Abtrac CEO Edward O’Leary gives his thoughts on How to Manage Business Advisors

Someone called into my office to see me the other day. She was quite frustrated. She knew I’d worked for an accounting firm in my past. She’s been a user of Abtrac for a long time. And she was in the neighbourhood. She’d had problems with some of the balances in her accounting system. She went to see her local accountant for help to sort things out.

You’ll be hard put to find a news site today that doesn’t have a bad forecast for the global economy.

Even locally we read that the majority of people in our lovely lands are inexorably falling behind economically. “The decline of the middle classes.” Indeed we probably all know people who are struggling right now, trying to keep up, trying to live within tight financial constraints.

Project Planning and Management

Every growing business gets to a stage where directors and managers get the feeling they’re ever so slightly ‘out of touch’. Things are too busy. It can get worse quite suddenly. Founders aren’t seeing the progress they’d hoped the business would have made across the range of jobs at hand. At the end of each week,  and at month end there is outstanding work that should have been completed.

Obtaining buy-in on expectations of work to be done by your staff is part of the recipe for success.

It’s not Big Brother. It’s plain and simple, good business management. Shying away from discussions on expectations will result in Parkinsons Law prevailing. That benefits nobody.

We’re more than halfway through 2020 and people still are using Excel timesheets!

These are the same people that get excited about driverless cars, being able to order your dinner from your smartphone or even having robots vacuum their house. The companies that give you these products are guaranteed not to record their precious information in something as simple as Excel, and neither should you.

Here are the signs it’s time to replace your Excel timesheets:

In any business, the ability to efficiently collect and analyse data is widely acknowledged as key to its success. But incredibly, the widespread use of spreadsheets for data manipulation and storage is alive and kicking. Reports are delivered with much effort and often collated from data that let’s face it, is old.

I took an enquiry recently from someone. How could they better manage their costs in a firm of 40 staff. She started by saying their team of 10 full time administration and accounts people, “do everything for us”.

Since many of our clients run at ratios of 10:1 or 8:1 billable to non-billable staff I was staggered to hear of a ratio of 3:1. Upon further discussion it became clear.

With the coronavirus pandemic, a policy of home-working will be new for many businesses. Which means a lot of us are dealing with an unusual challenge of, for the first time, working from home, full-time.

Even if you’ve done the odd day here and there in the past, this is different. It’s sudden. And for an undefined period of time where potentially, your whole company is involved.

These 5 tips will help ensure you’re successful both in getting through your workload and maintaining your mental wellbeing.