7 reasons why Asana is ideal for accountants and bookkeepers

Which accountant or bookkeeper doesn’t want to work in a more streamlined way that saves time? And if you run your own accounting or bookkeeping practice, being more efficient is strongly linked to your growth potential. To achieve this, it’s good to embrace today’s technology. In this article we are looking at why Asana is ideal for accountants and bookkeepers and why you should think about implementing it.

Simplicity 

One of the main and most important reasons why Asana is ideal for accountants and bookkeepers is its simplicity. The interface isn’t overwhelming. It’s very intuitive to use and its functions are presented in a neat and logical way. When choosing any software for your accounting or bookkeeping practice, simplicity should be always one of the most important criteria. As an accountant or a bookkeeper, you need to be well organised and quite efficient when performing tasks for your clients.

Apart from regular tasks, you probably receive lots of various emails from your clients resulting in additional ad-hoc requests. You need to be able to easily and quickly add them to your task management software so they never get missed. Tools that are too complicated where you have to spend lots of time organising, rearranging and figuring things out are your biggest enemy. With Asana you can move between the client tasks with ease and in a very efficient way without wasting time unnecessarily.

Automations

Recurring tasks in Asana are one of the best features making this tool ideal for accountants and bookkeepers. Your work is mostly repetitive. Monthly bookkeeping, annual accounts, quarterly VAT returns and so on. You don’t want to be recreating tasks each time. Instead, you need a tool that will help you set up a task once and reuse it on a recurring basis. This will give you confidence that you never miss any deadlines and that all the tasks are performed to the same standard by all of your accountants and bookkeepers.

Subtasks

Putting on your to-do list “Do monthly bookkeeping for a client” is not enough. As a bookkeeper or an accountant of course you know what is involved in bookkeeping, but is every client the same? There will be things that you need to do that are specific only for a particular client. And subtasks are here ideal to break down your work. They also ensure you always remember all the steps. And if a task ever needs to be covered by another accountant or bookkeeper, they will always know what exactly they need to do. This ensures you always deliver the highest-quality service to your accounting and bookkeeping clients. Subtasks also help you keep your to-do list clean and easy to use as subtasks sit inside main tasks and don’t clutter your lists.

Easily shareable with the team

If you have a team of accountants and bookkeepers or even just one additional person that works with you, being able to share tasks with them proves once again that Asana is an ideal tool for accountants and bookkeepers. Instead of sharing notes and tasks via emails or instant messaging, you can just easily share them internally. This way you keep all client work in one place which also improves efficiency. You can also assign tasks to others if a structure in your team changes and you need a different accountant or bookkeeper to take over the ownership of certain tasks.

Due and to-do dates

A nature of accounting and bookkeeping work means that not all tasks can be started and completed straight away. Even a regular bookkeeping task can be spread over more than one session. You may be missing documents from the client, have bank reconciliation queries and this means you need to wait before you can mark a task as fully done. At the same time, you need to make sure you are aware of any deadlines that are dependant on your tasks, for example, management reporting or year-end accounts. Being able to assign both to-do dates and due dates makes Asana ideal for accountants and bookkeepers. It can also help you manage your workload efficiently without feeling overwhelmed.

Colours

First thought Why colours? But lots of us are very visual. Also, visuals can help us quickly notice things and speed up our decision-making process. Asana lets you create projects and tags and assign colours to them. So, when you are looking at your to-do list next time, you can easily spot what tasks you are dealing with and how you want to arrange them to be even more productive. For example, your self-assessment tax returns can have different colours to VAT returns.

Templates and checklists

Templates are real savers. Implementing templates and checklists in your accounting and bookkeeping practice is a way to go and grow your practice. You can have various templates and checklists, for example, a checklist for a corporation tax return, a checklist for a VAT return, a template for asking for a review from a client and so on. Each client is different but certain principles and also accounting standards are the same. You don’t want to be starting from scratch each time you start a task for a client. You want to be quick, efficient and keep high standards.

In Asana you can create templates and checklists to reuse. Next time when you have a self-assessment client, you can simply onboard them by using an existing checklist. These templates and checklists can be used by other accountants and bookkeepers in the team. This again ensures consistency making Asana ideal for accountants and bookkeepers.