Contents of CPA Practice Advisor - MAR 2012

Today's Technology for Tomorrow's Firm.

Page 9 of 38

An excerpt from the Fall 2011 issue of CCH Partners
Double-Digit Growth
An innovative "dashboard" helps clients — and a California firm itself — monitor performance in near real time.
Tese days, even in the most volatile of market conditions, Andy Armanino can flip open his laptop and with a few keystrokes quickly see where the firm stands — that day — in terms of charge hours, realization, billing and collection, profitability by service line and other key performance indicators (KPIs). "Previously, those KPIs were difficult to get
at, requiring a lot of heavy lifting by our IT team," he says. "We might do it in advance of a partner meeting, but the rest of the time we would wonder about it. You might see people with their heads down and figure you're doing OK. But that's not the way we want to run our business." Adds Matt Armanino: "We want to be
the go-to resource for the CFO group — on their speed dial — not just on finance issues but with business process or people issues that will help them grow their businesses."
UNDERSTANDING CLIENT NEEDS Tat holistic approach underpins year after year of double-digit growth and development of a robust consulting practice that now contributes about one-third of the firm's annual revenue. "We don't want to be a product provider, selling audits or tax returns," he says. "We want to understand what
the client needs, where they want to be in the future, and how to help them get there." Te firm kicked off a project
internally to develop a custom business intelligence (BI) solution tailored to the firm's needs. Using a web- based platform called QlikView, the firm created a second-generation BI product that works with ProSystem fx® Practice Management and provides
x
an easy-to-use graphical interface that partners of the firm can use to review firm-wide metrics or to drill down to get specific performance data on individual clients, engagements, offices or staff.
NAVIGATING A PATH TO SUCCESS "One of our core values is continuous improvement, and this tool supports that effectively," Matt explains. For example, top-level numbers for the valuation practice might be on track, but drill down and you discover charge hours for two people are way off. You investigate and find one person on vacation and the other in need of guidance. "Tat might have been masked before because the high-level results looked OK," Matt says. "Now we can see areas where you can drive continuous improvement."