At a glance
- Resource planning matches the right staff to specific work months in advance.
- Start by mapping future work and assessing your team’s skills and capacity.
- Poor planning leads to staff burnout, operational breakdowns, and reduced profitability.
- Maintain a 20% capacity buffer and involve clients early in the process.
Most accounting practices believe they plan ahead. Yet too often, partners are left counting heads in peak periods, hoping they have enough team members to handle the workload.
But unlike lawyers handling one-off transactions, accountants work within recurring cycles.
Those cycles create forecast forecasting opportunities.
Annual reporting deadlines repeat with predictable intensity. Client advisory needs also often follow seasonal patterns tied to business planning cycles and regulatory requirements. Resource planning leverages all this by matching specific staff to specific work months in advance to maintain profitability and sustainability.
What does resource planning involve?
Jamie Skelding, director at Prime Accountants Group, describes resource planning as a constant process. “You need to strike a balance. You don’t want to be over-resourced, but equally you’ll need to have staffing capacity in advance to cope with the extra work and growth you are looking for,” he says.
This challenge goes beyond basic capacity planning, which simply asks whether you have enough bodies to handle the workload. Resource planning forces you to answer questions that drive business decisions. Do you need additional staff next quarter? Or should you focus on winning more work? And how do you stop overservicing before it erodes your margins?
Skelding notes this kind of planning must be targeted. “You don’t want to have capacity in payroll while you’re looking for work in audit, as you’re putting your resource in the wrong part of the business,” he says. Throughout the year, staff will leave, skills will develop, and client needs will change. Resource planning should help you adapt: precision in task allocation can prevent overservicing and leave projects more likely to finish on time and budget.
Building your first resource plan
Don’t wait until you are desperate for staff before beginning to plan. Start by creating a forward-looking map of who will do what work when.
List compliance deadlines, regular client requests, and known commitments for the next six to twelve months. Then, assess your team’s current skills and capacity. This means looking beyond simple availability to see who can handle complex restructuring rather than basic compliance. It also means identifying any capability gaps. With a realistic assessment, you can start allocating team members to specific tasks.
“If you only ever plan to full capacity, you have no ability to grow.”
Jamie Skelding, Director, Prime Accountants Group
Skelding advises against thinking about capacity just in terms of hours. “You might be able to satisfy demand but if you have a top-heavy or bottom-heavy split, you may have the wrong levels of staff working on the wrong type of work,” he says.
Experts consulted by Financial Accountant agree that client cooperation is essential for resource planning to work effectively. If you’ve allocated your senior tax specialist to Client A’s work in March, but Client A submits information in April, your plan collapses.
Heather Townsend, founder of The Accountants’ Growth Club, recommends involving client managers early in the relationship. “Even before you sign them up as a new client, have the person who would be running the day-to-day account attend meetings. Set expectations at the beginning by clearly communicating how the firm works and who their contacts are,” she says.
Building timeline agreements into your onboarding process can also help the process run smoothly.
How to spot poor resource planning early
Poor resource planning rarely announces itself with dramatic failures. Either firms wait too long, which affects quality and profitability, or they plan to maximum capacity and start seeing small operational breakdowns that cascade through the business.
“It’s usually the type of issue that, if the firm wasn’t running at nearly full capacity, they’d be able to deal with. Like completing client onboarding or someone forgetting to chase information,” Townsend says.
The human cost becomes visible quickly. “If you’re working your staff too hard, you’ll see tempers fraying and staff being sick more often,” Townsend says. Assigning expensive senior staff to routine work or watching junior team members struggle with tasks beyond their capabilities can also result in burnout and high churn rates.
Skelding agrees that operational efficiency often deteriorates if firms don’t leave a 20% capacity buffer. “You can see work in progress building up and recovery rate performance dipping, in terms of getting jobs across the finishing line and efficiency levels weakening. You might have lots going on but you’re struggling to complete anything,” he says.
This isn’t to be confused with the manageable intensity of busy season where everyone expects pressure; it’s chronic overwork and task mismatch that drives talent away. “If you only ever plan to full capacity, you have no ability to grow,” Skelding warns.
A final thought
If you’re new to resource planning, Townsend offers a final piece of advice: you won’t get it right the first time around. “This is a learning opportunity; this is a data point. The most important thing to think about is why you are doing it,” she says.
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