Art of Accounting: The changes for 2025 that 2024 brought

Right now many people are making resolutions of what they hope to accomplish in the forthcoming year. I think a better use of their efforts would be to evaluate their accomplishments this year and see how they could build on them. Here are five areas you should have grown in during 2024 that can be built on. If you haven’t grown in any of these areas, then use this as a roadmap for what you can do in the new year.

1. Technology adoption: The growth of the use and adoption of the newest technology and digital security is occurring at an extremely rapid pace. Each day of delay will set you further behind and make it harder to catch up. If you haven’t made a meaningful leap, then you should use 2025 to do so. This is real stuff! Be realistic and ask yourself if you’ve done and are doing as much as you could with technology adoption.

2. Staffing: Training and retention have been identified in a recent survey posted in Accounting Today as the most critical issue confronting medium and large practices. I do not understand why small practices don’t agree with this. Before we merged with Withum, my partners and I felt the single area that held back our growth the most was the dearth of qualified staff, but we did something about it. We pretty much started only hiring recent graduates and invested heavily in training them, and it worked wonders for us. Our investment paid off with our staff growing, staying with us longer than they might have otherwise and our having a stable staff successfully following our systems. We quantified our investment, and the dividends were abundant and consistent. Ignoring this important area dooms your practice to mediocracy and stagnation. Think about your growth with your staff in the last year, and if less than excellent, then do something about it. While I have been with Withum 20 years now, I speak to many practitioners regularly and the biggest concern they have is staffing. And yet, I see many doing little that’s different. Get going with this.

3. Workload compression: It is part of public accounting and also private accounting with its year-end closings. It cannot be helped, but it can be managed. One way is to shift work that could be done before your tax or busy season gets hot and heavy to the earlier slower period. Another way is to embrace smart scanner and practice management software more fully. Other ways are to hire temporary staff and develop quick methods to train them with most of the tax return preparation processes and to make better use of the admin staff to relieve the preparation staff from detailed oriented administrative steps. A final way is to do the unthinkable and get out of the tax preparation business. Be realistic about how well you managed your workload this past year. If not as well as you think it should have been, then get started now with some tax preparation projects you can do now rather than the end of March.

4. Keeping current: There is a continuous flow of tax law changes, and A&A changes are also quite voluminous. The only way to keep current is to spend some time every day reviewing the changes. Putting it off, even for a couple of days, will create a massive project to face. If there are too many changes to keep up with, then you might also be spreading yourself too thin. If you are a solo, consider limiting what you do or developing an expertise in niche areas that should make you better able to stay current by limiting the areas of the inflow of changes. If you practice in a partnership, let each partner take over an area of expertise that they are expected to stay current in, and share your information with regular update breakfasts or lunches. If you want to be a professional, you need to be a professional, and that takes effort. Look at how you fared last year grappling with the changes. If you’re not happy, then don’t catch up. Just start keeping current from today onward.

5. Managing your time better: We all have the same amount of time, but some use it more wisely than others. An easy way to manage your time better is to not take on projects or responsibilities that have unrealistic deadlines, are beyond your area of expertise, that you are not compensated for or that are beneath your level of specialization. Delegating better solves a lot of “not enough time” problems. Delegating also means managing staff better and not subjecting yourself to have work pushed upward to you from staff. Make them do their jobs. Errors dissipate time and energy. Start a war on staff errors with a zero-tolerance program. Initially this will require an investment of time, but if done right it will create huge dividends in reduced demands on your time. Spend some time really reviewing the demands made on your time in the past year. Identify the biggest time wasters and biggest projects you worked on and decide how you could have avoided that much time, and then do something about it starting with any new demands on your time. 

These are daunting and there are other areas not mentioned here. However, if you pick one or a part of one of these five and get started, you will be that much ahead when you do your retrospective at the end of the upcoming year. If you are part of a partnership, decide which are the most critical for your practice and have each partner commit to one project.

You and the managing partner, if multiple owners, should have each owner or partner prepare a broad outline of their 2024 accomplishments and use that to set goals for 2025 with benchmarks during the year and a method to monitor the progress. 

I wish you success and good health and happiness in the New Year.  

Do not hesitate to contact me at emendlowitz@withum.com with your practice management questions or about engagements you might not be able to perform.