According to a recent Intuit study, small business owners are increasingly looking to their accountants to provide broader business consulting services in this economic downturn. Is your practice prepared to expand beyond traditional tax and accounting services to deliver the business consulting services your clients need to compete in this market?
Clients need more help, but don’t always know how to ask, or believe that you as an accountant, can do more than just tax and financial statements. We often hear from small business clients that they think of their accountant as the guy for tax returns and financial statements, but not for other needs.
Outsourced CFO Services
This ugly economy presents an opportunity for you to re-position your services. Many small business clients are big enough to need a CFO, but too small to afford one. Accountants are in the perfect position to fill the role of an outsourced CFO. Leading firms who understand this are creating outsourced CFO practice units within their firms.
CFO Services are different than write-up or bookkeeping and should be a segregated practice unit with metrics for success and a managing director. Write-up is about recording history, while CFO Services focus on present operations and future plans. Positioned correctly, the outsourced CFO practice unit can deliver new revenue growth for the firm while supplementing the needs of small business clients who want to maintain accounting records at their location.
To get started, have current ProAdvisors become certified. The certification will keep your ProAdvisors current on changes, indicate to clients that your office is a QuickBooks expert and tells new clients that your firm can solve their QuickBooks and small business problems. We recommend you have a certified ProAdvisor in each office to identify opportunities and drive the practice unit.
Delivering Value for the Business
Spend time at the client’s location, like a CFO. Being in the client’s office is the best way to identify client pain points and opportunities for you to add value. To uncover opportunities, ask owners what they would like to know about their business, but don’t. Ask bookkeepers what their pains are. Practice building reports the clients can use, which is usually an iterative process.
Here are some examples of CFO Services your ProAdvisors can deliver that add value for clients:
Clients need more help, but don’t always know how to ask, or believe that you as an accountant, can do more than just tax and financial statements. We often hear from small business clients that they think of their accountant as the guy for tax returns and financial statements, but not for other needs.
Outsourced CFO Services
This ugly economy presents an opportunity for you to re-position your services. Many small business clients are big enough to need a CFO, but too small to afford one. Accountants are in the perfect position to fill the role of an outsourced CFO. Leading firms who understand this are creating outsourced CFO practice units within their firms.
CFO Services are different than write-up or bookkeeping and should be a segregated practice unit with metrics for success and a managing director. Write-up is about recording history, while CFO Services focus on present operations and future plans. Positioned correctly, the outsourced CFO practice unit can deliver new revenue growth for the firm while supplementing the needs of small business clients who want to maintain accounting records at their location.
To get started, have current ProAdvisors become certified. The certification will keep your ProAdvisors current on changes, indicate to clients that your office is a QuickBooks expert and tells new clients that your firm can solve their QuickBooks and small business problems. We recommend you have a certified ProAdvisor in each office to identify opportunities and drive the practice unit.
Delivering Value for the Business
Spend time at the client’s location, like a CFO. Being in the client’s office is the best way to identify client pain points and opportunities for you to add value. To uncover opportunities, ask owners what they would like to know about their business, but don’t. Ask bookkeepers what their pains are. Practice building reports the clients can use, which is usually an iterative process.
Here are some examples of CFO Services your ProAdvisors can deliver that add value for clients:
- Plan. Create a plan with financial objectives for the business. The budgeting tool in QuickBooks works very well to track progress against the plan. All business owners want their business to perform better, and most accounting firms are not involved enough in the process of developing a plan and holding clients accountable. Firms that help clients achieve goals are more valuable than firms who merely provide compliance work.
- Use Classes. Classes and job costing are often under-utilized, but can provide important insights into product or customer profitability. Once you have a plan, classes help segment operating data so you can take corrective action. Look for opportunities to leverage them.
- Owner Dashboard. Customize the owner’s dashboard to put the most important metrics in front of him (AR, AP, Revenue, etc).
- Teach. Most clients are not accountants or QuickBooks experts- that’s why they need you. Watch them as they work and you can probably eliminate a few steps easily. Removing a frustration from the client’s daily process will enhance your value to the client, move the firm beyond the compliance-only perception and reinforce the value of additional engagements.
- Automate the work. Teach clients to use Online Banking and debit card transactions to reduce transactional entry. Use QuickBooks Merchant Account Services to better reconcile credit card transactions and improve cash flows. Technology has enabled collection of payment at the point of service, even remotely. We recommend implementing MAS in your firm to become proficient in the process. Once you learn and can teach it, it can yield big time savings for clients.
- Paperless workflow. Define a process and digital filing system to take your client’s operation paperless. Managing documents is an enormous burden that does not add value to the operations. Streamlining this burden can provide needed bandwidth for the owner to focus on the business operations, and accountants are natural organizers.
- Operational bottlenecks. Document operational processes to reduce variability. Once documented, process improvements become much easier to implement. Accountants are good problem solvers and, as an outsider, you may be able to see problems the client doesn’t recognize because they are too close to the work. The Intuit Marketplace of third party developers has an abundance of solutions to solve operational problems.
- Marketing. CFO’s help businesses grow and succeed, and owners often forget that marketing activities drive sales. QuickBooks offers a free website. Offer to launch the website and or help the business launch it, and where necessary, recommend other marketing expertise.
Finally, engage with other ProAdvisors who are delivering outsourced CFO services. They are a great resource for best practices to share with clients. The QuickBooks Community and Linked-In are a good place to start building your network.
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