For many accounting-firm owners, human resources begins as a collection of administrative responsibilities. Someone has to run payroll, enroll employees in benefits, maintain records, post open positions, and answer questions about time off. Because these activities appear on the expense side of the ledger, it is easy to treat HR as overhead that should be controlled rather than an operating system that should be improved.
That view misses the larger financial story.
In a service business, people create the client experience, perform the work, protect quality, identify opportunities, and preserve institutional knowledge. The question is not simply how much the firm spends on labor. The more useful question is what the firm receives in return—and what systems help talented people produce their best work consistently.
Rhamy Alejeal brings a financial lens to that question. Alejeal is a co-owner of People Processes, an HR services company he helped launch after beginning his career in employee benefits and studying labor economics. When he appeared with Universal Accounting Center President Roger Knecht on the Building the Premier Accounting Firm podcast, the two explored how accounting professionals can connect workforce decisions to profitability, productivity, and sustainable growth.
Their discussion offers an important lesson for accounting firms: HR is not separate from business strategy. It is where financial discipline and human behavior meet.
Reframe Labor From an Expense to an Investment
Payroll is often one of the largest costs on a business owner’s income statement. That makes it an obvious target when margins tighten. Yet reducing payroll does not automatically improve the business.
If a productive employee leaves, the immediate numbers may appear better. Compensation and benefit expenses decline. But the business may also lose client knowledge, production capacity, revenue, and the time other employees must spend covering the vacancy. Recruiting, training, mistakes, and slower service can erase the apparent savings.
Alejeal encourages owners to think in terms of return on labor investment. If the business spends a certain amount on employees, how much of that investment supports average-or-better productivity? Which roles generate revenue, protect revenue, or reduce costs? Where is performance being limited by unclear expectations, poor processes, insufficient training, or weak management?
Knecht applies a similar standard to accounting firms: every role should contribute to revenue or reduce expenses, either directly or indirectly. A bookkeeper may produce billable work. A client-service coordinator may improve retention and free technical staff to concentrate on higher-value tasks. A manager may reduce errors and help several employees become more productive. The contributions look different, but each should connect to a meaningful business result.
This does not require reducing every employee to a spreadsheet cell. It requires making workforce decisions with the same care an advisor would bring to any other major investment.
Useful measures can include:
- Revenue or gross profit per full-time employee
- Labor cost as a percentage of revenue
- Billable utilization and realization, where appropriate
- Error and rework rates
- Client retention and satisfaction
- Time required for a new hire to become productive
- Voluntary turnover among high performers
- Managerial span of control
- Capacity available for new work
No single metric captures the value of a person. Together, however, these measures can reveal whether the firm’s people systems support or obstruct performance.
Know Which Employees Create Disproportionate Value
Employee contribution is rarely distributed evenly. Some team members solve difficult problems, strengthen client relationships, improve the work of those around them, and preserve calm during demanding periods. Their value extends well beyond the tasks listed in a job description.
In his conversation with Knecht, Alejeal uses the familiar Pareto principle to explain why a relatively small portion of a workforce may create a large portion of enterprise value. The precise ratio will vary by firm, but the management implication is sound: leaders should know who their strongest contributors are and understand what keeps them engaged.
Start by asking:
- Which employees would clients notice immediately if they left?
- Who improves the performance of other team members?
- Who consistently exercises sound judgment without constant supervision?
- Who understands the firm’s systems, clients, and standards most deeply?
- Which employees embody the culture the firm wants to preserve?
- Where would a departure create the greatest operational risk?
Identifying high performers is only the beginning. The firm should also learn from them. Ask how they organize their work, communicate with clients, identify errors, and make decisions. Document the methods that can be taught without trying to strip away the judgment and individuality that make those people effective.
This creates two benefits. First, it gives high performers recognition and a path to greater influence. Second, it turns personal expertise into organizational capability. The goal is not to force everyone into an identical mold; it is to make successful practices visible and repeatable.
Build Processes That Serve People
Growth exposes inconsistency. When only one or two people run a firm, informal communication can keep work moving. As the team expands, unwritten expectations create missed handoffs, uneven training, duplicated effort, and avoidable frustration.
Processes solve that problem, but only when they reflect how people actually work.
Alejeal cautions against treating policy as an end in itself. A process should create clarity and fairness while allowing leaders to respond intelligently to exceptional circumstances. Rules that are applied without judgment can damage trust; exceptions made without principles can create favoritism. Good management requires both structure and discretion.
An accounting firm should formalize the employee journey just as intentionally as it maps the client journey:
- Organizational design: Determine which role the firm needs next, how responsibilities fit together, and how many direct reports each manager can support effectively.
- Job design: Define realistic outcomes, required capabilities, decision authority, and how success will be measured.
- Recruiting and selection: Create consistent job advertisements, screening criteria, interviews, and work-sample exercises that reflect the actual position.
- Onboarding: Give new employees the context, training, tools, relationships, and early feedback needed to become autonomous contributors.
- Performance management: Set expectations, hold regular conversations, address problems promptly, and create development plans rather than saving all feedback for an annual review.
- Compensation and benefits: Maintain a coherent total-rewards strategy that supports the labor market, firm economics, and employee priorities.
- Offboarding: Protect client continuity, transfer knowledge, recover access and equipment, and learn from voluntary departures.
These systems do not need to be built in one exhausting project. Alejeal notes that even a focused hour each week can produce significant progress over several months. Begin with the area creating the most risk or friction, define the current process, and improve one stage at a time.
Design Total Compensation Intentionally
Salary is only one component of employee cost. Employers may also fund payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, paid leave, holidays, health coverage, disability and life insurance, retirement contributions, and other benefits.
When these costs are evaluated separately, owners can make poor decisions. A benefit may appear expensive without accounting for its effect on retention or tax efficiency. A salary increase may appear simple without considering payroll taxes or whether employees would place greater value on health coverage, retirement support, or paid time away.
Alejeal recommends measuring total compensation and comparing it with what the firm is trying to accomplish. In the podcast conversation, he offers benefit-spending ranges as useful warning lights rather than universal rules. For example, very low benefit spending may indicate that a firm is underinvesting in attraction and retention, while unusually high spending should prompt a review of plan design, utilization, and employee value.
Those benchmarks should begin a conversation—not end it. Appropriate spending depends on the firm’s size, geography, employee demographics, labor market, plan structure, and business model. Owners should work with qualified HR, benefits, tax, and legal professionals before changing a plan.
A practical compensation review should consider:
- The complete employer cost for each position
- What employees understand and value about the package
- Whether benefits address the needs of the target workforce
- How the package compares with relevant competitors
- Whether the plan supports retention of critical employees
- The tax treatment of different compensation options
- Participation and utilization rates
- Whether vendors and plans are reviewed regularly
The objective is not to offer every fashionable perk. It is to invest in a package employees value and the firm can sustain.
Communicate the Value You Already Provide
An excellent benefit that employees do not understand has limited retention value.
Alejeal emphasizes the importance of presenting benefits clearly. Enrollment documents, plan summaries, and technical terminology can overwhelm employees. When communication is poor, the firm may spend heavily without strengthening its employee value proposition.
Accounting firms should make total compensation visible and understandable. That can include personalized total-rewards statements, digital enrollment support, concise benefit guides, recorded explanations, live question sessions, and reminders about underused resources.
Communication should answer practical questions:
- What does the employer pay in addition to salary?
- Which expenses or risks does each benefit help the employee manage?
- When and how can an employee enroll or make a change?
- Where can employees get help without sharing private health information with a manager?
- How do the firm’s career, flexibility, and development opportunities fit into the overall package?
This broader story becomes the employee value proposition: the reason a capable person should join, remain with, and contribute to the firm. Compensation matters, but so do meaningful work, flexibility, leadership quality, professional growth, autonomy, and belonging.
Improve Onboarding Before Chasing More Applicants
Recruiting receives considerable attention because an empty position is visible. Poor onboarding is quieter but often more expensive.
A new employee arrives with energy and optimism. If the firm provides a laptop but no clear plan, introduces tasks without explaining outcomes, or leaves the employee unsure where to ask questions, that enthusiasm fades. Managers then conclude that the hire lacks initiative when the real problem is an inadequate system.
Effective onboarding should move a person toward three outcomes:
- Competence: The employee can perform the work to the firm’s standards.
- Autonomy: The employee can make appropriate decisions without unnecessary dependence on the owner.
- Alignment: The employee understands the firm’s values, clients, priorities, and way of working.
For an accounting practice, the onboarding plan might include software access, security procedures, service standards, review protocols, sample client files, communication expectations, deadline calendars, shadowing, and scheduled checkpoints at 7, 30, 60, and 90 days.
The manager should also define what success looks like at each stage. “Learn our bookkeeping process” is vague. “Complete a month-end close for a training client, document the exceptions, and prepare the file for review using the firm’s checklist” is observable and coachable.
Use Financial Insight to Strengthen Client Advisory Services
The connection between accounting and HR extends beyond the accounting firm’s own employees. Small-business clients often ask their bookkeeper, accountant, or tax professional questions about payroll, benefits, hiring costs, and affordability.
That does not mean accounting professionals should practice employment law or design benefit plans outside their expertise. It does mean they are well positioned to bring financial clarity to workforce decisions and coordinate with qualified specialists.
An advisor can help a client:
- Calculate the fully loaded cost of a new hire
- Model the revenue or capacity needed to support the position
- Compare compensation scenarios
- Track labor cost and productivity trends
- Forecast the cash impact of hiring
- Evaluate benefit spending in the context of margins and retention
- Identify the financial cost of turnover and vacancies
- Build departmental budgets and accountability measures
This is a natural extension of advisory work. It moves the conversation from “Can we afford this salary?” to “What investment will this role require, what result should it create, and how will we know whether the decision is working?”
That distinction creates real client value. The accountant supplies the financial framework; HR, legal, and benefit professionals contribute their specialized guidance; and the owner receives a more complete basis for action.
How Universal Accounting Center Helps Owners Build the Business Behind the Work
Technical skill alone does not teach an accounting professional how to hire, delegate, set expectations, manage capacity, price services, or build a firm that operates beyond the owner’s individual effort. Those are business-owner capabilities, and they must be learned deliberately.
Universal Accounting Center has helped bookkeeping, tax, and accounting professionals develop those capabilities since 1979. UAC combines practical technical education with coaching and a proven turnkey business process so professionals can build marketable services and stronger operations—not merely complete another course.
Its training can support the HR and growth goals discussed by Alejeal and Knecht in several ways:
- Stronger role design: Clear service offerings and documented delivery processes make it easier to define what employees should own and how their performance should be measured.
- Better economics: Training in pricing, profitability, and advisory services helps owners understand the revenue and margin required to add staff responsibly.
- More repeatable work: Standardized bookkeeping, tax, and advisory methods reduce dependence on tribal knowledge and improve onboarding.
- Greater delegation: Coaching helps owners shift from performing every task to leading a capable team and working on the business.
- Higher-value client conversations: UAC’s Profit & Growth Expert training helps accounting professionals turn financial information into actionable business guidance, including insight relevant to labor and capacity decisions.
- Continued accountability: Business and marketing coaching gives firm owners support as they implement new systems rather than leaving good intentions on a shelf.
UAC also offers the free Accountrepreneurs Challenge, a 90-day program with weekly exercises designed to help accounting professionals work on themselves and their businesses. For owners who know their people systems need attention but struggle to create momentum, that rhythm can turn a large goal into manageable action.
At GrowCon, owners of bookkeeping, accounting, and tax businesses can connect with peers, tools, and experts while learning practical approaches to growth. Those relationships matter because hiring, leadership, compensation, and delegation are rarely solved by a single template. Owners benefit from seeing how other firms address similar challenges.
A Practical 90-Day HR Improvement Plan
Firm owners do not need to redesign the entire employee experience at once. A focused 90-day plan can establish a strong foundation.
Days 1–30: Understand the Current State
- Calculate total labor and benefit costs.
- Identify critical roles and high-impact employees.
- Review turnover, vacancies, capacity, and recurring performance issues.
- Ask employees what helps or prevents them from doing excellent work.
- Choose one HR process that creates the most friction or risk.
For Days 31–60: Define the Process
- Map the selected process from beginning to end.
- Assign ownership for every step and handoff.
- Define the desired outcome and relevant measures.
- Document essential instructions, templates, and decision rules.
- Ask the people who use the process to test and improve it.
Days 61–90: Implement and Review
- Train everyone affected by the change.
- Communicate why the process matters.
- Track a small number of meaningful indicators.
- Hold brief check-ins to identify confusion and exceptions.
- Revise the process based on evidence and employee feedback.
At the end of the 90 days, select the next priority and repeat the cycle. Over time, these focused improvements create an organization that is easier to lead, easier to join, and better equipped to serve clients.
Build a Firm Where People and Processes Reinforce Each Other
A premier accounting firm does not choose between people and processes. It uses processes to give people clarity, consistency, and the freedom to apply their judgment where it matters most.
Rhamy Alejeal’s discussion with UAC President Roger Knecht on Building the Premier Accounting Firm makes the financial case for that approach. Labor is an investment. High performers deserve intentional retention. Benefits should be designed and communicated as part of a coherent strategy. Recruiting, onboarding, performance, and offboarding should operate as connected systems rather than isolated transactions.
When firm owners take those ideas seriously, HR stops being an administrative afterthought. It becomes a mechanism for protecting quality, expanding capacity, improving profitability, and building a business that can grow beyond the owner.
Universal Accounting Center can help accounting professionals make that transition. Through technical training, business coaching, marketing support, the Accountrepreneurs Challenge, and a proven process for building a premier firm, UAC helps owners develop both the competence to serve clients and the operational confidence to lead a business.
Learn more about Universal Accounting Center’s training and coaching and look for Rhamy Alejeal’s appearance on Building the Premier Accounting Firm, “How to Attract and Retain Top Talent.”
The strongest firms do more than hire good people. They create the conditions in which good people can do exceptional work—and choose to stay.
