💡How To Get Your Admins Doing Technical Reviews

Killer firms have killer quality assurance processes. It’s the only way to scale your technical expertise, but it’s hard to do.

On Monday’s pod we explored meaningful ways to begin standardizing QA, even pull your admins in to save the time of your most senior technical folks.

6 takeaways from that episode to begin challenging the assumption this can’t be done:

1. Just start documenting
   Building an SOP for the entire process seems unimaginable, so start with 5%. What part of the process can anyone do? Begin carving up the review function into distinct tasks.

2. Start with the easy stuff
   Don’t jump to 1040 review, start with 1099s. Don’t delegate accountability for a full month end close, build an SOP for part of the balance sheet review.

3. Get help
   Record & narrate yourself going through a review, then get a member of the team to draft the steps. If multiple people do technical reviews, have a team member draft a unified version.

4. Augment with QA tech
   A growing number of apps will perform part of this process for you, but when you don’t have an explicit process, it’s hard to make use of them, and accountants will just redo the work. But when you can point to 10 explicit steps a tool will automate, you’re truly eliminating work.

5. Remove yourself from the process
   That 5% you carved out? Find a way to never do it again. The goal is to take non-technical work off the plates of your most scarce human resource: high level technical folks.

6. Centralize review notes
   Most firms capture review notes in a siloed way, within each project. This prevents you from identifying common points to incorporate into QA. Centralize those points to enable a high level analysis of what your process is missing.

This is a very basic starting point, but I find most firms haven’t begun to explore this. The notion it can’t be done is a great assumption to start pushing back against in bite-sized ways.

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📅 This Week

• I’m in Vegas at AICPA Digital next week, if you’re there don’t be a stranger

• I wrote about the trap of word-of-mouth as a growth strategy

• You can now buy .meme domains

• Cool example from the folks at Pixie of how to use a custom GPT as a marketing tool

• Toasty is an AI tool that uses your podcast feed to produce longform & social media posts

• I interviewed COO of Boomer Consulting Arianna Campbell to talk through how to support change-averse staff in your firm

• We played choose your own firmventure:

  

• This year I’ve talked at length about AI agents that can operate your desktop, and their impact on accounting. The #3 trending repo on Github is this “self-operating computer” AI agent

• If you’re a startup working on an AI application for accountants, go sign up for the AICPAs startup accelerator. The application window closes today, and it’s a great way to get access to more firms

• Amazon launched Q, it’s AI assistant for work

• Google’s Bard AI assistant can now discuss the contents of YouTube videos, which is simultaneously helpful & problematic for some types of creators. We’ll run through what this means for folks like me who produce videos on tomorrow’s pod

• Mastermind signups begin tomorrow in my community. If you don’t have a friend group who also runs firms, consider checking it out

😍From The Community

My private peer networking community Realize for firm leaders, now capped at 500 members.

• 12/01 📃 Mastermind Group Signups Open

• 12/07 🎉 December Member Mixer 🥳 with Dymond

• 12/12 💘 Swiping Right - Crafting Client Communications with Kellie Parks

• 12/15 📃 Mastermind Group Signups Close

• 12/19 🏫 Hall Pass - Live Coaching with Brandon Hall

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