Managing partner of Wendroff & Associates, CPA Brian Wendroff joins me to discuss how we can improve workflow efficiency through automation, different workflow efficiency tools that bring systems together, and how his accounting team responded to new automation technologies.
Following four years of Military service, including a tour at the Pentagon for the Secretary of Defense’s Office, and work experience as a staff accountant at the International Accounting Standards Board in London, England and local CPA firm, Brian founded Wendroff & Associates, CPA in 2006.
He quickly established himself as an Entrepreneur’s CPA and an expert in technologically advanced accounting systems, being one of the first firms nationwide to offer complete online accounting solutions.
Since its founding, Wendroff & Associates has grown in size each year and Brian has continued to upgrade the firm’s business advisory services to include outsourced CFO services, budgeting and forecasting and high-level tax planning models, and free accounting and tax strategies on its social media.
As Brian is fond of saying, a CPA firm needs to think of its clients throughout the year, not just at tax time. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Accounting Automation:
- Thinking of automation in terms of the process behind it.
- How automation can improve workflow efficiency.
- Workflow efficiency tools that can bring systems together.
- How to learn about new technologies that improve workflow.
- How difficult it is to learn how to use automation technology.
- The impact automation can have on tax season.
- How accounting teams respond to new automation technologies.
Resources:
Connecting with Brian Wendroff:
Connecting with the host:
- Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
Quotables:
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- 8:42 – “For any business owner sometimes when you see something it’s something that you could use but you’re not ready at the moment to use it, and for us, we saw Zapier maybe 2 years ago, we saw it and we kind of just shelved it, we put it on the shelf. Then it was only about almost a little less than a year ago that we looked at it and go hold up we have some time left can we create this small automation step, a small step and it worked. It was really me and when I saw it work I was like this is beautiful, this automation is beautiful, it might have been just putting something on a Google sheet and it automatically sends this information to an email, and then it lets me know through Slack. But when I saw how easy it was to do that and how I thought about what it can do, the potential of it, I was bought in.”
- 11:13 – “When I started using it when I actually put the time into it, it took me maybe an hour or 2 to then create that special automation and that’s when that opened up my mind to ok I can use this product to be able to create more complex automations but at the same time I also realized as a professional that we can only get to a certain limit with it but this potential process of automation can be limitless and that was cool.”
- 15:27 – “That’s the thing I think automation has done is that it’s created different ways for us to see results of how we get our work done and that’s cool, it’s like we’ve become scientists of creating something like this, we’ve become people who complete a project, these are very rewarding things and I think the results can be defined in many ways.”