10+ SMART Goal Examples For Accountants

Accounts aim to ensure the financial health of any business. 

Whether you own an accounting firm, work as a freelance accountant, or run an accounting & finance department in a firm, you need to set SMART goals to sustain and grow. 

You are also responsible for the bookkeeping of the business and accurate reporting of the expenditure and income in any business. 

However, you also can be someone who is supervising the accountancy department of your organization or responsible for the management or might own a small business.  

In that case, it is crucial to have a SMART goal placed in your organization for the accountancy department. Also, it is your duty to ensure them.

The challenging part is to set or design the goals, SMART goals surrounding the core function of accountants toward the growth of the business. 

So here are the specific but not too many to be not adaptable and customized, smart goals for accountants or accountancy departments to strike. 

Smart Goal Examples For Accountants

Lead The Acquisition Ascension Of Your Company 

Any accountancy firm or accountancy department of a business requires this standard practice of sending to their sales team or BDM. 

You have to ensure that you are covering the most important aspect of your business, which is the consistent growth of your company. And for that, you can start focusing on the leads first. 

Make sure you set clear and precise goals for all the leads you are generating or coming to your business. 

It also will be based upon the total number of people or team members you have in your business development team, your business targets, objectives as well as your conversion rate. 

Leading the acquisition ascension for the business is one of the key goals to ensure efficient and profitable lead generation and then required sales under prescribed cost. 

Measuring Profit And Loss With Accuracy 

P & L, Profit & Loss is a known financial statement that tells the costs, revenue, and expenses of a company in a specific amount of time. 

Usually, the time-frames for these financial statements are monthly, quarterly, and annually. So for accountants, one of their goals is to collect these data on expenditures and income very accurately. 

Any mistake, miscalculation, or lack of accuracy can hamper the financial stability of the business. 

You have ensured that the financial documentation of these statements must be very thorough and detailed. It must be accurate and align with federal standards and criteria. 

Increase Your Onboarding Efficiency 

In these times of the digital era, there is no excuse for accountants not to have a detailed and well-documented onboarding process. 

It needs to start from getting a lead from your website and then landing on online accounting software that you’re comfortable with. 

You need to be more efficient in reaching out and accepting clients through digital mediums with higher efficiency towards technologically fulfilled business operations and management. 

The idea here is to be the up-to-the-speed of today’s internet era by making your onboarding process efficient, smooth, and quick. 

This will also ensure to get the higher ROI value from your lead acquisition towards closing the deal or offer. 

Have A Well-Optimized Website That Generates Leads

No matter how obvious it sounds, it is a SMART goal to set for accountants or accountancy & finance professionals to have a ‘well-optimized’ website to generate leads. 

And by ‘well-optimized’, there are many grounds to cover. First of all, your website needs to be branded and formatted under the norms of Google. 

It also needs to be mobile-friendly and optimized for search engines. You need to place a lead-generating system for you through the website

If you are a small business or corporation, it is critical to align your sales team and accountancy team to process the leads generated through the website on a daily basis. 

Keeping Records Meticulously 

One of the essential tasks for accountant professionals is record-keeping. You need to be very careful and detailed in your accounting, organization, and logging of the data.

It is an important goal to set where you are supposed to capture real-time information regarding the expense and income of the business. 

The reports also need to be consistently reviewed including the submitted paperwork you receive on a regular basis. 

You need to ensure they are complete and correct, signed whether through digital signature or hard-copy signs. 

You have to ensure a meticulous record-keeping system in your account management and more organization and categorization. 

It should be kept in an orderly fashion, with set categories, color-coded attributes, and sequential alphabetization. 

Create A Cross-Selling Marketing Strategy 

So, your SMART goals have been about client acquisition, lead generation, and website optimization, now you need a cross-selling strategy in place, once your lead converts.

This is also a good way to decrease your customer acquisition cost and increase your profits per sale.  

You need to have a solid plan in place to approach your onboarded potential client or even converted client to cross-sell them other services you provide. 

You can also create a simple 12-month cross-selling plan where clients need to know about all the offers or services you have. 

Use a drip email marketing campaign to reach your new customers and generate more sales through cross-selling. 

Running Internal And External Audits 

A financial audit is about objectively evaluating the financial statements and behavior of an organization towards its financial duties and bookkeeping. 

Companies need to be regularly assessed by internal as well as external auditors that might be subject to the potential Internal Service Audits (IRS). 

So, It is one of the vital duties, and hence the goals of Accountants to perform these internal audits to prepare them for such kinds of audits in the future. 

The auditing needs to be accurate and thorough, giving transparency to the investors or stakeholders to make their investments more confident.  

Also, it allows all the internal strategies of the company, consultants or business leaders to make the rightful suggestions or improvements to make to achieve company-wide changes across departments. 

You also need to set a goal to perform external audits to assess the companies that your business is going to or interested in selling, merging with, or acquiring. 

Client Servicing System 

These are not the days when you deal with a box of receipts every day.  That’s it is essential to digitize and more importantly create cloud-stored books for every client. 

There needs to be an automated system where each of your clients will be on the cloud with an automation system where they will be billed periodically or as required. 

Get some time to maintain the communication between your clients and talk about these exchanges. 

The idea of using automation and a digital accounting system is simply about keeping up with this technological era and speeding up the servicing process for your clients.

There are advanced tools such as Fresh books, Xero, Sage, etc which you can also link to your CRM and email marketing platform to create a systematic engine for your business.  

Boosting Financial Outcomes 

Another SMART goal example for an accountant has to be dedicated to improving the financial outcomes of their business. 

You certainly have to make a specific stance of the growth or improvement expected to achieve in a certain time frame. 

But the idea is to consistently evaluate the detailed internal accounting and reporting of your business finance. 

Do the timely evaluation of all the expenses, expenditures, incomes, and investments of the business. 

This evaluation through a financial lens is critical for decision-makers, policy-makers, and business leaders of your enterprise. 

You also have to provide the valuable feedback and improvement ideas you have to the authorities to improve the financial outcomes. 

The collection and management of all the accounting records, statements, receipts, reports, and data need to be regularly checked and organized. 

New systems must be created to draw quick conclusions from these reports and observations to save money and improve the financial well-being of the company. 

Go For Digital Taxation System 

You may love it, hate it or try to fight it, or even embrace it just like other accountant professionals and even other business owners. 

But what needs to be learned here is, it is vital and needed. So you better get yourself to the latter part which is the future of your firm, and that is embracing the digital taxation system. 

MTD is happening and will be the future of how taxation works. It is critical to onboard your clients who are used to or still are on a traditional bookkeeping system. 

If you are not going to do it, your competitors will, and then you might have to, so it is better to be an early bird in adopting the technology, it will only give you the competitive advantage. 

Report On Financial Positioning 

Just like auditing and record management, submitting detailed and well-analyzed reports on the financial positioning of a business is a SMART goal for accountancy professionals. 

Financial Positioning means the economic or financial condition or well-being of the company on the basis of which you need to create reports that needed to be submitted to managed seniors. 

There are five types of reports and financial statements you need to submit to convey the financial positioning of the business. 

Profit & Loss Statements, Income Statements, Balance Sheets, Cash Flow Statements, and Shareholder or Equity statements are those five types of reports. 

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