Productivity hacks for accountants

This is the first of what may become a series of posts about productivity.

There are countless podcasts, articles, and blogs about productivity. I’m a listener/reader of some and I don’t think I have ever come across one specifically made or written with accountants in mind. 

Allow me to step into that gap with (my first) three tips that I think can be adopted by accountants regardless of the technology they are given to use by their organisation.

Use keyboard shortcuts

Navigating documents and spreadsheets is quicker using the arrow keys than using a mouse or trackpad. There are shortcuts for most of the popular actions such as copy (Cmd/Ctrl + C), paste (Cmd/Ctrl + V), save (Cmd/Ctrl + S), and open (Cmd/Ctrl + O). In Word the space bar combined with arrow keys highlights text faster than you can drag a mouse

You can see the shortcuts next to the items in the menus in apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You could also do a web search for lists of shortcuts 

Don’t try to learn every shortcut in one go; instead, learn one or two and when they become second nature learn another couple.

Use text expansion

There must be some phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs that you use over and again. This could be contact info like your email address and phone number. It could be a standard reply to email requests. Whenever you notice you are writing something you have written before, or you find yourself looking for a previous document to copy the text for re-use, there is a candidate for text expansion.

Text expansion is a service where you link a short trigger phrase to a longer one so that when you type the trigger phrase it is replaced by the longer phrase. For example, when I type ‘socf’ it is replaced by statement of cash flows and ‘xbs’ is replaced by balance sheet. (I use x as the first letter for lots of my triggers because few real words begin with an x and it is on the main keyboard so takes fewer taps on a phone or tablet.)

I also use text expansion for auto-correction of words. For example, when I type ‘cipfa’ it will automatically be capitalised to CIPFA.

There are many text expansion apps available and which suits you depends in part on the device you have and how much you are willing to pay to save time. Textexpander is the one I have. It works across platforms and can be synced so that the same trigger shortcuts are available on all your devices. 

Bonus tip

If you use an Apple computer, an iPhone, or iPad then you can do you text expansion for free because Apple has built it into the operating systems. Go to the Keyboard section of settings to set it up. 

Use your voice

When I was a finance director in the early 2000s I had a voice recorder and a personal assistant, Lynn. I could, and did, talk into my voice recorder when walking to and from the office and give the tapes to Lynn to turn into letters, emails, reports, etc. Lynn would sometimes have time to type things for other members of staff but most of the staff, most of the time, had to write their own documents.

These days we can all dictate our writing using just a smartphone and I strongly recommend that you do. I am sure you can speak faster than you can type. Voice recognition software has improved over the years and it makes fewer mistakes out-of-the-box and the more you use it the better it gets as it learns the words you use.

I suggest next time you have a document to write that is more than 2 or 3 paragraphs long you try dictating the first draft on your phone. Email that document to your work account so that you can put the words into the official template and then finish the document. I think you could save a stack of time and effort.

Let me know your productivity tips and perhaps I will include them in a future post.