.png)
I asked a question at the start of our recent webinar. Who does most of your compliance preparation today?
Just over half the room said graduates or juniors. A third said senior accountants. The rest said an offshore team.
That third is the one I keep thinking about. In a lot of practices the most experienced people in the building are still setting jobs up, and I understand exactly how that happens, because my own firm ran that way for years.
The more useful question is who ends up doing what
Most conversations about compliance software stay on what the software does. The more useful question for a practice owner is who ends up doing what, because that is a staffing decision rather than a software one.
In Abby we call the person who sets a job up the preparer. That could be a bookkeeper, a graduate, an office manager, or someone on an offshore team. It depends entirely on who you have, and every practice I speak to has a slightly different answer.
What I would like to see in every firm is senior accountants who are not doing the preparation stage at all. They open the workpapers once those are done and get straight into the part of the job that needs them.
How long each of the four steps actually takes
Putting timings against the four steps is the quickest way to see whether the right people are on the right parts.
Gather takes my preparer about ten minutes in the first year for a client, because of the mapping. In the second year it is closer to five, since most of that setup carries over.
Calculate is Abby's step and it takes about 30 seconds, or a couple of minutes on a larger Xero file.
Review is where your accountant comes in. Depending on the size of the job and how complicated it is, anywhere from half an hour to about an hour and a half.
Approve is the partner or senior accountant going through the job properly and signing it off. Usually fifteen to thirty minutes.
Look at where the time sits in that list. The two steps that take the longest are the two that genuinely need an accountant, and the two that take almost no time at all are the ones that used to eat the week.
Why manual preparation ends up with your seniors
When the preparation is manual, that balance is completely different. The setup and the building take hours, and senior people end up doing work that has very little to do with their judgement.
That was the thing I could not get past in my own practice. My seniors were spending far too much time on the compliance job, lining it up and preparing it and going back to clients for the information that was missing. I knew it should not be like that.
I share your pain on this one, by the way. I have had plenty of year ends where I got to the other side of it and thought, something has to change before we do that again.
We have been running on Abby for 19 months now, and the change has gone further than I expected.
What surprised me about my own team
My preparers have started working through half the review themselves.
They complete the easier workpapers and leave the trickier ones for the accountants, along with anything carrying a variance. That was not something I planned for. It happened because the guidance sits on every workpaper, so somebody newer to the job can read what it is and what to do without having to ask anyone.
That has been good for the team as well as the timings. People who were doing the same repetitive setup are now finishing actual workpapers, and you can see them getting more confident with it each time.
If you want another person in that chain, there is second reviewer functionality in Abby for exactly that.
Try splitting one of your own jobs across the four steps
Take a job your practice finished recently and split the time across the four steps. Who gathered it. Who built the workpapers. Who reviewed them. Who signed it off.
Then ask whether the person doing each part is the right person for it.
Most firm owners already know the answer to that. The reason it has not changed is that the preparation had to be done by somebody, and it usually landed with whoever could be trusted to get it right. That is the part worth looking at again.
If you would like to see how the four steps run in practice, I am happy to walk you through a job of your own. You can book a demo now.
