CPA firms often have difficulty tracking the progress of tax returns as the paperwork makes it way through their internal work flow. In most cases, a client will drop off a return, and various accountants will perform the work depending on the nature of the return and an individual’s preparers availability. Typically, this involves a lot manual procedures, which in turn leave managers with little ability to assess efficiencies, or to identify where bottle necks are occurring. Oftentimes, when a client calls to inquire the status of a return, there is no way to quickly determine how far along in the process it is; employees have to manually track down files or ask around to find out who is currently working on it.
can help alleviate these problems. By using out of the box workflows to map business process, can be configured so that each step in the process for completing tax returns can be tracked. This gives the ability to time stamp documents as they are received, and track the personnel who are working on the returns. As each step in the tax return process is completed, the next step can be automatically generated. This allows easy management views to track productivity, and quick visibility to see what stage a particular return is in should a question arise. Staff personnel can focus on more critical tasks, data on who prepared the returns can be saved for historical and reporting purposes and to create client reminder letters for the next year.
While not a traditional use for customer relationships management, Microsoft CRM can easily be configured to give CPA firms an easy and intuitive way to improve their workflows. To learn more about this and other creative uses for Microsoft CRM, download 24 Wildly Creative Uses for Microsoft CRM.
By Intellitec Solutions,
