4 Ways Pixie Can Help Remote Accounting Teams Save Time & Work Smarter

They say that behind every great man, is a great woman.

Well, behind every great accounting firm, is a great practice management app.

And with everything that’s happening in the world right now, forcing accounting firms to adopt a new remote way of working with both their teams and their clients, the need for a collaborative, cloud-based and time-saving practice management app has never been greater. 

By saving time on practice admin, you gain time to spend with your clients during this time.

If such an app is what you’re looking for, then you’re in the right place.

Here are 4 ways Pixie can help remote accounting teams to save time, work smarter, and communicate more effectively. 

1. Recurring job scheduling and auto-assigning

Planning work can be a pain at the best of times, never mind when you’re suddenly working remotely away from the rest of your team and dealing with urgent enquiries from clients with everything that’s happening.

With Pixie, the burden and pressure of that planning is removed. With our recurring job scheduling feature, jobs can be created for clients and set to recur on a weekly, monthly or annual basis. Whatever you need. Once these have been set up, then you don’t need to worry about finding time to plan. Everything will be done for you as soon as you log into Pixie.

See it in action below for a recurring confirmation statement job!

And if that’s not enough, you can streamline and save time even further by using our auto-assigning feature. 

When setting up the recurring job templates, you have the option to auto-assign the job to a specific person or job title within the firm. 

Then, when the job next occurs, it will automatically appear on that specific person’s to-do list. You don’t have to lift a finger.

2. Complete client records with email history

Imagine the situation…

One of your team members is working on a job for a client. They’ve exchanged a few emails back and forth with the client about some required information. All of a sudden, your team member falls ill and somebody else is left to pick up the job.

In a normal situation (unless you were using a shared mailbox e.g. accounts@johnsaccountants.co.uk) you wouldn’t be able to find out what communication had been sent to the client already. 

With Pixie, this isn’t an issue.

Client records are updated with all outgoing and incoming emails automatically. You can even make sure that the correct emails are attached to the right jobs in just a click!

All you need to do is click on the client record, and from there you can select the emails tab. Or equally you can select the job, and everything you or a team member needs to pick up the job will be right there. 

See it in action below!

3. Generate work reports to support your weekly reviews with the team

When working with a remote team, communication is crucial. 

As well as having daily stand-ups on Zoom or Hangouts (which I’ll be covering in a second), it’s always worth having a 1:1 review with each of your team members to see how they’re getting on, not just with work, but also to assess their happiness levels as well.

In Pixie, generating work reports to see what your team members have been working on is as simple as a click of a button. Literally. 

Check it out below! You even have the option of exporting it as a CSV if you need to. 

4. To-do list as daily plan

One of the things I’d really suggest doing now that you’re working remotely is holding a daily stand-up call with your team. This can be done on Zoom, Teams, Hangouts or similar.

And the agenda is really simple:

• What were you working on yesterday
• What are you working on today
• Do you have any bottlenecks or challenges?

For your team members, getting the info for these meetings is incredibly simple. To figure out what they’re working on today, they just use their to-do list. And to find out what they were working on yesterday, they just run a report on ‘done’ tasks.

See how the to-do list looks below! 

Want to give Pixie a try?

Are you looking for a collaborative, intuitive and time-saving practice management app to help you manage your remote accounting team?

Pixie comes straight out of the box with 2-way email sync, simple task and deadline management, customisable workflow templates, automated client email reminders and much more. 

Try it now for 30 days and let us look after your practice whilst you focus on looking after your clients.