See how automation and advanced workpaper tools can enhance your firm’s professional mentorship programs.
Why you should invest in your employees
In a fast-paced work environment, it’s easy to prioritize short-term deadlines over long-term professional development. But let’s step back and analyze the broader implications of this approach.
In a 2021 Edelman study, more than 80% of respondents considered it important for companies to offer training and mentorship programs. Another survey from INTOO and Workplace Intelligence found that 44% of Gen Z workers plan to quit within six months due to lack of career development support.
These findings should be especially pertinent to tax and accounting where staffing constraints are a top industry pain point. Perhaps the best way for tax practices to sustain talent isn’t to hire, but to foster it internally.
Is your firm giving preparers opportunities to increase their value-add potential? Do their daily responsibilities put them on track for career advancement? Let’s examine how automation, standardized workpaper software, and professional mentorship programs can help you invest in your team.
Elevate staff with automation
Think about how much time your preparers spend inputting data into tax software and indexing workpaper binders. Although these tasks are essential, they require a low threshold of tax expertise and offer little toward career development.
Fortunately, these are also the perfect conditions for technology to lend a helping hand. 1040SCAN leads the industry in 1040 automation, recognizing 4–7 times as many documents as alternative solutions. 1040SCAN even extracts data from margin interest, investment fees, foreign income, and over 65 other fields that competing solutions don’t.
By spending less time transposing data and organizing workpapers, your preparers can focus on knowledge work that nurtures their ambitions and boosts productivity.
What you’re solving is congruent with what the younger generation wants to do. No one went to college, studied accounting, and passed their CPA exam to copy a number from Box 3. This allows us to teach them what different values in Box 3 mean and what needs to be considered.
Steven Hart, Chief Information Officer, Janover LLC
Mentor preparers with workpaper tools
Reviewers typically bill time at a much higher rate than preparers, making review the most expensive stage of the 1040 process. Rather than making the same corrections over and over, why not guide preparers to improve their workpaper documentation? What if they could even perform a first-line review themselves?
SPbinder is a workpaper management system designed to enhance preparation and reduce review time. Here are some examples of how its collaborative tools improve workpaper quality and educate staff.
Role-based Sign-offs
SPbinder enables up to four sign-off levels so users can track who made what changes and when. It creates a clean record of each workpaper’s history and ensures that it passes through the correct assignees.
Notes
SPbinder’s collaborative Notes functionality allows team members to communicate with context. Through a centralized note tab, colleagues can create threads, link to specific workpapers, and leave labeled attention items.
Review Tree
The Review Tree in SPbinder gives reviewers easy oversight of items that require attention. It automatically populates preparer actions into their appropriate categories so reviewers don’t have to search. This both increases review efficiency and helps reviewers better track their preparers’ development.
Model your professional mentorship programs after the Big 4
The tax and accounting industry is notorious for its high turnover, but nowhere is this issue more prevalent than with the Big 4. To help boost retention, each Big 4 firm has developed its own professional mentorship program with well-defined avenues for career advancement.
For example, PwC launched a $2.4 billion employee investment campaign in 2022. Among other perks, the program allows staff to customize their career path and choose the types of assignments they want to work on. PwC U.S. chairman Tim Ryan declared the battle for talent was over due to some of these efforts.
Happier, more satisfied people will do better work for their clients, if they’re feeling better about themselves. We’re changing and redesigning every single process within our organization to give people choice.
Tim Ryan, CNBC, October 2022
KPMG has made similar investments, leveraging generative AI, gamified training, and networking centers to help employees advance their capabilities.
Winning the talent wars of tomorrow
CPA retirement is surging and accounting graduate rates are in decline. If these trends continue, talent searches are poised to become even more competitive in the coming years. While your firm might not have the same resources as the Big 4, you can still adopt their employee-first mindset.
Investing in the right digital solutions and professional mentorship practices can help you develop your dream CPA in-house. Doing so preemptively protects your firm from future staffing pains and puts you in a position for long-term success.