ADVISORY & CONSULTING

Survey: Rough Seas Ahead for Small Business

Their best advice: Innovate, adapt, go online. Hang on.

Small Business Advisors: Top row – Kenesha Coleman, Claudia Hill Rachel Wehr. Bottom row – Joe Eckeklkamp, Catherine Anderson, Christopher Awungjia, Michael Kridel

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By Rick Telberg
CPA Trendlines Research

With lessons learned in painful lockdowns and grueling tax seasons, accountants are scrambling this summer to help their small-business clients cope with a harsher, more unforgiving business environment that demands new technologies, new work processes, and, most of all, new habits and attitudes.

MORE SURVEYS & RESEARCH: A Crash Course in the Business of Public Accounting | CPAs See Best Outlook in Three Years, with Notable Exceptions | Tax Pros Race to the Finish Line | Another Tax Season from Hell? |
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Accountants are working with their small-business clients to:

  • Keep up with changes in online technologies.
  • Learn to be flexible, innovative, and super-scrappy.
  • Pivot from brick-and-mortar to doing business online and virtual.
  • Manage new customer and employee expectations, and
  • Brace for revenue-hungry states seeking revenues from out-of-state online sales.

The terrain will be treacherous. In a CPA Trendlines study conducted in conjunction with Avalara, the tax management software vendor, accountants – by a margin of almost 2-to-1 – predict “much worse” business conditions for small businesses in the next 12 to 18 months. That’s the bleakest outlook in all five sectors surveyed, including the nation’s economy in general, their firms, their clients, and themselves personally.