businessfitness™: The experts in making accounting firms efficient

When you purchase HowNow® Accountants you are purchasing more than a product. You're purchasing a service. This means you're making an important decision on a supplier/advisor relationship.

It makes sense then to understand a little about businessfitness™, the company behind the HowNow® products and services and the Good Bad Ugly™ benchmarking surveys and reports.

Our focus at businessfitness™

At businessfitness™, we're the experts in making accounting firms efficient.

What exactly do we mean by that?

Efficiency for an accounting firm is all about getting jobs done faster and cheaper. That's what we help our clients achieve. Faster means in fewer steps, in less time. Less time charged to WIP for a job translates into producing jobs for less, but cheaper also means achieving effective delegation.

With effective knowledge management in the areas of procedures, templates and precedents our clients can safely and systematically 'push work down the line' and delegate to less experienced team members to produce work that, in other firms, they wouldn’t be producing for quite some time.

The flow-on effect of higher levels of (safe and effective) delegation is that capacity is freed up in the higher levels of the firm. Partners and Managers are freed from the lower level work that drags down their average hourly rate recovered. The ability to delegate—while still achieving the desired quality levels—is the key to achieving your firm's ideal leverage structure for the type of work your firm produces. (See this David Maister article for more information regarding leverage structure: the ratio of senior to middle to junior team members in a firm and why it's so important to get it right for your firm.)

Your firm wins, your team wins

The firm wins—you achieve greater margins, assuming you price jobs based on their value to the client not on their cost to produce—and your team wins—they experience greater job satisfaction and faster career advancement by doing higher level work sooner and being supported by excellent systems in the process.

For businessfitness™ clients, training and induction headaches become a thing of the past because team members get up to speed very quickly by referring to the procedures, templates and various standard documents to help them produce top quality work to the standards the firm requires. The mantra 'This is how we do it here' is very strong in businessfitness™ clients, as it is in many successful businesses.

Importantly, this means your clients win too

Getting jobs done faster and cheaper doesn't mean that quality is ignored. Far from it. Your firm is already producing good quality work. It has to. Every job that goes out the door is reviewed and signed off. But the question is, how efficiently is the work being produced?

You don’t just want quality, you want 'fast quality'. Our clients achieve the same or better quality they were achieving before becoming clients, but in less time. That's fast quality. And faster job turnaround times for clients.

For example, it is common in our clients' firms for job review times to reduce by 75%. That is, where a particular level of job was previously taking two hours to review, the same types of jobs now take only 30 minutes to review.

Why is that? Part of the answer lines in standardisation, systemisation, knowledge management and template management. All the jobs that come through for review are based on the same standardised template electronic workpapers. Jobs that aren't, are rejected. (It doesn't take long for team members to adopt the standardised workpapers if you take this 'The fish that John West reject' approach to your review process. We help you with implementing these management approaches.)

This approach means there are higher levels of 'knowledge re-use' which is knowledge management lingo for 'a whole lot less reinvention of the wheel'! Everyone benefits through this.

Why is the businessfitness™ approach to making accounting firms efficient so effective?

It's because we do more than just talk about these principles. There are enough spruikers and educators in the profession already. What you need now is tools, not just theory.

At businessfitness™, in addition to the theory we have the tools—unique technology—to help you actually implement our message.

That combination sets us apart.

For example, we have software specifically designed for the needs of accounting firms (HowNow® Knowledge Manager and HowNow® Records and Email Manager) as well as world class accounting firm procedures, templates and standard documents that are implemented within a proven practice development process.

When you become a businessfitness™ client you work with your assigned Client Manager who will hand hold you through the change management and implementation processes to get team buy-in and ensure you maximise your return on your investment in the HowNow® Accountants system.

Now that you know a little about our company and our philosophy, here's a brief introduction to our products and services ...

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