The path to “paperlessness” is not paved in gold.
The path to paperlessness may not be paved in gold, but the experience of at least one Boston area accounting firm suggests that it just might be blanketed in green. DiCicco Gulman & Company LLP (DGC) has tripled in size over the past five years, an achievement it attributes to having good people and good opportunities, and thanks to its strategic adoption of technology to support its growth plans.
Incremental Approach
As a growing 30-person accounting firm in 2003, DGC was what might be called an early adopter of paperless technologies. The firm’s management team saw the advantages of filing documents electronically, particularly from a document storage standpoint – their filing room was literally bursting at the seams. The firm initially adopted a very organized Windows® Explorer filing tree for digital document storage.
As the firm began to grow, so did their increasing reliance on technology.
The firm decided to take the next step to begin working digitally – not simply scanning documents for storage. The practice of scanning on the front end in order to work online required a better way of moving work through the office than using paper routing sheets, and disparate tracking and due date monitoring files. In 2004, DGC became an early adopter of the XCM workflow management software and a key contributor to the development efforts of that solution.
As the firm grew in size, tripling its number of employees over the next three years, DGC decided it was ready for a full-fledge document management system and selected CCH’s ProSystem fx Document, which integrates with their workflow management software.
Intangible Benefits
Though the amount of savings realized seemed astounding even to firm management, they soon realized that the calculated return on the firm’s technology investments were probably even higher due to important intangible benefits DGC also gained in the process.
The young firm’s reputation for offering employees a technology-driven work environment, with multiple monitors, laptops and wireless capabilities at every desk, impresses new recruits, particularly recent college graduates, visiting the firm’s offices. That, paired with the firm’s balanced team-centric work environment, has helped to bolster its recruiting efforts.
The adoption of an efficient paperless work process has also inspired DGC to further explore environmentally friendly work processes. A year ago, the firm formally established its “Green Team”, a group of employees who collaborate to identify ways for the firm to adopt such practices, including self-timers on lights in its conference and training rooms, “think before you print” messages on emails, and various ways to recycle or minimize the use of paper and other materials from its daily operations. The firm shares these tips among its employees through its intranet and with clients through a monthly e-newsletter.
Successful Strategy
Many firms struggle with how to best implement paper technologies because doing so often has a profound change on how people work. DGC attributes its success in making a paperless work process part of its culture to taking a step-by-step approach to technology adoption and process change, as well as buy-in from the top down.
“Technology has become a key part of our culture – it has come to define DGC as a firm and as an employer. We had to have partner buy-in. The entire firm met to roll out the paperless initiative,” says Laura Barooshian, Tax Principal at DGC.
She cautions against doing too much too fast, however, “Every year you have the idea of what you want to do this year and have a view of five years from now. But, don’t do it all at once or people will be overwhelmed. The key for us was partner buy-in and communication, and incremental changes – doing each year what everyone can handle.”
That approach will continue to guide the firm’s success. The Boston Business Journal named DGC one of the region’s fastest-growing private companies in its second annual Pacesetters awards earlier this year. The honor recognizes the company's skill in managing a rapidly growing company, showing robust revenues and creating business strategies that led to success in a competitive business environment.