KAF - Home for the Tax Days

Joe Fabiano, KAF Partner, graced the cover of the November issue of Accounting Technology. Joe was also featured in the cover story "Home for the Tax Days", an article on creating a real work/life balance during what is traditionally a very stressful time of year at most CPA firms.

KAF implemented Project: Balance to give employees a balance between their work lives and personal lives.

At KAF, we realize that a happy staff go the extra mile to give our clients exceptional service.

Mark Albrecht, KAF Partner and CEO of XCM, an intuitive workflow and information automation solution for the accounting profession, is also featured in the article.

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The long days and Saturdays tax preparers normally work during tax season may be less of an annoyance to Joe Fabiano than the rest of the 30 employees at Kirkland, Albrecht & Fredrickson. After all, he’s single.

But urged on by the staff, Fabiano led the movement to improve workflow at the company’s tax practice. Except it wasn’t discussed as a workflow problem and solutions—it was “Project Balance.”

“Project Balance is trying to give employees a balance between their work lives and personal lives. During tax season, the typical CPA works mega hours from January to April 1,” says Fabiano, an audit partner. Obviously, that’s hardly a secret.

What the firm set out to do was cut down the work load. Employees often went home at 8 p.m. Wednesdays were set aside as “Family Night” and they worked few Saturdays, well, few by tax-season standards.

“We didn’t work any Saturdays during tax season, except the two before March 15 and the two before April 15. The only reason we worked those is that was the first time in the process and we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything,” he says.

That’s not your father’s or anybody else’s CPA firm.

The secret was the XCM software the firm implemented last year—software that was developed by the firm and is now being marketed by its affiliated company XCM Services.

XCM starts with scanning documents, an increasingly common practice. But workflow software is not just concerned with providing scanned images—it tracks the process of a tax return, or other documents through the firm.

It is this capability that made Project Balance, and its promise of more dinners with the family, possible. Because the legendary hours of tax season were as much about finding and tracking files as were about preparing and reviewing returns.

“A few years ago, when you came in Saturdays during tax season, you made meeting after meeting to discuss 'What you do during the week? What will you do during the next week?”

Of course, not everybody wants to go home early, or work in the morning. Fabiano says the system also lets people tailor their schedules to their preferences. The result has been good for employees and generally good for business, especially when clients call to ascertain the status of a return.

“You took the phone call and walked around the office asking who had the individual return,” Fabiano says. Now, he can just “hop on to the Web site and find out the status of the engagement.” Not only that, it’s easy to get missing information while the caller is still on the phone.

And XCM can help managers determine how long it takes returns to cycle through the firm, and whether any staff members are bottlenecks.