Get featured in the next Karbon eBook

  • 6 September 2021
  • 4 replies
  • 73 views
Jess Marcello
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Userlevel 3

Are you interested in featuring your firm and being quoted in our next Karbon eBook?

In our previous eBooks, we've always made an effort to get input from our community and experts who are leading the way in each topic we explore. And we'd love to do the same for the next one.

We're a couple of weeks away from launching our next eBook: ‘The Process Playbook: Your blueprint for standardizing, optimizing and documenting your accounting firm’s critical processes’

We'd love to hear your insights and feature them in the eBook.

Themes include:

  • Why you think standardizing and documenting procedures is important
  • How you've tackled the process of standardizing and documenting your firm's procedures
  • Why you've taken on the task of standardizing your firm's processes
  • What's worked, what hasn't
  • Anything else you'd like to add about the topic

You can share your insights as a reply to this message, or you can email me directly at jessica@karbonhq.com

Cheers :wave:

👋 Jess Marcello, Content Marketing Specialist at Karbon

4 replies

max
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Userlevel 7
Badge +19

 

  • Why you think standardizing and documenting procedures is important
    • For many years our company has survived through the excellent and specialized work of a small group of long-term employees. There is a vast amount of “Tribal Knowledge” about processes and clients that much of the long-term staff just know from years of working together. As we have started to grow our client-base and staff, we have discovered that all that specialized tribal knowledge takes a long time to transfer to new staff, and when our new staff made mistakes, we couldn’t blame them. We decided that we need to capture our processes in lists and then standardize those processes so they can quickly and easily be transferred to junior staff.
  • How you've tackled the process of standardizing and documenting your firm's procedures
    • Before we joined Karbon, we started capturing our processes in MS Word documents. Unfortunately, these processes were often neglected as people relied on their memory and tribal knowledge to get things done quickly. Once we switched to Karbon, it was natural to take the work we did and transfer them to Karbon work item templates (yay for copy and past as multiple tasks). We continue to adjust and refine the templates as we run into issues. I love how the process of doing and tracking the work is also the process of standardizing the work.
  • Why you've taken on the task of standardizing your firm's processes
    • We discovered that our clients were getting vastly different levels of service depending on who was doing the work. Standardizing the process makes sure that we provide a consistently quality product for all of our clients regardless of who is doing the work.
  • What's worked, what hasn't
    • One issue that we have run into is that there is not an easy way to roll template changes into existing work items without losing the client-specific customization. We are working on a few work-a-rounds like storing an excel sheet with custom client tasks that can quickly be copied and pasted back into a reset work item.
  • Anything else you'd like to add about the topic
respect humans | continually improve
Jess Marcello
Rank
Userlevel 3

Thanks for your insight, Max! Looking forward to featuring it our eBook.

👋 Jess Marcello, Content Marketing Specialist at Karbon
Coral
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Userlevel 5
Badge +5
  • Why you think standardizing and documenting procedures is important
    • With the recent changes and government lockdowns, we’ve found that having a standard process has meant that ALL staff and ALL levels can work together and know the next steps. For those members of staff that are experienced, then they know what needs to happen, but newer team members may not know, by having published workflows has given them the confidence of the next steps that they can take, especially if there are reduced numbers in the office or people working form home.
  • How you've tackled the process of standardizing and documenting your firm's procedures
    • We started documenting and mapping out what actually happens and then created documents that we could refer to. When we started using Karbon, we revisited these to check the process, but also built it out so that we could standarise emails and communications with our customers. This has been invaluable with showing that we work together and our team think and work the same way.
  • Why you've taken on the task of standardizing your firm's processes
    • There is the term what gets monitored gets managed and we noticed that quality varied depending on who was delivering the service, often because a team member didn’t have the confidence or the experience and had to research the requirements. By standardising the process has given our team the confidence and reduced the need to research because the team work in the same way. Plus, having standard emails drafted with sections that need to partially filled as save so much time that we’ve been able to respond quicker too which has lead to delighting the customer.
  • What's worked, what hasn't
    • You can’t be all things to all people! And any system is the same. We had some feedback from clients that client tasks were confusing or they didn’t like clicking through several sections to get to our queries. We found that by doing a video that we could refer our clients to helped and also have set up a contact that is linked to our own emails so we can see what the client sees - by working through this by being the client ourselves we’ve been able to take part in our own customer experience as well.
  • Anything else you'd like to add about the topic
The only constant is change!
Jess Marcello
Rank
Userlevel 3

Thank you for your input, Coral!

👋 Jess Marcello, Content Marketing Specialist at Karbon

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