The accounting industry is moving away from hourly billing and towards value-pricing or fixed-pricing. There are countless benefits to this movement – the chief being that you get properly rewarded for doing your work faster by becoming more knowledgeable and by increasing efficiency through automation apps.

“If I do a job in 30 minutes it’s because I spent 10 years learning how to do that in 30 minutes. You owe me for the years, not the minutes.”

Thus, the most common question in the app-stack building process is – how can this make me more efficient? I believe that’s the wrong question. Rather, then question needs to be:

How can this app help me be more accurate more efficiently?

Sure, efficiency is important, but it’s pointless if this automation app creates more errors for you, because you’d have to go back and manually fix these errors, eliminating any efficiency you might have gained. Imagine – the automation app automatically pushes computer purchases into Office Supplies than into Capital Assets; or it pushes Unknown Transactions into Uncategorized Assets; or it records refunds as Expenses instead of Negative Sales. In each case, the accountant would have to manually go into the accounting file and reclassify these errors. How annoying! How counter-productive.

In fact, there have been multiple productivity studies that demonstrated that touching the work once is much more efficient than multiple revisions and manual adjustments.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use automation apps. You must! Just don’t forget about quality. In fact, implement an Accounting Quality Automation (AQua) app, such as VERIFYiQ to automate the quality-verification.

Remember, Efficiency doesn’t lead to Quality; Quality leads to Efficiency