Why jobs get stuck and how to get them moving again.

Active jobs are inventory, and they hold your cash

Your inventory clients ask where the profit went, and you point at the stock on the shelf. Accounting firms have the same problem in their active job list. You can price well, deliver under budget and stay productive, and the bank account still doesn't reflect it. The fewer jobs you have open at once, the more money you make. Slow turnaround also creates an avalanche of sludge that moves through the firm all year: 10% of someone's September is left over from June, 20% from July, 50% from August, and nobody can give them anything new.

There are only three reasons jobs get stuck

Capacity, volatility and dependencies. People are handed 60 balloons when they can handle 30, and nobody can see the difference. Jobs vary in size, so allocation is guesswork. And accounting runs consecutively, so queues form between preparation, review, queries and signatures. That's not an accounting insight. Eli Goldratt wrote it down about manufacturing in the late 1980s, and it holds here.

Three things every item of work needs

Who, when and how long. Two out of three isn't useful. Telling someone a job is theirs without a due date or an estimate gives you no way to control how much they're carrying. Before that, work has to be deliberately allocated. If people are eating from a trough or working out of their inbox, turnaround can't be improved. And taking work off people has to become normal. Ask an accountant when work was last taken off them and watch them laugh.

The unknowns are bigger than you think

Australian benchmarking for FY26 put average write-offs at 7%, and 10% isn't unusual. Another way to say that is things take 10% longer than expected, or you're giving people 10% too much. On top of that, roughly an hour a day per billable team member goes to unallocated client work: queries, calls, ad hoc advice. Then leave is around 13% of the year. That's why the October spreadsheet is out of date by lunchtime on the first. Buffers aren't slack. They're the part of the plan that's actually true.

Reduce the dependencies you don't need

A BAS return does not need the same 15 step process as a set of financial statements. Fewer runners in the relay means a faster race. Know who every runner is before the race starts, and tell them what's coming before it arrives. Clients are runners too. A firm that tells an October client in August what's needed doesn't lose two weeks at info collection. And when the baton is passed, the person receiving it needs to know they're now running.

Tasks are the key, not jobs

Jobs are why turnaround has been unmeasurable. A job holds several deliverables with different processes, people and due dates, has no estimated time, has one due date, and in XPM offers a blanket list of 14 states that mean nothing to the task in front of you. Tasks carry an estimate, a person, a time budget, a due date and their own status. Set target days per stage, run it off a state ledger so nothing can be moved back and forth to hide the count, and put it all in one prioritisable list the person looks at daily. Give them a red flag on day six and they'll drag it to the top themselves.

Jobs are a vehicle for scope and a dollar budget. Tasks are where the work actually moves, or doesn't.