‘I work diligently for the entire day. But when the day ends, there’s not even one result that I have achieved.’
If this happens with you as well, you are not alone.
Finance and Accounting professionals are the busiest ones in an office.
You probably are running out of time right now as well.
A report by Kitces says an average financial advisor spends 43 hours a week doing their job. This time is divided into attending meetings with new and old clients, preparing for those meetings, answering client inquiries, and performing client activities.
Financial advisers must spend most of their time trying to get new clients, yet they only meet with potential clients for 4 hours each week.
This study indicates that financial professionals are having difficulty managing their time.
When it comes to how you spend your time as a financial and accounting expert, several things come into play.
However, there are hacks to help you better manage your time and produce outcomes at the end of each day.
Do you want to know what hacks can help you become more efficient and productive?
I asked my colleagues and friends working as financial professionals how they remain productive and focus more on important stuff.
And here are some of the best hacks that can help you get more done in less time.
It’s been studied that once distracted, it takes 23 minutes and 15 minutes for professionals to get back on track. This means if you keep getting sidetracked, there is no way you’ll make any progress in your work.
An accounting professional’s job is complex; a simple mistake may lead to huge losses to the company.
With being on track with your work, you can do more with accuracy and attention. While focusing on multiple tasks at once can reduce your productivity by as much as 40%.
It is time to control your productivity-killing activities and keep your priorities straight while focusing on a single task.
One distraction that sidetracks professionals is unscheduled meetings that come out of nowhere.
Because of the growing remote working culture these days, there are just too many meetings being organized.
We all know not every meeting has an agenda worth your while and many meetings end up being time wasters.
In an hour-long meeting, roughly 15% of the time is wasted, which accounts for 9 minutes every hour.
There are over 36 to 56 million meetings organized every day. And the ineffective ones among these cost the US around $70 to $283 billion.
Now, the time lost in unproductive meetings seems significant, right?
The wise choice is to join only action-oriented meetings and schedule meetings in advance.
With Clustdoc as your client onboarding platform, you can schedule in-advance meetings with your clients and teams.
There must be one goal of your meetings– achieve your target ROI. It is absolutely essential to communicate the agenda in advance so that your meeting ends with a result in hand.
Over 67% of workers feel they spend too much time on meetings and calls which hinders them from doing their best work, according to a Korn Ferry survey.
Respondents also said they waste 2-5 hours per week on meetings that bring no result.
It’s time to say ‘No’ to meetings that will bear no fruit and will end up only being on the list of another pointless meeting attended this week.
It is necessary to have a goal in mind for your next meeting and avoid wasting your time over useless meeting hours.
One hack to stop wasting time on recurring business activities is to automate them.
A financial professional office hour is, most of the time, full of hard work and consequently, time-consuming. There are just so many documents to collect and meetings to attend.
All the things that you do day in and day out can take hours of working schedule.
The best solution is to automate redundant tasks like onboarding, document collection, scheduling meetings, etc., and make time for things you are passionate about.
Clustdoc is the best tool to automate your business processes and make the most of your working day.
With Clustdoc, you can fully automate your onboarding, service registration, and documentation process. The tool makes the documentation process and managing online submissions more efficient and seamless than manually processing them.
If you are looking to automate your business workflows, look no further. Clustdoc lets you automate your processes without any in-depth technical knowledge.
Don’t waste your time printing and scanning documents any longer, go paperless and switch to Clustdoc.
Do yourself and your co-workers a courtesy and keep your workplace free of clutter.
We all know the negative environmental impact of being dependent on paper. The modern workplace must be sustainable, making paperless offices a reality.
An average employee spends 30-40% of their time looking for documents in filing cabinets.
It is a big timewaster.
After going paperless, you will no longer have to worry about losing and finding documents. And the right tool to make your office paperless is Clustdoc.
Clustdoc client portal collects client information such as online forms, application IDs, onboarding details, etc., with just a few clicks.
Clustdoc can help you avoid all the hassles of going paperless and seamlessly transition into a modern financial professional.
It’s common for accounting and financial professionals to have multiple projects running at the same time. Having to work on different projects simultaneously slows down progress in all the important activities.
You’ll have to identify your priorities and take only projects you can focus solely on and provide value. Rather than spreading over many projects and making no contribution to any, take limited projects and put your best efforts into completing them.
With the experience that you have in managing the finance and accounts of your company, you may feel like you can do everything on your own. You have to trust your team and delegate tasks to them.
By delegating tasks, you can get more done in a short amount of time. The best way is to put low-priority tasks aside and delegate or outsource them to spend more time on things that have a high value.
With Clustdoc, you can assign tasks, check application status, and collect work documents on the same platform.
Modern tools are making daily jobs less complicated, so learn to make technology your friend.
Technology is a huge time saver. Whether it be learning Google or Excel shortcuts or storing information on the cloud, working becomes easier and a fun task.
Making Excel your partner, you can save time from repetitive tasks. And who doesn’t love showing off an excel trick at work?
It’s time to store client information and documents on the cloud. It will save a lot of time you waste finding old documents in your file cabinet.
And as said earlier, automate as many tasks as you can with Clustdoc to effectively manage your time.
It’s time to manage your emails and avoid email clutter from being a disturbance at work.
Over 23% of work distractions are from emails. If you rely heavily on email, you can end up wasting a lot of time reading, reviewing, deleting, or writing emails.
To avoid getting overwhelmed by emails, keep your inbox list checked and delete emails you will not need in the future.
One thing you should do with your emails is check them when you are free. It gives you enough time to manage your email, delete unnecessary emails, give short replies, or take follow-ups.
As an accountant, you don’t have much to handle at work on social media. It is better to stay off social media during your working hours.
In a research by Pew Research Center in 2016, 67% of employees admitted to checking social media while working. Wasting your time over social media at work is a big time-waster, and it’s completely your responsibility to avoid it to stay productive.
You are not going to handle social media for your company, so do what you are best at and focus on business activities.
Now, that you have followed all the hacks, there’s only one thing left to do and that takes adequate rest.
To overcome work fatigue, take your time to rejuvenate, stay hydrated and take a break when you feel you need one.
Enough said, let Clustdoc automate your onboarding and client documentation process so that you can take your time off while your business keeps rolling.
Clustdoc is a client onboarding orchestration platform used by modern teams around the world. With Clustdoc, you can run automated workflows for requesting, reviewing and verifying new customers’ data, documents and contracts – without juggling between tools.
If your team is managing new customers using emails, spreadsheets and PDFs, you’ll probably love using Clustdoc.
