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Ask any firm owner what they would do with an extra day a week and you get an answer straight away. Then the day never turns up. Compliance work has a habit of filling whatever time you give it.
I have been running two practices on Abby for 18 months, so I have watched this play out in my own firm rather than in theory. The hours do come back. A job that used to take my team six to eight hours now takes under 90 minutes. What I did not expect was how much of a decision it is where those hours go.
Deciding where the hours go
If you get time back and quietly fill it with more of the same work, nothing much changes. You have a faster version of the firm you already had.
So it has to be a deliberate call. I would sit down and work out what you actually want that time spent on before it arrives, because the work will find it otherwise.
Here is where it went for us.
Advisory can go in the calendar
Almost every firm I speak to wants to do more advisory. Interest has never been the problem. Advisory is the first thing that gets pushed when a lodgement date is coming, and it keeps getting pushed.
When the compliance base runs to the same standard every time and there is no scramble at the end, that changes. Advisory work can go in the calendar and stay there.
Abby also gives you a head start on it. As I work through a job, anything worth raising with the client gets added to a meeting agenda as I go. A query, a note, something to check. By the time the job is finished the agenda is already built, so I am not sitting down with a client having forgotten what I meant to bring up.
More time with clients
Clients never see the workpaper. What they notice is whether you picked up the phone, whether you spotted something before they did, and whether you had the headspace to think about their business rather than their lodgement.
That is the part of the job I came into accounting for, and it is the part that gets squeezed first when the preparation is eating your week.
What it did for my team
This is the one that caught me off guard.
My team are less stressed. There is less staying back to untangle a file someone else prepared, and less bracing for what a busy period does to them. One of them told me she will never have to do a GST reconciliation again in her whole career, and she said it as though a weight had lifted.
The time saved is easy to measure. How the team feels about the work is harder to put a number on, and it is the thing I would tell other firms to look at closely.
Capacity you can plan around
The change I value most is predictability.
Abby prepares each job the same way. Same data, same structure, same output, every client and every period. So I know roughly what the review will take and I know the standard the file will meet before anyone opens it.
That is what lets you commit to advisory work, or take on new clients, or give people their evenings back, without gambling on whether this period is going to blow up.
Where the capacity comes from
For a lot of firms, some or all of this preparation is currently going out the door.
I hear the same three things from firms that have been outsourcing. The work was not always consistent. Turnaround was slow. And the senior review time never really disappeared, because you still had to check the output before you could trust it.
Bringing that work back in-house with Abby keeps it running to your own standard, prepared the same way each time, ready for your team to review.
The point of it
Capacity on its own is worth very little. What you spend it on is the whole thing.
For us it went to advisory, to clients and to my team. If you get the hours back and put them somewhere you have chosen on purpose, that is when a firm actually feels different to work in.
Have a think about your own practice. If a job that used to take a day was done in 90 minutes, where would you want that time to go?
If you would like to see how the workflow creates that capacity, I am happy to walk you through it. You can book a demo now.
