Improve Your Work Flow: Automate

By Ronald D. Kranzler, CPA, and Stephen Barrett, CPA, CITP
April 20, 2006
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What are the benefits?
The most obvious benefit of implementing automation is saving time. While the initial time and energy investment is considerable, the ultimate outcome is a significant reduction in the amount of time high-level managers and partners must spend reviewing and re-reviewing reports. Automation ends the infinite loop of edits and reviews that can hinder efficiency at this stage of production.

Aside from time savings, there is a high potential of cost savings by eliminating the need for a report-processing department. Reports that used to require three days to produce are now being done in hours. Eliminating that additional step in the work flow process usually results in savings on many levels.

Although not as tangible as time and money savings, another valuable benefit is the consistency and accuracy these automatically-generated reports have. By selecting pre-edited footnotes and opinions, pre-formatting line items and headings and automatically populating client-related data, first drafts of reports are about 90 percent edited upon creation.

The process has reduced the margin for error, increasing the confidence that the end product will be a good one.

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