Spotlight Reporting Recruiting and Retaining an A-Team: Best Practices

Recruiting and Retaining an A-Team: Best Practices

@spotlightrep

Thomas White, Territory Manager UK, Spotlight

Reporting

Thomas has a decade of sales experience including 8 years with the UK’s number 1 job board, reed.co.uk, where he managed a team selling to some of the biggest recruitment firms in the UK. He joined Spotlight Reporting in 2019, and has since supported 500+ accounting firms around the world. As Spotlight Reporting’s UK Territory Manager, Thomas is dedicated to helping accounting firms achieve their advisory goals.

This article is M ost Partners and

Directors know that recruitment is one of the most important aspects of building and growing an accounting firm. Delivering high-quality services is next to impossible without a solid team in place— even if you have wonderful clients, efficient internal processes, and a stellar techstack.

Unfortunately, recruiting has traditionally always been difficult in the accounting industry, and the situation has worsened since the beginning of the pandemic. In addition to this, many firms are also transitioning from compliance into advisory, so they’re not looking for a “typical accountant”—they’re looking for the much rarer well-rounded, high-performing individual.

So how do you build and keep an A-Team?

Finding New Talent for Your Firm

As a hiring manager, the first thing you need to do is clearly define the role you’re hiring for. Consider the purpose of the role, the KPIs you’ve established for it, and what skills/experience the new hire needs to have. Once the role has been clearly defined, there are two ways to kick off the hiring process, each with their own benefits:

1. Hiring Directly—Placing Your

Own Job Ad:

Hiring directly means you’re in full control of the advertising process. You’ll also save a large placement fee. However, hiring directly can be incredibly time consuming, so you need to consider if adding this to your current workload is a viable option.

2. Using a

Recruitment

Agency:

A recruitment agency can introduce you to the best-quality candidates in the market and save you massive amounts of time.

Some job postings can receive well over 100 applicants, who then need to be reviewed, shortlisted, screened, and interviewed. A recruitment agency can handle all of this, and you’ll only have to pay them once the role is filled.

Attracting the Best

Hiring the right candidate isn’t just about running an ad and hoping for the best—your firm needs

to be an attractive opportunity. If you’re serious about hiring the best of the best, it’s time to examine your work culture. Many candidates now gravitate towards firms who: • Have a clear vision and mission statement • Positively impact both the local community and the environment • Hold the right values and work with the right clients • Offer flexible and remote Hiring the right work options— candidate isn’t just about running an ad especially postCovid. • Create opportunities and hoping for for career the best. progression. Another key area for accounting firms to think about is brand awareness. What do prospective candidates know about your firm, and why? You can increase your brand recognition by: • Having a professional-looking website and social media platforms—candidates WILL research you online! • Promoting awards or accolades your firm has won–candidates want to work for top or emerging firms.

• Showing you value and prioritise employees through an employee wellness program, staff education, or internal promotions for your superstars. • Having a professional looking logo and visual identity.

The Interview Process

Once you have these pieces in place, you’ll need to create a fantastic interview process. A process that’s too long or disorganised may put off the best candidates, while one that isn’t stringent enough will let in the worst. Be clear on:

• how many interviews each candidate needs to go through • what tasks, if any, you’ll need them to complete

Knowing these things ahead of time will help candidates be more relaxed throughout the process. Remember, you need them to be themselves so you can see if they’re a natural fit for your firm.

Retaining High Performers

The more you understand and engage your employees, the more likely they are to stay put. Consider offering: • On-target earnings or bonuses • Perks (free amenities, learning opportunities etc) • Performance bonuses • Flexible working options • Regular reviews (weekly or monthly) with consistent pay reviews (every 6-12 months)

Employees who feel valued, acknowledged, and appreciated are unlikely to leave their positions. years. With new technology automating many timeconsuming tasks, employees are looking at the value of what they can offer, rather than the hours they can put in. Focusing on productivity shows your staff that you understand how important their time is, both inside and outside the office.

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And finally, work-life balance has become exceedingly more important over the past two For more information, visit:

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50% higher approval efficiency and reduced labour costs: how Tinka Consulting used ApprovalMax to help NOUS drive efficiency by eliminating manual work

Tinka Consulting is a Brisbane-based business with clients all-over Australia that offers bookkeeping, accounting, business reporting and advisory services. This is an interview with Trent Todd, Technical Director of Tinka Consulting.

@ApprovalMax

Trent Todd, Technical Director, Tinka Consulting

Trent brings a wealth of accounting and advisory experience to TINKA. His Big 4 accounting background has benefited a number of advisory and business improvement teams. He’s also an experienced CFO of a global medical research business. Trent’s professional career has focused on delivering valuable business and process improvement services to a broad range of companies. His passion lies in helping business owners understand the drivers of their business to enable growth through better processes and reporting.

This article is H ow would you describe your services and your

customers?

We’re not a traditional accounting firm, and we don’t do tax. This allows us to focus on helping businesses reach their full potential. Our team has deep commercial experience and can help with reporting, advisory and process improvement projects to increase productivity. We specialise in working with SMEs across the Digital / Tech / Software / eComm / Energy and Medical industries, mostly 10+ FTE businesses but all the way up to 150+ FTE ones.

What are the common challenges such businesses face?

They really need clear and accurate financial reporting that delivers meaningful insights for making informed decisions in their quest to move forward. It’s also essential that they can plan their cash flow properly. But fastgrowing businesses often struggle to keep up with the mounting administrative work and stay on top of potential risks. We often see a lack of proper financial processes like an audit trail, formal approvals and payment controls.

How does approval automation help with overcoming these challenges?

One of the biggest challenges is the inability to plan cash amounts precisely because incoming invoices are not in the system until fully approved, and that can take weeks. Most of these businesses use email approvals, which are simply unproductive and all too easily forgotten in a busy inbox. Usually there is a large number of approvers, meaning that without an appropriate approach it’s not just difficult to do reliable cash flow forecasting – the accounts payable process is also affected. To sum it up, a lot of time and effort can be used much more efficiently by introducing the right automation tools.

Automating approvals and processes can save a lot of time and, therefore, money. One of our customers with 30 staff actually reduced costs by 39,000 AUD per year. We measure the time spent, so, the larger a business is, the bigger the savings. Another great example is a business with over 140 staff that achieved a total reduction of over 150,000 AUD per year. Implementing the solution here meant 2.5 days a week of the accounts administrator’s time could be reallocated to other activities.

Case study: eliminating manual work to cut labour costs in a branding agency

NOUS is a branding agency with creative intelligence for great results. They help develop brands but also deliver those brands through website design and development, a creative concept and the design of brand collaterals, digital campaigns, video productions, packaging and marketing automation.

The problem: trying to run complicated approval workflows manually

NOUS has over 20 staff in Brisbane and services businesses from all kinds of industries. NOUS takes a lot of care when they bill their clients to issue true and correct invoices, so they’re run through a multi-layered approval process before they’re sent out. It can have up to four steps, including the approvals

by managers from various departments, account managers and directors.

The company used to have a manual file system for approvals: documents were put into someone’s folder to get their approval and then transferred to the next person, and another one, and another one... With so many approval steps this was becoming a tedious task for the administrative team. One of them had to open each folder and all the PDFs it contained – at times up to 80 files – to check if all had been signed and approved before moving them on into the next folder. With this kind of approach, it was a real challenge for both approvers and the admin person to keep track of this process. To make it worse there were also manual approvals on printed documents.

Introducing ApprovalMax to save $40k and a total of .2 of an FTE in the operational team

Since sound approval rules had already been established and thought out in great detail, recreating them in ApprovalMax was pretty easy. The automated process with notifications simplified things for the approvers drastically and the laborious folder management became obsolete, freeing up that person’s time for higher value operational tasks. At the same time, spurred on by the ease of approvals in ApprovalMax, Tinka Consulting offered to tighten spend control and implement bill approval.

The move to paperless accounting

Complemented by a data entry tool, ApprovalMax enabled NOUS to completely eliminate paper from their processes.

Before, some of their approvals were in PDFs, others on paper – for those who preferred to physically sign documents. By creating a paperless approval process it became easy to make the case for a payment process using the batch payment functionality in Xero. collaboration with their clients enormously: there are fewer errors and more trust because the client is able to properly review and stay in control while having to do less work.

Results:

• Approval efficiency has risen by 50% (from entry to posting) • .25 of an FTE for administrative assistance was repurposed through efficiency gains • .2 of an FTE in the operational team was saved in total • Total ROI: $40k (conservative value) • Increasing the number of approvers has improved transparency across the business

Above: Tinka Consulting team with Sahil Malhotra, ApprovalMax Partner Account Manager

Improving the customer-topractice communication

For Tinka Consulting, implementing ApprovalMax has improved the communication and

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Learn more about ApprovalMax:

www.approvalmax.com