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We’ve recently started tracking our business on a weekly scorecard.

Our first draft leading measures:

  • Past due work count for each:
    • Bookkeeping
    • Accounting
    • Tax
  • Unbilled WIP
  • AR over 30 Days
  • New Business Presentations

Our lagging measures

  • YoY Revenue Growth
  • 365-day Revenue/staff
  • Gross Profit %
  • Net Profit %

We have targets for each of these numbers. I’m curious what other firms are tracking. I don’t want to track too much. Smaller groups will eventually have their own scorecards to track details related to their work area.

My premise states that if we are doing these activities (completing work on time, billing work timely, collecting on billed work, and offering proposals for new work), our lag measures will head the right direction, and if they aren’t, there’s a deeper issue we can explore (like pricing, efficiency, etc.).

We are starting to track these types of metrics as well. We recently signed up for KPI and I have added our COG’s/employee and the data from Ignition with our annual fees (we bill a monthly fixed fee to our clients). 

With this information I am looking at our YTD actuals vs the Annual Fee, I am also looking at our Budget to Actuals with COG’s to show our gross profit. We would like to start tracking our sales conversions as well as client satisfaction/net promoter scores to measure client satisfaction. 


Weekly (During tax season) 

Tax season scorecard - top tier clients tax return work items by status and a comparison from the previous week.

 

Monthly 

I prepare an Operations report for the monthly Partners meeting. It consists of the following: 

Billing 

  • Previous month invoiced amount. 
  • Monthly average to invoice to reach annual goal. 

WIP 

  • Open WIP as of specific date – usually the first day after we close out the previous month. 
  • RTB WIP. (Ready to Bill) 
  • Previous month write-down/cancelled WIP. 

Collections 

  • Any outstanding balance issues. 
  • Average transaction the past 30 days, 90 days, 12 months. 

Previous Month Write-up/Write-down 

  • Invoiced WIP vs. Invoiced Amount – resulting in dollar amount and percentage write-up/write-down. (Sorted by Client Owner, Payroll division separated as well) 

Top Gun 

  • Top 30 billed clients trailing 12 months. 

Fixed Price Clients 

  • Current count. 
  • Totals hours spent previous month. 
  • Total WIP accrued previous month. 
  • Total invoiced previous month. 
  • Total write-up/down dollar amount for previous month. 
  • Write up % for previous month. 
  • Average billable rate previous month. 

CRM – Wins & Losses 

  • Prospects – what stage they are at in the pipeline. 
  • New client/new engagement wins. 
  • Exiting clients. 

Colleague Utilization (Previous month)

  • Billable hours. 
  • Non-billable hours. 
  • Total hours. 
  • WIP. 
  • Utilization. (Billable hours / Total hours) 
  • Average Billable rate. 

@Ashley Rhoden, we are not collecting satisfaction information. Until the past couple years, we’ve grown very slowly and our client base has been extremely stable, negating the need for satisfaction metrics. Clients had a personal relationship with the managing partner. That is no longer the case and it’s a hole in our success metrics.

@Joe Leppert this is helpful. Thanks for putting this detail together. I will take some time to digest. I think it’s too much information for where we are at in our journey, but it’s great example against which to compare.


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