Time Management Tips for CPAs

It’s important that CPAs manage their time wisely to be most effective. Below are a few tips if you are striving to be a more efficient CPA.

Prioritize.

One technique time-management coach and author Elizabeth Saunders recommended is to set priorities after creating a comprehensive list of all the work on your plate. “Acknowledge all of your top projects while permitting yourself to focus on just three to five in any given week,” she said.

Learning to do just that has helped Michael Elliott, CPA and a partner with Dittrick and Associates in the Cleveland area and a graduate of the AICPA Leadership Academy. Like Deshayes, he is married with a young child, and has another on the way. “My wife has to listen to me go home every night and say, ‘I didn’t get anything done!’” he said. “She’d say, ‘Well, did you make a list?’” Simply writing out his top priorities for the week, Elliott said, has helped him get a better handle on his work.

Acknowledge all of your top projects while permitting yourself to focus on just three to five in any given week

Delegate.

Delegating work can also help you focus on the important stuff. Deshayes, who acknowledged being “a little bit of a control freak,” used to handle all of his appointment scheduling and travel booking. Since his administrative assistant took charge of these tasks, he has seen improvements in both his work and personal life. He returns home from business trips earlier and now has more time to help his firm grow.

Block out time for long-term or recurring tasks.

Work that doesn’t rack up billable hours immediately, such as business development, refining the pricing structure, and hiring new staff members, can be easy to neglect. “If you keep telling yourself, ‘Oh, Friday afternoon I’m going to do this,’ it’s going to keep getting pushed back,” Saunders said. “But if you say, ‘Every Tuesday morning I’m going to spend an hour on business development,’ you’re a lot more likely to make progress,” Elliott said he blocks out designated times on his calendar for his nuts-and-bolts administrative duties to ensure he makes progress on them.

Use technology to organize your time—and don’t let it waste your time.

Computers and smartphones can be useful time-management tools. Deshayes uses Microsoft OneNote to organize his ideas and projects. Saunders uses Evernote for that purpose and Google Calendar for task management while recommending the Things app to iPhone users for more immediate tasks. Many of her clients recommend Wunderlist for task management.

Computers and smartphones can be useful time-management tools

Be sure to keep technology from becoming a distraction, though. Saunders recommended turning off pop-up email notifications and scheduling two or three blocks of time a day to answer emails and phone calls. That’s a technique that has worked well for Victor Amaya, CPA, a partner with ClearPath Accountants in the Denver area, and a graduate of the AICPA Leadership Academy. “We usually tell our clients that they should expect an answer within 24 hours during the off-season and within 48 hours during peak time,” he said.

And remember, most issues can wait a day or so. As Deshayes put it, there are very few “accounting emergencies.”

Source: Time Management Tips for CPAs