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Make sure your midlevel offering is as profitable as possible.

By Hitendra Patil
The Definitive Success Guide to Client Accounting Services

When your prospects shop for client accounting services, what they find out about pricing methods and trends defines their expectations. If you follow very different approaches to price your CAS offering, it will take significant effort on your part to educate the prospects (and existing clients) about why you are pricing CAS the way you are.

MORE: CAS Pricing and The Accounting Profession | How CAS Communications Are Different | Your Firm’s Processes Can Set You Apart | Technology and Your CAS Clients | Top Five CAS Killers and How to Overcome Them | 21 Ways to Adjust Your Practice in 2021
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As they say, it’s easier to ride the horse in the direction it’s going. It is good to first conform to the perceptions of prospects when it comes to your CAS pricing. Once you ride the horse, you can direct it to the destination you want to take it to. Once you conform to the pricing method (not the dollar value) expectations of the prospect, their anxiety and perception of risk (what value will they receive in the price they are willing to pay) reduce. After that, they are more open to evaluating the choices you present to them.
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Pushing the profit per person.

By Hitendra Patil
The Definitive Success Guide to Client Accounting Services

Pricing your services correctly to ensure reasonable profitability is a major decision you will make in your client accounting services practice.

MORE: How CAS Communications Are Different | How to Write Your CAS Engagement Letter | 12 Signs It’s Time to Outsource | Will 2021 Be Your Cash-Flow Year? | Identifying the Right Clients for CAS | CAS Is, First, a Communication Challenge
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Our survey results revealed how CAS firms price their CAS offering:

• The topmost method of pricing CAS offering was fixed/flat fee, used by 41 percent of the respondents.
• The next most common method of pricing CAS was a mixed method of pricing (a mix of hourly, fixed and value pricing), charged by 36 percent of respondents.
• Hourly billing method was used by 33 percent of respondents.
• About 28 percent of respondents used value pricing as the method for CAS pricing.

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Help clients make decisions, don’t just report on what happened.

By Hitendra Patil
The Definitive Success Guide to Client Accounting Services

A successful client accounting services practice requires increased interactions with clients. Your usual non-CAS methods of client communications are not sufficient to meet the demands and expectations of your CAS clients. You must leverage new tech tools to reach out, communicate and collaborate with clients more frequently.

MORE: How to Write Your CAS Engagement Letter | Designing Your Firm’s CAS Processes | How to Create Your Firm’s CAS Team | The Technology Stack You Need for CAS | Communicating CAS to Clients and Prospects | How to Communicate the Value of CAS | Don’t Wear a Mask
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Some accounting software can help you automate client notifications (by email/text) based on customized triggers set up in the software. Similarly, automated payroll software can keep clients informed automatically. Mobile apps of core accounting software are becoming a necessity to deliver client service and communications.

Why?
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Define not just what, but also when.

By Hitendra Patil
Accountaneur: The Entrepreneurial Accountant

“People think of us (accountants) as the compliance agents – the necessary evil.”

This sentence haunts me even today, after hearing it nearly 15 years ago from a multi-award-winning, highly experienced CPA.

MORE: Designing Your Firm’s CAS Processes | Your Firm’s Processes Can Set You Apart | Technology and Your CAS Clients | Top Five CAS Killers and How to Overcome Them | 21 Ways to Adjust Your Practice in 2021 | How to Become an Outsourced/Virtual CFO
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Perception!

Has the accounting profession’s brand been (predominantly) perceived as “compliance” only?
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You might find yourself working backward.

By Hitendra Patil
Accountaneur: The Entrepreneurial Accountant

We have examined how you can enhance your firm’s internal processes and what factors influence those processes. In this post, we will focus more on CAS-specific processes that can give you competitive advantages. However, this post is not about the technicalities of accounting processes. As a professional accountant, you already know the accounting fundamentals required to create your processes for each of the segments of the services you provide.

MORE: Your Firm’s Processes Can Set You Apart | 12 Signs It’s Time to Outsource | Will 2021 Be Your Cash-Flow Year? | Identifying the Right Clients for CAS | CAS Is, First, a Communication Challenge
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Are client accounting services processes different than what you have been doing until now? Yes, and no.
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Not just in operations, but client experience.

By Hitendra Patil
The Definitive Success Guide to Client Accounting Services

If you were to define in three sentences how your firm is different, what would those three sentences be? Write them down.

MORE: 12 Signs It’s Time to Outsource | How to Create Your Firm’s CAS Team | The Technology Stack You Need for CAS | Communicating CAS to Clients and Prospects | How to Communicate the Value of CAS | Don’t Wear a Mask | The 8-Step Method for Launching Client Accounting Services | What CAS Is … and Is Not | Client Accounting Services: The Definitive Guide
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Read those the next day and judge for yourself if your competitors can say the exact same three sentences to differentiate their firms. If yes, you will see why this is a significant challenge for your firm’s growth aspirations.
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Two different approaches.

By Hitendra Patil
The Definitive Success Guide to Client Accounting Services

Client accounting services essentially requires an ability for your firm to be able to best serve the needs of all your clients. In other words, your firm’s technology stack, services, processes and pricing packages need to cater to businesses of different sizes, turnovers, as well as various levels of tech-savviness of the business owners and their employees. In yet other words, your firm should have the ability to do part of the accounting work or all the work your clients offload to your firm.

MORE: Will 2021 Be Your Cash-Flow Year? | The Technology Stack You Need for CAS | Communicating CAS to Clients and Prospects | How to Communicate the Value of CAS | Don’t Wear a Mask
Exclusively for PRO Members. Log in here or upgrade to PRO today.

When Clients Do Part of the Work

In such cases, you want the technology stack to be as standardized as possible to avoid costly, error-prone and time-consuming need to deal with a variety of software. At the same time, when clients do part of the work, you must seek to implement collaborative technology on the cloud to eliminate duplication of data entry and mailing/emailing information back and forth between your firm and clients.
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