Would You Buy Your Own Services?

Don’t expect potential clients to if you don’t know what sets you apart.

By Steven E. Sacks, CPA, CGMA, ABC

Do you ever wonder why after spending many hours on drafting, editing, proofing, and polishing—and proofing and polishing just once more—your engagement proposal efforts did not result in winning the engagement? And if this happens on a semi-regular basis, the frustration is never easier to take.

MORE STEVE SACKS: How Do You Value Your Most Important Asset?How to Build a Winning Proposal | Six Ways to Fix Your Firm Agreement | The Great Resignation or a Reshuffling? | Listen to Learn | Build the Framework to a Solution with Five Answers | Try for Success, Not a Win
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You may have the requisite knowledge, experience, and perhaps even a broad view based on a diverse set of clients. However, you may have become complacent by maintaining a “cookie-cutter” approach to developing your proposals. Like the old joke defining a consultant: “A person who takes off your watch, tells you the time, and gives the watch back to you,” implies an approach that you believe is best for your potential client, yet reflects no understanding of what the client actually needs.

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Want Higher Profitability? Turn to CAS

man's hand drawing upward arrow labeled "profit"

The effects of various pricing strategies.

By Hitendra Patil
Client Accounting Services: The Definitive Success Guide

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

MORE: CAS Requires Reaching Out More | Your CAS Engagement Letter Needs a Reset Option | Help Your Clients Run Their Businesses Better | CAS Tech Stack Depends on Cloud Use | Five Ways to Profit from CAS | CAS Is a Value Pitch | Accountants Are Perfect for Virtual CFO Roles | Raise Client Expectations with CAS | The Why Behind Your CAS Why
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The accounting profession’s largest CAS survey results revealed how CAS firms price their CAS offering:

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

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It’s Okay to Say No to Clients (Even the Large Ones)

Working with “smaller” clients can often be more rewarding – and profitable – than “big” clients.

By Frank Stitely
The Relentless CPA

There’s a reason you aren’t actively training clients to allow you to work efficiently. You’re afraid that you’ll lose clients.

I guarantee that you will.

MORE: Control Your Time: Avoid Ambush Meetings and Calls | Get Clients to Bring Tax Docs Early … Yes, EARLYWhy Time Tracking Still Matters | Make Fewer Mistakes, Increase Revenue and Capacity | Six Ways to Create a Millennial-Friendly Firm | Do You Know Your Turnaround Time?
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Clients have trained you to be inefficient. They’ll resist retraining. Some of them will leave and infect someone else’s practice.

The reason you fear losing clients is that you fear you can’t replace them.

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CAS Requires Reaching Out More

Businessman using Internet on smartphone and laptop

Use tech to up your communication game.

By Hitendra Patil
Client Accounting Services: The Definitive Success Guide

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: Your CAS Engagement Letter Needs a Reset Option | Structure Insights as What-Why-What | Set Your Processes Apart in Nine Steps | Five Ways to Overcome CAS Staffing Challenges | Think CAS Isn’t for Your Firm? | Convince Your Firm of CAS Value | Ten Ways to Tell a Client Is Ready for CAS | Launch CAS in Just Eight Steps
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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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Your CAS Engagement Letter Needs a Reset Option

Even with the best definitions, scopes can change. Here’s what to include.

By Hitendra Patil
Client Accounting Services: The Definitive Success Guide

“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.

Perception!

MORE: Structure Insights as What-Why-What | CAS Reports Are Better. Here’s How. | Is It Time for Your Firm to Outsource? | Raise CAS Awareness Among Your Clients | Which Clients Are Best for CAS | How Much Can Automating Bank Feeds Save You? | Wants vs. Needs: Why Not Fill Both? | Get Sticky with CAS | Who Is the Professional?
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Has the accounting profession’s brand been (predominantly) perceived as “compliance” only?

“We deal with the past. We do audits. And we deal with the present. We do taxes and books. Future – is not our business.”
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Structure Insights as What-Why-What

How to define and refine your CAS processes.

By Hitendra Patil
Client Accounting Services: The Definitive Success Guide

We know the outcomes that are important from the client perspective can, and should, define your firm’s client accounting services processes.

But how do you create your firm’s CAS-specific processes? Where should you begin? How would you know what to change and what to add to your processes?

MORE: CAS Reports Are Better. Here’s How. | Help Your Clients Run Their Businesses Better | CAS Tech Stack Depends on Cloud Use | Five Ways to Profit from CAS | CAS Is a Value PitchAccountants Are Perfect for Virtual CFO Roles | Raise Client Expectations with CAS | The Why Behind Your CAS Why | Who Is the Professional?
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It is both difficult and easy to create your firm’s CAS processes. It will be difficult, not impossible, to ask if you do not have reasonably deep insights into what your clients need and want. It will be easy if you have periodic interactions with your clients.
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Heather Satterley: You’ve Got to Meet People Where They Are

Stop saying yes to everything and start saying yes to yourself.

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See The Disruptors

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Heather Satterley is well-known for being an accounting tech expert. But tech isn’t the only skill accountants need today and for the future. “You can have great technology skills, but if you don’t have people skills and those softer skills, that’s going to be a problem,” she said.   

MORE PODCASTS and VIDEOS: Bill Penczak: Stop Forcing Smart People to Do Stupid WorkSandra Wiley: Staffing Problem? Check Your Culture | Scott Scarano: First, Grow People. Then Firm Growth Can Follow | Jody Padar: Build a Practice that Works for You, Not Vice-Versa | Ira Rosenbloom: With M&A, Nobody Wants a Fixer-Upper | Peter Margaritis: The Power Skills Every Accountant Needs | Joe Montgomery: Find the Sweet Spot of the Right Clients, Right Services and Right PricesMarie Green: Your Bad Apples Are Ruining YouMegan Genest Tarnow: Hire for Curiosity Rather Than ComplianceClayton Oates: One Way to Keep Clients for LifeRandy Crabtree: Follow These Three Rules to Keep Employees HappyErik Solbakken: Yes, You Can Work Less and Make More | Donny Shimamoto: Future Firm Growth Requires a MindshiftJennifer Wilson: Empower Young Workers to Build the Firm Everyone LovesMike Whitmire: Re-Think Your Hiring and Training PracticesHector Garcia: Success Strategies of a Quickbooks YouTube Superstar | Blake Oliver: Why Tax Work Yearns To Be FreePrivate Equity Explodes in U.K. | Brannon Poe: The Status Quo Must Go  | Accounting Nerds, Unlock Your Super Powers  | Disruptor: Jason Statts Shakes Up the Status Quo | Think Small to Think Big with Matt WilkinsonWhen Financial Statements Go Extinct with Corey SchmidtCan Geraldine Carter Save Accountants from Themselves?Re-Inventing Accounting with Tyler Anderson

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One of those softer skills that will be a key skill for the future is problem-solving, which requires keeping an open mind to “look at not just facts and figures, but look at tools, resources, people and pull them all together,” she explained. No one can be an expert at everything, so having “a wide network of really awesome professionals” is vital for filling in any gaps “to get the job done.”  

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CAS Reports Are Better. Here’s How.

Traditional reports stop short of what businesses need.

By Hitendra Patil
Client Accounting Services: The Definitive Success Guide

If you are wondering whether client accounting services (CAS) needs a different set of reports, you are in the right place. At the same time, it may be confusing how you can produce reports that are different than those your software provides out of the box.

MORE: Help Your Clients Run Their Businesses Better | Set Your Processes Apart in Nine Steps | Five Ways to Overcome CAS Staffing Challenges | Think CAS Isn’t for Your Firm? | Convince Your Firm of CAS Value | Ten Ways to Tell a Client Is Ready for CAS | Launch CAS in Just Eight Steps
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CAS is about the outcomes of your work, from the clients’ perspective. CAS outcomes are useful, insightful, and advise clients in ways that routine, traditional reports cannot deliver. The outcomes you provide from your CAS offering need to relentlessly focus on the relevance, usability and importance from your clients’ point of view. One of my ex-clients, an experienced and expert CPA from San Diego – who had mostly high-net-worth individuals with multiple businesses as his clients – told me, “After 19 years in practice, I realized that small to medium business entrepreneurs are not really concerned with managing their balance sheets. It is the job of the accountant.”
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