The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

194 | Organizing and Managing Work Production in Your Small Firm

• Serena Shoup, CPA • Episode 194

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Running a bookkeeping or accounting firm means juggling multiple clients, deadlines, and deliverables - often leading to that feeling of "I'm drowning in work!" As someone who's built a successful practice while working 20 hours or less per week, I've discovered that how you organize and manage your workflow makes all the difference between constant overwhelm and smooth operations.

Whether you're flying solo or leading a small team, these three actionable strategies will help you streamline your processes, reduce stress, and scale your firm without the burnout.

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • Three actionable strategies to centralize your workflows and processes in one place
  • How to implement a standardized file naming system that saves you hours of searching
  • Tips for designing your week with focus blocks to avoid context switching and burnout
  • Real examples of how I apply these strategies in my own bookkeeping business

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Welcome back to the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast. If you're a bookkeeper or an accountant running your own firm or thinking about it, you're in the right place. I'm Serena, and today we're diving into something that can make or break your productivity. How to organize and manage your work product efficiently. This was another struggle that someone replied back to my email with a few weeks back, and so here we are doing another mini episode. In case you haven't noticed the past few episodes that have aired have mini in brackets in front of the title. That means that it's a shorter podcast, maybe 10 minutes or less. And you can also find it on YouTube. So if you're a YouTube person that likes to watch YouTube videos, then I encourage you to go over to the Ambitious Bookkeeper channel on YouTube and subscribe and watch our videos. Some of the videos that are, these many episodes have some screen shares and some deeper dive how tos, and so they lend really well to YouTube. Alright, let's get into today's episode. Whether you are a solo bookkeeper or you have a small team like me, keeping your workflow streamlined is key to reducing stress, improving client experience, and scaling your firm without burnout. So today I'm sharing three actionable ways to manage your work product more efficiently. Let's jump in. Number one, centralize your workflows and your processes. One of the biggest challenges that I see small firms have is keeping track of client work across multiple platforms. Email, Google Drive, sticky notes, you name it. When your work is scattered, it leads to missed deadlines, rework, and unnecessary stress. So here's your action step for today. Choose one central place to manage your client work this could be a project management tool like Clickup Asana or even a well-organized Google Sheet the key is to document all of those recurring tasks, due dates, and client deliverables in one place, so nothing falls through the cracks. Number two, implement a standardized file and naming system. Have you ever spent way too much time searching for a document? Having a clear, standardized way of naming and storing files can save you hours each month, even if you're the only person in your firm. So your action step for today is to create a folder structure that works for you whether it's by client by year or by service type I'll give you a little hint here. We prefer to organize everything into client folders and then have the same structure in every client folder. Across the board and name things in a standardized way. I give you all of this inside of the Bookkeeping Business Accelerator. So if you are working on building your firm, check that out. Go to ambitious bookkeeper.com/bba, and if you're sharing files with clients, use a client portal or a secure Cloud system like Google Drive. Make sure it's the business version to keep everything in one place. Okay. Number three, design your week with focus blocks. If you're juggling multiple clients and life, it's easy to feel like you're constantly switching gears, which does kill your efficiency. Instead of working reactively, batch your work into focus blocks. For instance, today I'm batching podcast episodes slash YouTube videos. So if you've been watching on YouTube, you might notice that all of the videos for the past few weeks, I'm wearing the same clothes. I probably could have changed in between each one, but that kills the efficiency and the momentum that I have. So I'm just gonna keep on rolling. So your action step for today is to dedicate certain days or time blocks to specific tasks like Mondays for client meetings, Tuesdays for reconciliations, and so on. Especially if you batch all of your meetings into certain days. You'll have the other days completely freed up for uninterrupted work, and you can get. So much more done. This helps you really stay in control of your workload and your time and avoid context switching, fatigue, and therefore burnout. So if you want to see exactly how I design my week and manage my schedule to run a firm in 20 hours or less, I give it all away inside of the Bookkeeping Business Accelerator and one of the bonuses walks you through my exact process for planning my weeks so you can stop feeling overwhelmed and start running your firm efficiently as well. Whether it's just you or you have a small team of two to three people, go to ambitious bookkeeper.com/bba to learn more and join today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast. If you found this helpful, share it with a fellow bookkeeper and I'll catch you in the next episode. Stay ambitious.

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