At our November 2009 HowNow User Groups conducted around Australia, one of the most popular sessions was Managing a Compliance Assignment in a Low or No Paper Environment.
Presented by one of our Client Managers, Jenelle Schultz who is fresh out of working in public practice, the session ran through the on-screen practicalities of completing a compliance assignment, right from initial collecting and collating of client data, through to setting up electronic working papers under the client, through to managing and tracking client queries, to presenting a job for final review, reviewing a job on-screen and completion of the assignment.
Jenelle stepped through a range of tips including a simple Excel tip about how to quickly and easily email a specific worksheet (and not the whole workbook) to a client with client queries documented. (That tip drew ‘Wow’ comments from the audience.)
Due to the popularity of Jenelle’s session, we will be presenting it in a free webinar (online seminar) format on Wednesday 9 December 2009. If you’d like to attend that, you can register for free here, regardless of whether you are a businessfitness client or HowNow user.
Whilst we will be using all of the HowNow Document Management modules during this webinar, the techniques presented could be used in other applications. If you’re a HowNow user, the session will help you more effectively implement the ‘less paper’ approaches in your work, and if you’re not a HowNow user, there will be plenty of take home value regardless. The session will also give some insight into the value our clients receive from the ongoing education we provide clients, not just in using HowNow, but in looking at ‘the big picture’ of how to run a ‘less paper’ accounting firm.
Jenelle will step through a number of techniques which allow you to work with electronic accounting workpapers (i.e. Excel templates) on-screen, as well as other resources in a similar way to how you and your team work with manual paper workpapers. Having worked in both ‘the old paper ways’ and ‘the new paperless ways’, Jenelle can relate to the common challenges firms and individuals face as they move towards a low or no paper environment.
We always keep firmly in the front of our minds that ‘going paperless’ is not an end in itself, but rather improved efficiency and effectiveness are the aims. In this session you’ll see how efficient and automated many of the steps in an assignment can be, when done on-screen instead of on paper.
