PTO stands for Paid Time Off

this is #NiksTips Bonus, Scott Scarano & Nikole Mackenzie take on choice topics (that start with the letter P) as it relates to running their professional accounting firms.  Today's topic is PTO, where we discuss PTO and policies at our accounting firm.

I don't know if it's cheating that we're doing an acronym for today's topic, just using the letter P as the P-word, but I guess now we're opening up the door to P-acronyms...

We both have Unlimited PTO at our accounting firms.  What's your PTO policy?

But, for now, let's scope back out, Why this topic? Why PTO?

Niks selected this topic today because recently she's been getting back into doing client work and she hasn't done client work in a long time. And so she's starting to feel the burn of what the team feels when they take any time off.  Niks went on vacation for just one day and started to get text messages from clients and realized, "oh gosh, we don't have a system for when someone takes time off, I'm sure that when our team goes on vacation, they're getting text messages from clients, we're always so embedded in our client's business, and there's always payroll that needs to be run and invoicing and cashflow issues, how hard it must be for everyone to go on vacation or checkout. It's really challenging." 

So how do we structure a healthy PTO policy for our teams that doesn't disrupt the day-to-day needs and challenges of the business? What technology do we use? What are our processes so that we can actually allow our team to go on vacation, so we have this unlimited PTO policy, and we're trying to encourage people to go on vacation, but they're not going on vacation... how do we solve this?