You are not a Post Office

Have you sorted out your Debtor issue yet, like we touched on last week? This week our topic is predominantly for the accounting industry, however it’s totally applicable to any service based company that receives mail on behalf of their clients.

6. YOU ARE NOT A POST OFFICE

You are not a Post Office…so why are you acting like a mail sorting and clearing house?

On an average client base of 1500 clients, you will receive approximately 10,000 pieces of mail if not more, from the ATO per annum. The majority of this correspondence then gets actioned in some way internally and then forwarded onto the client, via post. 

The average time to receive correspondence once sent these days, is approximately 5 days. That’s 5 days from the ATO to you the accountant. There’s another 1-2 days to process this internally. Then another 5 days for the correspondence to get from you the accountant to your client. That’s approximately 12 business days for important ATO related correspondence to do the rounds and get to your client. 

​Let’s add up the cost. After you have received and processed this correspondence, you have the cost of your admin teams time to open, sort, scan, and save this to the client in your document management system. It needs to be reviewed by the accountant, have a letter drafted by admin, then signed by a partner, folded and enveloped, file noted against the client to mark as sent, collected/dropped of at the post office and then charged for postage at approximately $1 per letter. Have you added in the cost of printing and stationery here also? …..and this is just for general correspondence.

The cost of sending documents out for signing instead of for electronic signature can be upwards of $2 per item if not more likely around the $4 per item mark these days.

Your simple solution is to use the ATO portal on a daily basis and download, action and then email out the relevant documents to your clients.

You have instantly turned into a pro-active accountant. Not only that, you have reduced the turnaround time for the client receiving the information by at least 10 days, you have reduced the postage and stationery costs and you have reduced the man hours required to process the mail.

​You are now back to being an efficient accountant…and no longer a post office.

In the next blog, we’re going to talk about, how you can’t be half pregnant....want to know more? Get in touch for a chat!