Author: Amit Birk, CEO of Connected 360 Inc.

I was invited to an Accounting firm to discuss their current technology. I had only been there for a short period of time and started noticing the overwhelming amount of email notifications they were all getting. I made a comment during the meeting, “you all receive a lot of emails” as their phones were getting continuous notifications. I could feel how annoyed everyone was with all the constant notifications.

I paused the current conversation and asked; if they could wave a magic wand and immediately solve a technology problem that’s driving them crazy, what would it be? The Managing Partner replied and said the number of emails we get are insane and it’s impossible to keep up with.
I dug a bit more with some probing questions and found that the (expensive) Senior Staff Accountants who review the client documents, send majority of their documents internally via email all day long causing a ton of wasted time troubleshooting versioning issues and tracking where the latest version was.

The Firm’s Managing Partner was really frustrated, seeing all that wasted of time and inefficiency. He’s a smart guy and knew there was a better way, but they just didn’t have the time or skills to figure it out. He was busy charging $350 per hour for his services.
They already had the technology to make this process more efficient, faster and less prone to errors, they just needed to start using it. I wrote out some high-level numbers on the back of some scrap paper just to highlight the raw costs associated with this seemingly insignificant problem.

They have 5 Senior Staff Accountants, who report spending greater than 12 minutes a day searching for files in their emails. Ten minutes a day multiplied by those 5 Senior Staff Accountants sums up to 60 minutes a day and in a 5-day week, that’s a total of 300 minutes. That equates to 1200 minutes per month, which translates to 20 hours of wasted time a month, just from this one problem.

Now, let’s say that the billable rate of the Senior Staff Accountant is $175. Therefore, the 20 hours of wasted time at a billable rate of $175 per hour equals $3500 per month! That’s an outstanding $42,000 a year!

So, what did we do to save them from this financial chaos? We set up and trained the staff to use applications such as SharePoint and Microsoft Teams to facilitate and foster team collaboration and reduce email chatter. In addition to improving efficiency, we helped solve a problem that has a potential cost of $42,000 , proving how much value IT solutions can add to any business.