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
DOWNLOAD THIS ARTICLE

Shifting into High Gear (continued)

If a staff member clicks on an engagement link on this page, it will take him/her to the engagement dashboard ( Figure 3), which provides accumulated engagement information from the various systems. On this screen, the staff member will see a list of contacts drawn from our CRM system, all listed as hyperlinks for direct access to e-mails and voice calls. Our layout for this page also shows a listing of the last few interactions anyone had with that client.

Additional features on this page include:

• links to directions from the home or office to the client’s office;
• links to other engagements for that client;
• details of last billing date;
• current WIP;
• current A/R;
• a listing of staff assigned to the job; and
• details of the status of the engagement and the associated tasks.

From this one location, users can launch any engagement file or report they need, as well as conduct relative searches that search only the contents of the documents within that engagement file. Again, all of the components of these pages are constructed according to what information the firm wants staff members to be able to access. In addition, the end user has the ability to hide or display whatever features are useful or not useful.

Behind the scenes, we leveraged all of our systems, so that when an engagement is created in the practice management systems, the pieces of information in that system are used to automatically create the related workflow tasks, due date reminders, document management repositories and engagement management files. Keep in mind: This all happens without any further human interaction!

Leveraging the template and roll-forward capabilities of the various systems allows us to automate the entire rolling-forward process, resulting in a consistent starting point across all engagements. The obvious benefit here includes a serious reduction in start up and review time.

NextPrevious