for the long haul by leveraging a Utilization Dashboard:
Instead of shuffling through disconnected tools to manage your team's schedules, tracking their availability and capacity to assign them to client work - with a glance you can easily locate their utilization in graph form. This data comes from any logged time on the platform as well as estimated time scheduled to the user. This time is separated and can be filtered through Logged Time such as Billable or Non-billable, as well as estimated time including Scheduled, External (times that stem from your external calendar, like Google Calendar or Office365 Calendar), Committed, and Auto-scheduled. Additional filters you can benefit from include: Date, Access Level, Divisions, Groups, Manager, and Skills.
The inventory of your firm is comprised of your team member's productivity and the billable work they do for your clients. With the ability to have constant visibility into how your team's being utilized currently as well as historically, you can see the tasks each team member is working on, get insight into who is being underutilized and the number of billable hours they're logging, and as a result tweak the schedule at any time to make pivotal changes and adapt to any situation.
With the power in a glance to get a grasp on how everyone on the team is each spending their time to help determine your business' overall profitability, you're getting insight into who is being utilized and more specifically being utilized profitably. You have the ability to compare the amount of work that was logged to the amount that was scheduled during a certain time period and can determine the billable and non-billable hours.
With a Utilization Dashboard have a dynamic view of how your team's time is being utilized. With that insight, you can update your team's work accordingly, re-assign tasks if needed, and maintain your task deadlines from a single dashboard. With that visibility, everyone in your team is on the same page and you eliminate the chance of missing important deadlines.
If your accounting firm is searching for a dynamic, integrated platform with the power to improve your team's utilization thanks to data of the logged time of billable and non-billable hours, and your team's real-time schedule, give Accelo a try!
