You wouldn’t dream of climbing on board an aircraft if you knew the pilot was going to ignore the pre-flight checklist because she’d ‘done it before’.

Would you allow a surgeon to operate on you or one of your children if he didn’t follow the recommended World Health Authority (WHO) surgical checklist that has saved many many lives in many many countries?

So why do accountants allow certain mission critical jobs in their firm to happen without the pedantic, disciplined, committed approach to checklists that airline pilots and surgeons have?

Pilots and surgeons are some of the brightest and best trained people on our planet. But they use checklists at mission-critical moments in their day-to-day jobs every day. They treat these checklists seriously. They do not pay lip-service to checklists. Why? Because they know they save lives.

Needless risks accountants take every day…

OK so nobody is going to die because you or one of your team ignored a checklist or didn’t take the checklist seriously.

However, you run the risk of losing a client or losing your reputation or losing a key introducer to a competitor if you miss certain mission critical tasks.

And in a cloud accounting world where speed of production is getting faster the chance of mistakes will increase. Unless you take checklists deadly seriously at certain key moments in the work you do.

So what checklists might be mission critical checklists in an accountancy firm?

1. Books and records received checklist – this is a profoundly powerful customer care opportunity and an opportunity to prevent missing items derailing your production. Get this checklist working like a pilot’s pre-flight checklist or a surgeon’s pre-incision checklist and you can impress clients with your customer care, reduce or prevent the ‘pick-up-put-down’ of jobs that costs you a fortune in lost time and lost profits

2. Post-year end meeting checklist – Your meeting agenda. When taken seriously this meeting agenda can radically improve the quality of the most common client-meeting you have. But because you have so many of these meetings you probably ‘wing it’. A pilot wouldn’t. A surgeon wouldn’t either!

3. Team meeting checklist – another agenda. Time is precious. Achieving the right result every week with your people determines the motivation and productivity of your people. This is definitely another mission critical opportunity for a checklist.​

Yes, there are other checklist opportunities in your accountancy firm! But if you are going to raise your commitment to checklists keep your focus narrow – check out the report now for more on this jugular insight.