As a team, we work collaboratively – it’s one of the core ways we operate to ensure we’re solving good problems in good ways for our clients and our team.
Background:
We are heading into our three month check in with a new client. We’ve onboarded them to cloud-based accounting systems from a paper-based environment. Heading into the third month, we want to ensure that the new processes and systems that we’re developing with the client are working for them and for us.
This morning, 5 of our team members met to brainstorm. The discussion involved everyone working with the client – payroll support, bookkeeping, financial reporting, oversight, and client relationship management. We knew we needed input from the entire client team to ensure that we were identifying all of the problems and their impacts to ensure we propose the best solutions.
Problems to solve:
- Financial reporting functionality and process improvement to monitor profitability on a per project basis
- Accurate sales tax reporting for expenses/input tax credits
- Cash flow management
- Workflows for managing source documents for accounts payable, bookkeeping, and payroll
Our method:
- After two months of working with the current systems, our team has identified areas where efficiencies are required to support the client’s internal processes and our own internal workflows.
- Our team members individually identified road blocks that were causing interruptions and inefficiencies to our own workflows.
- We met last week to identify the problems.
- Over the past week, we’ve been identifying the impact that the problems are having (e.g. inefficiencies, resource usage, capacity constraints, communication issues, impact on job satisfaction, etc.).
- Today we met for one hour to discuss impacts and propose solutions with the internal team.
- Our Senior Manager will now review the proposed solutions with our operations manager and will propose recommendations.
- Next week we will meet with the client with our proposed recommendations and implementation plan to ensure the workflow changes will work for them while still working for us.
Every person on our team brought forward unique perspective and valuable solutions. We discussed change management, efficiencies, resource allocation, preserving the integrity of our relationship, and job satisfaction. We came up with a plan that works for the whole team and that we feel will also best work for our client.
This is how our team works to proactively and collaboratively find solutions to support our clients – each and every time.
At MOD, we are working with a feminist lens. We collaborate to find the best solutions for our clients and our team.
We love solving problems with and for each other and our clients!
If you have accounting problems you need help with, please reach out to our team at hello@modaccounting.ca . We’d love to collaborate with you to find the best solutions for you and your organization!