Someone Else Has to Look at This After You

It was tax deadline week, and the partner had already emailed the whole team asking everyone to check their email and turn comments quickly so we could wrap everything up by Tuesday. A manager I know sent comments to a senior associate on Friday evening. The senior associate did not appear to look at them until Sunday afternoon. The client needed that information, and the manager's job in that moment was to delegate, but the delegation did not come back in time. So the manager spent Monday doing two jobs with a Tuesday deadline sitting right there.

I have heard a second version of this story more than once. Someone gets an assignment at 9:00 in the morning and hands it back at 5:00 in the afternoon, or sometimes 11:00 at night, and records one hour against it. I can't know what happened in between, and it may have been legitimate work on other clients. The person reviewing it has no way to tell, and they now have an evening to plan around.

I think of both stories as a negative chain reaction. Very little in public accounting or industry goes to a client or gets finalized after only one person has touched it, so your work is one link in a chain, and when it arrives late, everyone behind you has less time than they planned on. The manager expected to review at a certain point, now has a shorter window, and feels the stress of that. A 9:00 assignment that takes a couple of hours can reasonably be back by early afternoon, which lets the reviewer look at it that day. If it lands at 5:30, the review happens tomorrow at best, and if the work is urgent, someone stays up late or gives up a weekend to cover the gap.

Communication handles most of this. If you can't turn something around in the window your reviewer is expecting, tell them early and give them a time, even something as short as “I can have this to you by noon on Sunday.” A manager who has that message can plan around it, and a manager who hears nothing has to guess. What remains is what a reasonable person would expect given the circumstances. Work assigned at 9:00 that takes a couple of hours, and that was prioritized the way its nature called for, can be finished before 5:30 or 11:00 that night. Nobody owes a firm their weekends all year. Deadline week changes that, especially once a partner has asked in writing for quick turnaround on comments. Sitting on them until Sunday afternoon falls short of what everyone was told, and the stress lands on the people around you.

I learned to work the other direction as a staff accountant. One partner I worked with reviewed based on the deadline rather than the completion date, which is understandable, but it meant some jobs could not be done too early because they would sit for a week or a month waiting to be looked at. So I asked what I should prioritize, and when I finished something, whether the partner would be able to look at it. It also took experience to judge which jobs were worth chasing down. When I could get a good result done early, I made sure there was time on the partner's calendar, so that one piece of work started a chain reaction in the right direction.

The same reasoning drove how I handled clients on audits. I put effort into getting clients to send information early. My firm used the term backlog, and I came up with what I called a front log, which meant getting what we needed before the fieldwork date. Cash is a good example. If it was done before day one, and comments on it are typically not expected, the team could spend day one on the higher-risk areas, which saved time over the whole engagement.

Tools and staffing models will keep changing how the work gets done. In a client service role, communication is still what keeps a deliverable moving. Before you start your next assignment, ask whoever reviews it when they can look at it. That answer is the deadline you are really working against, and you will only know it if you ask.