As a agency chief, you’re properly conscious of the continued expertise scarcity within the accounting trade. It’s one of many causes you’re investing so closely in expertise.
Along with serving to you retain up with evolving shopper wants and expectations, these new software program methods and AI instruments also needs to assist issues run extra easily and effectively internally. They’re meant to maintain your present employees glad and productive, and to draw the intense younger expertise that can assist propel your future progress.
There’s only one drawback: Even with all the brand new expertise, issues someway really feel much less environment friendly. Workers members are nonetheless spending hours chasing data, re-entering information, and fixing errors, they usually’re getting annoyed. They’re discovering themselves with much less time for shoppers and strategic work. They’re getting burnt out.
However the notion of including expertise shouldn’t be the place you went incorrect. In truth, 79% of respondents in Karbon’s 2025 State of AI in Accounting report imagine that graduates usually tend to be a part of accounting companies that actively use AI and different superior applied sciences. So investing in additional tech was – and is – a wise play.
The extra doubtless concern is how you added that expertise. The mix of too many items and too little coordination has most likely resulted in a foul tech stack – one which’s fraying your employees and bogging down your agency.
Right here’s repair the issue so you possibly can maintain onto your greatest folks – and entice some nice new ones.
If Your Tech Isn’t Speaking, Your Tech Stack Isn’t Working
Including expertise is nice in principle. However if you happen to haven’t been listening to how methods talk and combine with one another as they’ve come on board over time, you’ve doubtless been constructing a disconnected tech stack.
That’s why issues that have been speculated to develop into extra productive and extra environment friendly don’t really feel that approach. Your methods aren’t speaking and your employees is paying the worth. What are you able to do to make issues higher for them?
It begins with how you set collectively your tech stack. Ideally, you need to be specializing in the methods that management the information associated to your relationships, work, and financials. Begin by mapping the instruments you’ve added through the years, together with how (or if) they join. Be sure you establish…
- Core foundational back-office options that allow the agency to handle its work, comparable to instruments for workflow and mission administration, reporting and information evaluation, and crew collaboration.
- Follow administration and CRM elements that assist with shopper communications and engagement.
- Rising areas that relate particularly to the agency’s underlying service focus, comparable to taxes or shopper accounting companies (CAS).
Inside every of those tiers, ask questions comparable to…
- Are all of those methods interacting correctly and effectively?
- The place are the redundancies?
- What might be eradicated or streamlined to make issues simpler for employees?
A Streamlined Stack = A Extra Happy Workers
With a greater concept of your agency’s true wants and capabilities, it’s time to realign your tech stack. The aim? To focus totally on these components and options that enable your folks to do their jobs extra effectively and productively. This realignment will come from a greater, extra disciplined tech choice course of:
- Prioritize your infrastructure to handle the largest employees workflow points first.
- Assessment the tech choices that deal with your prime priorities with an eye fixed towards integration with present methods.
- Consider potential distributors to find out which may be the best and best to work with.
- Determine what belongs within the stack, specializing in just a few key issues – comparable to workflow match, scalability, or ease of use – which are most important to your crew.
- Develop an equation in your qualitative evaluation by assigning a weight to every of the traits that matter most to your agency.
- Rating your choices utilizing a simple 1 (poor) to five (glorious) scale to fee how properly they match your chosen standards.
- Join a free trial or product demo to check the finalists, ideally with some key employees members becoming a member of in. Which of those prime picks greatest lives as much as your expectations?
That is the alternative of randomly including new instruments and hoping for the very best. That is a deliberate and targeted strategy that may assist your agency construct a tech ecosystem the place information flows, collaboration improves, and shopper work scales easily.
All of which results in a extra happy employees – and a extra engaging choice for younger expertise in search of their match within the accounting career.
Flip Your Tech Stack right into a Expertise Benefit
Expertise is an accelerant. In a related and environment friendly system, it can amplify the features; in a disconnected and inefficient system, it can exacerbate the negatives.
In different phrases, your tech stack can both be one in every of your agency’s greatest promoting factors or one in every of its greatest ache factors. Which is why having a strategic imaginative and prescient round expertise and a considerate plan to ship it’s important.
It’s time to cease merely piling up new instruments and methods and to begin discovering and eliminating the overlaps, gaps, and drawback areas which are slowing down your employees. It’s time to construct a system that’s personalized, customized, and conformed to how your crew wants and desires to function. And it’s time to place within the laborious work of change administration that tech adoption calls for.
As a result of in doing so, you gained’t simply be bettering your workflow effectivity. You’ll be highlighting your efforts to create a extra constructive tech-forward tradition in your folks. And that’s the form of differentiator that may assist a agency overcome one the career’s most vexing challenges – the continued quest for expertise.
In regards to the Creator
Ian Vacin is co-founder and chief partnerships officer at Karbon, a maker of AI-driven accounting apply administration software program, and is co-author of Scale with Function: The Service Entrepreneur’s Information to Intentional Progress. He has practically three a long time of management expertise in expertise and accounting with Karbon, Xero, and Intuit, and is keen about serving to accounting professionals be as profitable as attainable to allow them to higher serve the small companies they help.
