Here is a situation every firm owner knows. You hand a capable person a piece of work. They are qualified, they have done this kind of thing before, and they hand it back done a way you did not want. Not wrong, exactly. Just not how you needed it. So you fix it yourself, and quietly you wonder why good people keep missing the mark.
Nine times out of ten, the problem is not the person. It is that no one defined what “right” looked like before the work began. The instruction was closer to “here is a client, clean it up” than to anything a person could actually act on. And “clean it up” is not an instruction. Clean up in what way? To what standard? Ending where?
There is a better way to hand off work, and it comes from teaching, of all places. It is the idea of an anticipatory set.
What is an ‘anticipatory set’?
If you have ever given a good presentation, you have already done this. You state the title, the objective, and what the learner should walk away knowing. You set expectations before you begin, so everyone knows where you are going.
An anticipatory set applies the same discipline to a piece of client work. Before the work starts, you define three things: the objective (what are we actually producing), the steps (how it gets done in this firm, with these tools), and the anticipated result (what a good outcome looks like when it lands on your desk).
That sounds like common sense. Most firms do a rough version of the first two. Some are good about step 3, helping their team understand what good looks like. What almost nobody does is a fourth and final step, and it’s also “the one that changes everything.”
The final step everyone skips: what does a wrong result look like?
The most valuable part of an anticipatory set is defining the negative outcome. Not just “here is what good looks like,” but “here is what a bad result looks like, and here is where to go if you see it.”
Think about what that does for the person doing the work. Without it, when something looks off, they have two bad options: freeze like a deer in headlights and stop, or push on and hand you a wrong number they did not know was wrong. Weeks later you are looking at a quarterly financial report wondering why it never got finished, or a client is telling you the figure cannot be right because their sales went up and the number went down.
With it (that is what wrong looks like), the person has a tripwire. If the result comes out looking like this, something is off, stop and check here. They can catch the error themselves, in the moment, because you told them in advance what wrong looks like and where the answer usually hides. One firm caught a payroll figure that was off precisely this way: the team member knew the number looked wrong, knew where to look, and traced it to an error the payroll provider had made in their reporting. That only happens when someone has been told what to anticipate.
Is the bookkeeper really bad, or just different?
This reframe is worth keeping. When work comes in from a previous bookkeeper, the perception often is, it’s a mess, the reflex is “they did a terrible job.” Usually that is not true. A debit is a debit and a credit is a credit. They did a perfectly good job, their way. It just is not your way.
Your way is uniquely yours, and it is invisible to anyone you have not explained it to. A new hire does not fail because they are incapable. They fall back on how they did it at their last firm, because you never defined how it is done at yours. The frustration you feel (“why didn’t they do it the way I wanted?”) has a simple root: you did not say.
Isn’t this just extra unbillable work?
It feels like it. It is the opposite. Two reasons.
First, discovery is billable. Working out what a client actually needs, and how your team will deliver it, is chargeable work, not overhead you absorb. Every client has particular needs, and finding them is part of the engagement, not a favour you do for free.
Second, defining expectations upfront prevents write-downs. Think about how much time gets written off because work came back wrong and had to be redone. Rework is a write-down with a friendlier name. A little time spent at the start, laying out what success looks like, avoids a lot of time lost at the end cleaning up a result nobody defined.
How does a firm actually keep this current?
The anticipatory set is not a one-time document. It has to be revisited, because the things it depends on keep moving: new team members arrive, clients change, and the technology updates constantly. How you used a tool two months ago may not be how it works next month.
The practical answer from firms that do this well is deceptively small: mandate the time. One firm “ we work with,” has every team lead meet a process manager once a month to surface any change in how work is done. The important word is mandate. When it was merely encouraged, crisis management always won and the meeting never happened. When it became a scheduled, attended, “what did you contribute” commitment, it stuck, and the amount they learned about their own team and their own processes was startling.
An hour a month, per person, to keep the way work is done visible and current. That is the whole cost. And it is the same discipline as building one agreed way of doing it across the firm, just maintained rather than set once and forgotten.
The part that reaches the client
There is a bigger version of this for any firm offering advisory or client accounting services. You have sold the client a result, an experience, an outcome they are now anticipating. The anticipatory set is how you make sure you actually deliver the thing they are expecting, rather than discovering the gap at year-end when they ask where something is.
And there is a human dividend. A team that knows what is expected, knows the steps, and knows what a good result looks like is a team that enjoys the work more. A large part of why people burn out and leave accounting is the misery of guessing at what someone wanted and being corrected after the fact. Take that away, and you are a long way toward being somewhere people actually want to work.
None of this is a magic bullet. But an hour spent defining the anticipated result before the work starts saves the team, the client, and the timesheet a great deal of avoidable pain.
If it would help to have someone sit down and define it properly with you, so your team stops guessing and your work stops coming back wrong, that is a conversation we have with firms all the time, and the kind of thing a good back-office team does as a matter of course.
For more on building a better accounting practice, MoneyPenny hosts Beyond Numbers, a podcast of practical conversations on capacity, workflow, pricing, technology and the realities of running a firm. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple or Spotify.
