Improve Your Work Flow: Automate

By Ronald D. Kranzler, CPA, and Stephen Barrett, CPA, CITP
April 20, 2006
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Reprinted in the Oklahoma Society of CPAs’ OSCPA Wire, a biweekly e-newsletter for members of the Oklahoma Society of CPAs, with permission from the Boomer Technology Circle^TM Spotlight. First published in the "Boomer Technology Circle^TM Spotlight" April issue. Visit Boomer Consulting online at www.boomer.com.

It’s fair to say every accountant, at some point in his or her career, has experienced a deep level of frustration when trying to get a client’s financial statement out the door. We all have them — those little inefficiencies in our firm’s report processing procedures that add up to excessive amounts of wasted time. The redundancy of updating FASB required changes on a client-by-client basis; the pain of drafting, proofing, redrafting, re-proofing, approving and replacing newly written footnotes or opinions; the irritation of discovering in a final draft that the table of contents wasn’t changed to match the rest of the report when content on page 12 ran onto page 13 thereby creating a one-page shift on all following pages. The possibilities are endless.

Automation: the Holy Grail. But what is automation?
If you have ever found yourself on the verge of insanity as a result of these seemingly mindless — albeit pertinent — tasks, perhaps it’s time to automate your firm’s financial statement report process. Automation, according to Encarta Dictionary, is defined as “the conversion of a workplace to one that replaces or minimizes human labor with mechanical or electronic machines or processes.”

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