Accounting professionals Evaluating Tax Season Time to assess how to improve processes in the coming year

Congratulations! You made it through another tax season. With stress relieved and the realities of tax-related tasks fresh in your mind, it may be a good time to evaluate how your practice can improve processes for next year's season and for ongoing client services. You can start by asking yourself whether or not you encountered these scenarios in the last several months. Did you:

• Spend an inordinate amount of time worrying over or trying to fix technical problems?
  
   
• Get blindsided by a computer crash and loss of data?
  
   
• Waste too much time traveling to clients’ offices?
  
   
• Work late at the office too many times when you’d rather be at home?
  
   
• Increasingly get barraged with client questions and requests as the dreaded day of reckoning approached?
  
   
• Neglect ongoing bookkeeping services because of tax season work?

Some of these situations are inevitable. However, you may be surprised how many of these problems can be greatly minimized or altogether solved by switching to the online working model or upgrading one of its components.

For example, by hosting QuickBooks®, ProSeries, and/or MS Office at a data center, rather than maintaining them at your office, a firm can affordably outsource IT management, virus protection, data recovery, and software upgrading.

Also, hosting applications and files enables you, your staff, and your clients to work at home at anytime, work on the same files together from any location, and allows your company to more efficiently handle the onslaught of requests and inquiries during tax season and perform ongoing bookkeeping throughout the year.

Learn more about trying or upgrading the online model

Marketing Advisory Services

An important key to capitalizing on consulting engagement opportunities with clients is good communication. Most firms don’t have trouble suggesting compliance needs to clients but do find it difficult to successfully market advisory services. One place where this breaks down is in the client interview.

For bookkeeping, tax preparation, and basic audit services, it’s easier for the client to see value. However, for advisory services including strategic tax planning, thorough audits, and business operations consulting, the value isn’t self-evident. The accounting professional often assumes the client understands the value of such services, when they do not.

Good marketing of advisory services starts with a thorough interview of a client to help them understand why bookkeeping and tax preparation are only a small part of the value an accounting firm can bring to their business. It continues by reminding them of the other valuable services available that can help them plan strategically and reach a higher level of operational efficiency. One good way to remind clients of such services is through a well-designed website with a client portal and through regular print or electronic newsletters.

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