CLIENT SERVICE OPPORTUNITIES

The CPA’s Best Role: Leveraging Knowledge, Not Just Process

David Bergstein says you’re wasting your time and your client’s money if you’re not focussing on the future.

With Steven Sacks
The NEW Fundamentals: Thriving in Disruption

To be more competitive, CPAs need to shift their focus from compliance service to process-oriented, value-added work, veteran CPA David Bergstein tells CPA Trendlines. This means working with clients to understand their business operations, competition, and financial challenges, such as liquidity, solvency, and profitability.

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The Key Takeaways:

  • Accountants need to switch their focus to look to the future and real-time accounting, which means that the right way of doing things these days is to take advantage of all technology and automation.
  • It’s a small and mid-size business that doesn’t have a bookkeeper, that doesn’t have an accountant, that doesn’t have a controller, that doesn’t have a CFO that looks to CPAs to help them. CPAs’ advantage is to use that technology to automate all those processes and then spend time selling value-added services.
  • Today, to be successful as an accountant, you must identify what platform or platforms you’re going to use to capture your clients’ data at the source to move it through the system.
  • Payroll tax processing services can be expanded by setting up the human resource tools that go with it. Beyond processing payroll, CPAs can find ways to get lower workman’s compensation; automate the onboarding of employees, and provide various benefit options.
  • As part of the de-emphasis on process, younger staff members don’t want to do vouchering anymore, which will be supplanted anyway by automation. So, it’s great for firms to offer more training opportunities to their younger staff regarding analytical thinking, selling, and how to consult with clients to find out what their needs are.

 

Transcript

David Bergstein, interviewed by Steven Sacks