Making Better Use of Your Senior Accountants and Their Valuable Time
Experienced accountants are among the most valuable people in any accountancy practice or finance department. Yet many spend a surprising amount of time on routine tasks that could be handled by less experienced colleagues. From bookkeeping and reconciliations to chasing paperwork, making better use of senior accountants’ time can improve productivity, create development opportunities and help businesses grow without placing additional pressure on their most experienced employees.
When experience meets the petty cash tin
You’ve spent years developing your accounting knowledge, passed more exams than you care to remember and built up a portfolio of valuable clients.
And here you are, on a Tuesday afternoon, trying to work out why someone’s petty cash is £17.42 short.
Sound familiar?
Of course, every accountancy practice has routine work that needs doing.
Bookkeeping, reconciliations, processing invoices and keeping records up to date are all essential.
But there’s a difference between making sure these tasks are completed properly and having your most experienced accountants doing everything themselves.
The question is whether you’re making the best use of the skills you’re already paying for.
The hidden cost of doing everything yourself
It’s tempting to think that if an experienced accountant can complete a task in ten minutes, there’s little point asking someone less experienced to do it in twenty.
And in the short term, that might be true.
But multiply those ten-minute tasks across a working week, then across an entire team, and the picture starts to change.
That’s time that could be spent advising clients, reviewing more complex work, developing business relationships or identifying opportunities to improve services.
There’s also another consideration.
When experienced employees are constantly occupied with routine tasks, junior colleagues miss opportunities to learn.
So you potentially have two problems: senior staff aren’t being used to their full potential, and less experienced employees aren’t developing as quickly as they could.
Delegation isn’t about passing the problem along
Before anyone starts handing over their entire workload to the newest member of the team, there’s an important distinction to make.
Delegation isn’t simply giving somebody a task because you don’t want to do it.
It’s about matching responsibilities to someone’s ability, providing appropriate guidance and gradually increasing their independence.
A junior accountant might begin by processing straightforward transactions, preparing basic reconciliations or organising information for more experienced colleagues.
With training and supervision, they can develop the confidence and competence to take on more demanding work.
And as their capabilities grow, senior staff can spend less time on routine processing and more time on the work that genuinely requires their experience.
It won’t happen overnight.
But that’s rather the point of developing people.
Could an apprentice help create that capacity?
For practices and finance departments looking to make better use of their existing teams, an accountancy apprentice could be part of the answer.
An apprentice isn’t simply an extra pair of hands. They’re someone you can develop around the needs of your business, building their technical knowledge alongside practical workplace experience.
At Accountancy Learning, our accountancy apprenticeship programmes support learners at different stages of their development, from those taking their first steps into accountancy to employees progressing towards more advanced responsibilities.
The important thing is to have a plan.
What tasks could someone reasonably take on during their first few months? What might they be capable of after a year? And which responsibilities could eventually move away from your senior team?
It’s also worth remembering that apprentices need proper supervision and protected time for training.
The Government’s guidance on employing an apprentice explains employers’ responsibilities, including providing workplace experience and allowing time for off-the-job training.
So yes, developing an apprentice requires an investment of time.
But that investment can help create capacity in the longer term.
Start by looking at where the time goes
You don’t necessarily need to recruit somebody tomorrow to start addressing the problem.
A useful first step might be asking your senior accountants to look at how they’re spending their working week.
Which tasks genuinely require their qualifications and experience?
Which could be delegated with appropriate training?
And are there activities that have simply remained with the same person because they’ve always done them?
You might be surprised by the answers.
Sometimes the biggest obstacle to delegation isn’t a lack of capable people. It’s finding the time to show somebody else how to do the job.
Which, admittedly, brings us back to that familiar problem of being too busy to make ourselves less busy.
Making better use of the team you’ve got
Good accountancy practices need experienced professionals. They also need people who are learning, developing and preparing to become those experienced professionals in the future.
Getting the balance right can make a real difference to productivity, staff development and the long-term strength of your business.
At Accountancy Learning, we work with employers to help them recruit, train and develop people who can make a meaningful contribution to their teams.
If you’re wondering whether your senior accountants could be spending their time more effectively, perhaps it’s worth having a conversation about how your team might develop.
Let’s explore the possibilities. Give us a call on 01392 435349 or email [email protected].
After all, your most experienced accountant probably has better things to do than investigate that missing £17.42.
