If you’re planning to grow your accounting practice, the workpaper tool your team uses is worth careful thought. In our view, it’s one of the biggest factors in whether your investment in new clients and staff turns into profit. Compliance work is where most firms make their strongest margins, so the right tool pays off quickly. The wrong one can turn that same investment into chaos for your firm and frustration for your team.

This article is for medium-sized Australian practices weighing up cloud workpaper software. It covers how growth affects the way your firm operates, the risks of staying with the wrong setup, and what to look for in a tool that can grow with you.

What growth looks like in an accounting practice

‘Growing an accounting practice’ can mean a lot of things. However, we see growth as purposefully reinvesting in your firm in order to sustainably build your client base and profits. Getting there usually means changes across several parts of the business at once:

• New team members at every level, from graduates to managers to new partners. With remote work now common, they may be spread across the country or overseas.
• More spent on marketing, networking and business development to keep new work coming in.
• Reviewing processes and your tech stack, to check that the systems you’ve invested in will continue to support your expansion.
• A review of fees as your firm’s reputation and service offering mature.

Growing your firm is an exciting opportunity, but it also changes how things run day to day. There’s more compliance work coming through each year and more people doing it.

The risks of workpapers that weren’t built to scale

Many firms run on in-house workpapers refined over many years. They work, the team knows them, and there’s real value in that. However, the pressure shows once your firm starts adding people and clients faster than the system was designed for.

• New clients inherit old inefficiencies. If your team is creating folders and setting up workpapers by hand, copying and pasting data into spreadsheets or working in clunky files, all of that repeats with every new client. Whatever frustrates your team today will happen again at a larger scale.
• New starters take longer to become productive. In-house tools rely on someone senior explaining how things work. That’s manageable with one new graduate. It’s much harder with five, spread across different offices, starting at different times.
• Someone has to maintain the training. Internal guides, templates and how-to documents all need updating whenever the workpapers change. That work usually falls to a manager or partner who already has a full client load.
• It’s unclear who to ask for help. When a tool was built internally, support is whoever built it. For a remote team, that person quickly becomes a bottleneck.
• Firm standards slip as the team grows. In a small firm, one person can see how workpapers are being prepared across the practice and keep everyone on the same process. As your firm grows, that oversight gets much harder. Every workpaper is still reviewed, but this is the stage where teams start building their own ways of doing things. Our article on why workpapers should be consistent across every team in your firm covers this in more detail.

What to look for in cloud workpaper software for a growing practice

If any of those risks sound familiar, it’s worth looking at what workpaper software is out there. Most workpaper software is now cloud-based, and our article on tips for evaluating a workpaper tool gives you a framework for comparing features. For a growing firm, though, the provider behind the software matters just as much as the features. You’ll be working with them for years, so look for one that:

• Is established and secure, with a track record you can check.
• Integrates with your ledger and practice management apps, so client data flows in without re-keying.
• Knows the industry, and understands how accounting firms actually operate.
• Covers support, training and best practice resources, so your team isn’t left to work things out alone.
• Is someone you can build a working relationship with as your firm changes.
• Builds its software around values that match yours.

That last point is easy to overlook. A provider’s values shape every product decision it makes. If it prioritises standardisation, a modern user experience and rethinking how workpapers should work, rather than recreating spreadsheets online, its software will keep moving in the direction your firm needs as it grows.

How Cimplico Workpapers supports growing firms

We’ve spent around ten years building software for Australian accounting firms. Cimplico Workpapers was built from the ground up as a web-based platform, designed around how workpapers should work as a firm grows, and it connects with the tools Australian practices already use, including Xero, FYI and Atosa.

Bringing new clients on. Bulk onboarding lets you authorise your connected ledgers and import clients from tools like FYI in one go, rather than setting each one up by hand.

Firm-wide templates. You set the steps, checks and schedules for each type of job once, and every job across your firm follows them. You can be confident your firm’s standards are met in every file, whichever office or team member prepared it.

Review you can rely on. Review conditions make sure the necessary work is done before a job gets to you. A clear audit history shows what’s been done and by whom, and connected files keep the supporting evidence alongside the work it relates to.

Learning pathways for new staff. Structured courses tailored to each role, plus on-demand resources, mean a new graduate or manager can get up to speed without relying on a senior team member’s time.

Oversight in one place. All of your firm’s workpapers sit together, with dashboards that show where every job is up to.

A relationship that grows with you. You’ll go through structured onboarding with our team, get access to best practice content, and stay in contact with us as your firm changes.

Multi-office firms like Carey Group use Cimplico Workpapers to keep their work consistent as they grow. You can read their story here.

If your firm is growing and you’re evaluating workpaper tools, we’d be glad to show you how Cimplico Workpapers would fit the way you work. You can book a demo here.

Frequently asked questions

Can in-house workpapers scale with a growing firm?

They can for a while, but each new client and staff member adds manual setup, training and maintenance. The cost tends to land on partners and managers, who end up supporting the system as well as doing client work.

Does Cimplico Workpapers work with multi-office firms?

Yes. Firm-wide templates, centralised data and oversight dashboards keep work consistent across offices and remote team members. Carey Group is one multi-office firm using Cimplico Workpapers as it grows.