An Interview about Software amid the Pandemic
By Michael Straughan
Featuring David Straughan - Tax Partner at MacGillivray Chartered Professional Accountants & Business Advisors
David manages the tax practice and is responsible for the technology that the firm uses on a daily basis. In a fast-paced environment with several work processes, his team uses both Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Planner to effectively communicate and manage projects. I’ve asked him some questions to gain some insight into his software decisions and implementation process.
With so many different business communication and project management software products, why did you choose Microsoft Teams and Planner for your firm?
The public accounting software space is very fragmented. There’s a single dominant software provider (“CaseWare”) for the preparation of year-end financial statements that has a market share of over 80% in Canada but beyond that there is a relatively large number of other software providers covering tax preparation, workflow, time and billing as well as digital document management. With a myriad of suppliers, it’s a challenge to keep individual applications fully patched against security vulnerabilities, updated to current versions as well as keeping their databases up to date with current client information. As a result, we tend to do everything we can to NOT choose software that requires us to create and maintain additional databases.
To be honest, we originally chose Microsoft Teams 3 years ago simply to handle internal messaging and presence indication for our staff because it was free and because it was fully integrated with the Office 365 suite of products. We were looking to replace an aging internal chat tool that had become glitchy and unreliable. We didn’t realize the full potential of Teams at the time.
Once we started using it, we quickly started to realize the potential of Teams. First, it handled our needs for a solid internal messaging and presence indication solution perfectly. Next, we quickly discovered that Teams would be useful in helping us manage our individual Firm practice areas. Each practice area (Assurance, Tax, and Financial advisory services) has different team members, does an annual practice plan for their group and needs to maintain master documents and coordinate professional development for their group. Teams allowed us to manage all of this. Specifically, it gave us the ability to restrict access to sensitive information to members of each specific team.
The arrival of the COVID19 pandemic forced us to significantly change the way we operate our business on a day-to-day basis:
- We suspended face to face meetings with our clients.
- We closed our office to the public and shifted many staff to nearly full time work from home arrangements.
- We suspended fieldwork at clients.
We turned to Teams to help us manage within this new reality. Fortunately, we’ve been set up to work remotely for many years so the transition to working mostly from home wasn’t as hard as it was for many other accounting firms. We’ve had full remote access via a VPN for over 15 years and fully cloud based for 10 years. Most staff have multi-monitor desktops at home and at the office.
With the suspension of face to face meetings with clients, we needed a solution that would give us the ability to video conference with them that also provided the ability to share screens. Screen sharing was essential to allow us to walk our clients through draft financial statements, reorganization plans etc. We considered Zoom but we ultimately chose Teams once again because of its complete integration with the Office 365 suite of products.
We also needed a solution that would allow us to video conference with our staff. Managers and partners need to be able to manage their teams through regular check-ins, video calls etc.
Teams fit the bill here nicely. We ordered webcams for everyone’s office and home machines and we were on our way. We did have a significant initial challenge with our rollout of Teams video calling. Teams calling was so new to everyone, we had to train both our staff and our clients in its use. We had to learn how to troubleshoot connection issues on the fly without discouraging people from using it.
COVID19 hit our assurance practice the hardest. Audit work came to a virtual standstill with the suspension of fieldwork at client premises. Many of our clients were shut down themselves for the first few months as well which made continuing work on those audits impossible.
As clients began to open up again, we were faced with the urgent need to figure out how to complete audit work remotely that had previously been done at client premises. From May to September we struggled mightily with this as clients learned how to scan and send information to us.
We realized that the future of our assurance practice will depend on our ability to learn how to “distance audit”. We needed to figure out how to manage the flow of information between us and our clients, in ways we never had to before. In particular, our biggest challenge is dealing with the flow information that we used to handle as paper while physically at client’s premises.
We decided to trial the use of Microsoft Teams in this role. Up to this point, membership in our Teams was limited to Firm staff members, with outsiders as guests. We decided to create custom Teams for individual audit engagements with key client staff members as members in addition to our staff. Within the audit engagement team, we trialled the use of both Trello and Planner as Apps within Teams to allow us to manage the audit “projects” timelines, deliverables and information flows. We moved forward with Planner rather than Trello because we found it easier to use.
What are your favourite features of these products? Why?
Our favourite feature is the complete integration of both products with the complete Microsoft 365 suite of products. It is easy to book Teams calls directly from Outlook. Many of our clients have also moved to Teams in the past few months to manage their own businesses remotely which makes it easier for us as they are now already familiar with it and open to its use.
If any, are there any features that you want added to these products? If so, why?
At present, Team admins don’t have the ability to add people outside our organization to a Team. We have to have our outside IT consultants do it for us. Since we’re going to be using a lot more of these teams in the coming months (and it takes a few days for our IT guys to do it for us), it would be a lot more efficient if we could do it ourselves. Interestingly, the documentation and permissions for Teams claims that this feature already exists! It took us several weeks of going back and forth with Microsoft before they admitted that it is not yet functional.
Are there any features you don’t like about these products? If any, why?
We’re not big fans of the way Teams chat retains all chat content. We would prefer it if chat content disappeared after the chat window was closed or if Teams at least had the option of deleting chat content within their Team if they wanted to.
How long have you been using these products?
We started using Teams three years ago. We added Planner to the mix 4 months ago.
How large is your team?
Our teams varies in size throughout the year. Our traditional busy season is from January to April and we typically have approximately 20 staff at this time. We drop down to 16 over the summer (from May to August) and 18 for the period September to December.
When you first implemented this software, did you face any challenges? If any, how did you overcome them?
Teams represented a huge paradigm shift when it first came out. There was nothing else out there like it so no one knew what it was really capable of. This lack of familiarity meant that training was always a challenge. We were always starting from scratch with our staff.
When we adopted it for video conferencing, we were faced with having to teach our clients how to use it in addition to teaching our own staff. We overcame this through intensive training. We taught each of our staff how to solve their own connection and configuration problems and taught them how to do the same for others on calls with them who happen to be having problems. This was key because we absolutely want all our clients’ experiences with Teams to be positive. Teams is here to stay and we need to make sure all our staff and clients are on board with this critical initiative. The need for training is continuous as Teams upgrades seem to regularly delete existing speaker/microphone/webcam configurations.
When did you first notice an increase in productivity after implementing the software?
When we first began using Teams three years ago, we didn’t see a significant increase in productivity. That said, Teams still fulfilled a very valuable role for us. Historically, we keep all of our client work in CaseWare, TaxPrep and in our secure digital document management system (“CCH Document”). We had no natural place to keep the information we use to actually run our Firm. Teams provided a solution to this problem, as I described in question 1 above.
After we implemented our COVID19 protocols, we did see a significant and immediate increase in our productivity, mostly because we were starting from zero. Teams video calling restored our ability to communicate meaningfully with our clients. It gave us the ability to communicate and manage our staff, particularly the junior staff who were working remotely for the first time.
It is too soon to say if the use of Teams and Planner to conduct “distance audits” will ultimately lead to significant increases in our productivity. To date, results have been good; the initiative has been well received by clients, and our staff members have made solid progress in developing their own skills in using it.
We have realized one significant improvement already though. Managing an audit used to be a very time-consuming process. We now see the future and the future for us is Planner or a tool like it since it gives all parties the ability to see the status of the job in real time.