Why being proactive helps tackle accounting challenges

Accounting tasks within your firm can be withdrawn and mundane, but taking a proactive approach allows you to build a picture of your firm’s finances and spot opportunities.

With so many intricate financial details to handle, your measures need to be efficient and effective to ensure your firm is meeting its compliance obligations.

Because you have the difficult challenges of handling client funds and managing your firm’s own costs, it’s important that you have practices that allow you to focus on your legal work.

What accounting measures should I introduce?

There are different measures you can put in place, including keeping your firm’s business bank account and client funds separate.

Different bank accounts for different aspects of the business help with reporting measures and safeguard both sets of funds.

This allows you to manage both as separate entities and not cause any confusion when calculating your firm’s finances.

It also helps your firm maintain clear financial records and helps when needing to meet the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s (SRA) compliance regulations.

Another proactive step to accounting should be monitoring any updates from SRA and looking at how you can incorporate those into your processes.

As you have compliance obligations to meet, you may need to train your team and you need to know what has changed so that you don’t face any sanctions.

In addition to this, having an effective budget and finance plan in place allows you to manage incomings, expenditures, revenue and profits.

Budgeting allows you to prepare in the event that the Government or SRA introduces new regulations and having a financial plan alongside this lets you analyse the overall costs and functionality of your firm.

Coinciding with budgeting and financial plans, you should proactively be completing regular financial reviews.

This allows you to analyse your finances, compare the differences and spot opportunities to grow your firm, especially if your revenue and profits have increased.

Why should my approach to accounting be proactive?

You should be proactive because your finances can change very quickly, but it also gives you the opportunity to explore your growth plans.

Being proactive allows you to take charge and complete accounting tasks at a consistent and effective pace while operating within the regulatory guidelines.

Because you are being proactive, you can look at growing your firm, whether that is introducing new services, hiring more solicitors to handle more cases or creating another branch of your firm.

How can I start to take a proactive approach to accounting tasks?

If you need any support with your firm’s accounting and want to take a proactive approach, our specialised team of accountants is here to help.

We can help you start to put measures in place so you can understand your firm’s finances and implement procedures in your firm that you and your team can follow.

For support with your accounting, speak with our team to see how we can help.