CPA Survey: Building Better Firms & Greater Life Balance*

*Source: CPA Trendlines

Bookkeepers, CPAs and tax preparers are making their New Year’s resolutions with excellent intent, vowing to research and use new tools, technologies, and increased attention to marketing to facilitate a more balanced  business and personal life, and to provide important new service benefits to their clients.

In step with our previous post about ‘chunkified’ cloud accounting, topping the list, three quarters of survey participants are decided that they will “work smarter, not harder” in 2012. beyond that biggie, the CPA trendlines survey parces the top goals and strategies by which accounting professionals intend to make good on the first.

For example, nearly 60% of respondents intend to “leverage new technology to improve operations.”

Sampling of responses –

A local CPA firm in San Juan, Puerto Rico, intends to complete his firm’s transition to cloud computing.

Another CPA, at a small-town practice in Kansas, just west of Joplin, Mo., is resolved to “continue in the quest to be a mean, green, fee collecting machine.”

A small practitioner in Greenville, S.C. has promised himself he’ll “go 100 % paperless and move more of the practice into the clouds.”

A partner in a five-partner Massachusetts firm, is hoping to deploy technologies that will make it easier to close one of the firm’s two offices in the next year or two, “which will make my life easier and hopefully more profitable at same time.”

From Alberta, Canada, the managing partner at a mid-sized firm is executing a four-point plan for 2012 dominated by technology initiatives: “Paperless conversion; update scheduling/workflow process; portal towards end of year; and more internal staff training to improve efficiency and work quality.”

Read full report and take the survey at CPA Trendlines