SPECIAL

AI Can Help Market Your Firm

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It augments rather than replaces human expertise.

By August J. Aquila
Price It Right: How to Value Accounting Services

Artificial intelligence can do a lot of things very effectively, and one of them is to offer numerous benefits to a look at it as a start and not the end of the AI marketing discussion.

MORE: Twenty Questions to Ask Before Starting Your Marketing Plan | Five Ways Smart Marketing Boosts Your Firm’s Enterprise Value | Marketing’s Role in Staffing and Recruitment | Measuring Marketing Success: The 10 KPIs | Seven Reasons Marketing Can Make Your Firm a Great Place to Work | Seven Ways That Marketing Helps You Retain Clients | Is Pricing a Marketing Function? | Develop Your Personal Marketing Plan in Ten Steps | Five Ways to Make Partners Fall in Love with Marketing | Analyze Your Firm to Keep It Current | What Makes a Great Website? | Losing Can Help You Win More | Three More Strategies for Growing Your Practice | Four Strategies for Building Your Practice | Eight Areas to Cover for Personal Goals
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Here are some ways AI can assist in your marketing efforts:

  1. Customer segmentation and targeting: AI can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and segment customers based on their preferences, behaviors and demographics. This enables the firm to create highly targeted marketing campaigns tailored to specific customer segments, resulting in improved engagement and higher conversion rates.

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Donny Shimamoto: Defining Accounting Transformation | Accounting Influencers

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“This is a new area for accountants, but it’s an evolving area, and I think it represents a great opportunity for us…”

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Accounting Influencers
with Rob Brown

Rob Brown and Donny Shimamoto discuss reform, transformation, and change in the accounting profession at individual accountant and CPA plus practice levels.

More Accounting Influencers with Rob Brown here

In 2001, Donny founded IntrapriseTechknowlogies LLC, a specialized CPA firm dedicated to helping small businesses and middle-market organizations leverage strategic technologies, proactively manage their business and technical risks, and enable balanced organizational growth and development. Donny also works as a trusted business advisor with larger organizations, facilitating organizational strategic planning and execution, IT governance and planning, enterprise architecture, information architecture and assurance, business process improvement, and business intelligence initiatives.

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Staff Crave Advancement and Challenge

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three coworkers looking at a tablet

Do your people know what it takes to get ahead?

By Marc Rosenberg
CPA Firm Staff: Managing Your #1 Asset

The CPA firm mergers and acquisitions company ProHorizons has surveyed thousands of staff on what they want most from their jobs. Here are excerpts from their survey results:

MORE: What Leadership Looks and Feels at CPA Firms | Eleven Things That Good Mentors Do | Give the Recognition Your Staff Needs | The Importance of Great Bosses | How Remote Work Is Impacting Accounting Firms | Make Work Flexibility Work for Everyone | Why Staff Leave CPA Firms … and How to Stop Them | How to Solve the Big Disconnect in Talent Management | What Relevance Means for Staffing in Accounting | How Accounting Staffing Has Changed
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Opportunities for Growth and Development

One of the most common reasons people leave their jobs is because they don’t see potential for future growth. Staff want to be in a position where they are constantly growing and improving instead of just staying stagnant. The best CPA firms encourage that growth by providing opportunities for career and personal development.
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The Future of Fees

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Are you raising yours to close a salary gap?

By CPA Trendlines Research

When The 2024 Rosenberg National Survey of CPA Firm Statistics asked prominent consultants what’s coming down the pike in the accounting profession, an upheaval in fee structure came up a lot.

MORE: When Staffing Falls Short, Clients Get Culled | How Accounting Firms Are Dealing with Retirement | Next Five Years Are Critical for Accounting Firms | Staffing Turnover’s Down, But Why? | What’s Your Firm Worth? Private Equity Wants to Know | The New Pipeline: Outsourcing and Offshoring | Is This the Last Year of Accounting’s Golden Age?
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First, the good news: net fees are growing rather nicely.

  • Net fees at firms billing more than $2 million jumped an average of 10.7 percent.
  • Growth at firms billing over $20 million leaped by 12.5 percent.
  • Even small firms, those with $2-5 million in revenues, grew by 9.1 percent.

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Using Change Orders with Scope

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How is a change order like taking your car to a mechanic? Read on.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing – By The Radical CPA

Change orders are the result of a well-scoped process. They occur when a client adds a service not included in their original engagement or when a manager or partner requests a service be scoped and priced separately. The client decides whether or not to proceed with the change.

 

MORE JODY PADAR

THE RADICAL CPA

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The process of a change order is similar to taking your car to the mechanic for an oil change. During a diagnostic, they find you need a tire alignment as well. The alignment is not included in the services you bought, but you’re curious to know how much it would cost. Depending on the price, you’ll add it to the original quote, or you won’t.

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As Private Equity Closes In, Firms Seek New Answers to Staffing Problems

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Smart leaders are investing in tech, talent and orderly retirement timing.

By Jennifer Wilson
The Rosenberg National Survey of CPA Firm Statistics

We’ll see positive movement in staffing with more firms investing in outsourcing, offshoring, non-accounting staff added to work streams, increasing starting salaries, providing more support on campus to students and candidates, and other pipeline initiatives. The pace of consolidation and private equity investment will only accelerate, changing the face of the Top 100, with firms separating their audit practices .

EDITOR’S NOTE: Every year, The 2024 Rosenberg National Survey of CPA Firm Statistics asks the profession’s top consultants two sets of questions:

    • How do you think the next 12 months will unfold? Trends? Predictions? Other thoughts?
    • How would you assess the last 12 months? Trends? Observations? Struggles?

MORE: When Staffing Falls Short, Clients Get Culled | How Accounting Firms Are Dealing with Retirement | Next Five Years Are Critical for Accounting Firms | Staffing Turnover’s Down, But Why? | What’s Your Firm Worth? Private Equity Wants to Know | The New Pipeline: Outsourcing and Offshoring | Is This the Last Year of Accounting’s Golden Age?
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PE investors will have their hands full, trying to manage by the numbers, and drive change with traditionally change-averse, entrepreneurial partners who didn’t sign up originally to submit to a boss. And I fear that PE firms are overpaying for their equity stakes (and driving firm prices up for acquirers) and that realization will begin to dawn on some of them who realize there might not be a flip in sight.
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Competence Is Just the Beginning

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Where are you headed? Answer these questions about your ambitions and finances.

By Martin Bissett
Passport to Partnership

Staffers aspiring to be partners must learn the key characteristics of successful partners. They also must learn how to develop their own personal plans to achieve partnership. Firms and staffers alike need a clear set of procedures, processes and milestones for turning top talent into the next generation of firm leadership.

MORE: What Rich Accountants Do | Attract Clients, Don’t Sell to Them | Think of It as Service, not Selling | Eight Questions That Target Personal Accountability | Are You Projecting Confidence? | Does Client Perception Match Your Firm’s Reality? | Firm Not Thriving? Five Fixes | Five Questions for Grading Prospects | Health, Wealth, Stealth: Challenges on the Path to Partnership | Don’t Let Recurring Fees Kill Your Practice | Rate Your Personal Purpose | Five Ways to Make Selling Easier
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There are seven critically important criteria by which partners assess partners-to-be. I call them:

The Seven C’s

1. The first is Competence. As a prerequisite, but only a prerequisite, accountants must master their technical abilities and qualifications, whether it be audit, tax or management accounting. Whatever your area of specialty, as a staffer the partners expect you to be able to know at least as much as anyone else who may report to you.
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Gates Foundation, UK Fund Biotech Grant for Ag Breakthrough

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Innovative technologies that facilitate crop growth while reducing dependency on chemical fertilizers have become increasingly crucial.

By Rick Richardson

August saw the Gates Foundation and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom grant a $2.83 million grant to the British biotech business Legume Technology. AgFunderNews reports that the company intends to use the additional cash to provide farmers in Africa with a cost-effective and safe way to enhance crop health and soil fertility.

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Africa’s total soil fertility has declined over time, mostly because of excessive chemical fertilizer use, which has accelerated acidification.

Legume Technology has spent the last 20 years building bacterial and fungal microbial biofertilizers to fight that issue. These biofertilizers essentially create natural alternatives to chemical fertilizers by capturing nitrogen from the air and keeping it in the soil for the crops to absorb.

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Survey Shows Big Opportunities in Small Business

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two seated women talking

Business owners name three top challenges.

By CPA Trendlines Research

Small, private businesses are the bedrock of the American economy.

  • There are more than 33 million of them in the country.
  • They constitute 99.9 percent of American businesses.
  • They employ over 60 million people.

MORE: Salary Guides for Accountants Vary Widely: Whom Do You Believe? | Are You Earning What You Deserve? | The Slow, Painful Death of the 150-Hour Rule | Partner Comp Earnings Gap: What’s the Right Spread? | Main Street Accountants See Turbulence Ahead for Small Business | Partners: Your Middle Managers Are Getting Squeezed | The Joys of Firing Bad Clients | Gear Up For Growth | How Future-Proof Is the Accounting Profession? | Accounting Influencers | In-Person Conferences Still Essential | Accounting ARC | Risky Business: The Art and Science of Startup Company Valuation | Innovation through Wellness: You Can’t Grow without a “Well” Firm
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  • They account for over 62 percent of net jobs created since 1995.
  • They generate a third of export value.
  • They are a bountiful source of innovation.

They also make up the majority of the clientele of CPA firms, most of which are themselves small, private businesses. But a small, private business isn’t just another client. Each is a bundle of opportunity. They all need more than tax preparation. They need advice. They need planning. They need governance. They need experience. Sometimes they even need a little family therapy.

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Do As Little As Possible

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Older businessman taking a coffee break

And still have happy clients.

By Ed Mendlowitz
202 Questions and Answers: Managing an Accounting Practice

QUESTION: I have many clients who always expect me to do extra work as part of our fixed-fee agreement. How can I get paid extra for work beyond the scope of our agreement?

MORE: Want to Merge? Here Are 23 Things to Request | I’m Just Starting Out; Why Join an Association? | I’m 76. Should I Slow Down? How? | Ask for What You’re Worth | Two Options for Collecting Past Due Fees | When Board Service Gets Tricky | Eleven Ways New Staffers Can Help Bring in Business | Busy Season Is Over, So It’s Time for Some Resolutions | Want to Merge? Six Steps to Take | How to Start Providing Family Office Services
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RESPONSE: This is a recurring theme, and one that has many answers. One approach: Don’t take on the extra work.

Here is another approach.
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