Where five hours a week actually hide in a CPA firm.
Every firm says the same thing: “We're busy, but I couldn't tell you exactly where the week goes.” I can.
It goes to the same five places, in almost every firm, almost every week. None of them are billable. All of them feel like work.
1. Chasing documents
A client owes you eleven documents. Nine arrive. Now someone in your office, often a partner, spends part of every day writing polite versions of the same sentence: “Just following up on the two items below.” Multiply that sentence by every open engagement, and document chasing alone is hours a week of your most expensive people doing your least expensive work.
2. The inbox
Every client email gets a handwritten reply, usually from the person whose hourly rate is highest. Most of those replies are variations on twenty situations: the status question, the “quick question” that isn't, the document received, the meeting requested. The judgment in your answers is worth everything. The typing of your answers is worth nothing, and the typing is most of the time.
3. Meeting notes and follow-ups
Thirty minutes with a client produces another fifteen to twenty minutes nobody accounts for: writing up what was said, what was promised, and who owes what, then turning that into emails and tasks. Skip it and things fall through cracks. Do it and the day quietly shrinks.
4. Intake and onboarding
Every new client answers the same questions. Someone retypes those answers into your systems, checks what's missing, and asks for it. It's the same choreography every time, performed by hand, as if for the first time.
5. “Just checking in”
Status updates to clients who haven't asked yet, so they won't call. Necessary, unbillable, endless.
The arithmetic
Be conservative. Call it one hour a day across all five. That's five hours a week. Six full workweeks a year, spent by people whose hours have a number attached, on work that has none.
Here's what I'm not going to do: list AI tools. Lists of tools are how software gets sold, and I don't sell software. Which five hours your firm is losing, and which tools give them back at what cost and setup time, is a diagnosis, and diagnosis comes before prescription. That's the whole idea of the practice.
The diagnosis takes 30 minutes of questions and costs $999, once, with a simple guarantee: if we can't find five hours a week in writing, you don't pay.