Kicking Your Technology Investment
Into High Gear

InfoTech Update
An AICPA Publication
Vol. 16. No. 3
May / June, 2007
By Stephen Barrett, CPA.CITP, MCP
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Shifting into High Gear

Once all of the content exists within the integrated systems, the possibilities become almost limitless. As mentioned, our content management system allows us to create customizable dashboards that accumulate relevant, timely information from the various systems (document management, electronic management, practice management/time and billing, CRM) and display this information on one screen, presented in an Internet browser. This dashboard is highly customizable, permitting us to decide, as a firm, the information that should be gathered and presented at the staff and engagement-specific levels.

Figure 2 shows how we elected to construct the staff log-in pages in accordance with the way our firm decided to build this page. Staff members have immediate access to a list of all of their own clients (filtered by partner or manager), along with each client’s current work-in-progress (WIP) and accounts receivable balances. Each click on a client’s balance drills down to reveal the detail of that balance, all the way down to the staff’s time entry.

Next to this on the web page are links to all active engagement files. These links are managed centrally, so as engagements are assigned to our staff members, each user’s individual dashboard is automatically updated. Beneath these lists, we have the workflow details of the engagements, in addition to different scheduling information, including due dates, status and staff management. From this one screen, we can perform full-text searches across all of our documents or search by firm-defined attributes, including partner, office, document category or other attributes.

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