clients need so much more than basic accounting & write-up.
^ click to play the video
with steven sacks
the new fundamentals
armed with the latest technologies, accountants can do more than ever – faster, better, and cheaper. but too many accountants are missing the biggest opportunity that technology creates, according to judy trepeck, long a leading figure in the profession.
more from steven sacks: bill reeb: new rules for the covid era | is your message open to interpretation? | effective communications in the age of covid | why proper communication is critical | how to create effective internal communications | how to select your firm’s board | trust is a key organizational ingredient | real influence vs. immediate gratification | fake it ‘til you make it: an ultimate goal? | 4 ways to boost job satisfaction | have you gauged your staff’s enthusiasm? | why knowledge maintenance is key
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in her conversation with steven sacks, trepeck, currently senior vice president for customized training at the michigan state cpa society, outlines how cpas can go beyond basic accounting to provide more value-added services. it requires experience, talent, ambition, and, maybe most of all, intuition.
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trepeck provides a framework for any accountant to add advisory services to their menu of offerings.
some of the key takeaways and the full transcript:
- cpas should think about what their clients and potential clients need beyond the audited or compiled financial statements.
- many small companies either do not understand common tools like quickbooks or do not have the staff to administer and work with technology tools.
- clients assume the accountant entering the supporting financial information has the expertise to make judgments regarding the appropriate journal entries.
- but that’s a dangerous assumption to make.
- with the advent of client accounting services, the cpas should make it clear to the client what the service is. if it is bookkeeping, then make it clear. if a value-added service will be provided, such as a top-down analysis, then that should be made clear.
- cpas should not be reluctant to ask for more fees if the work goes beyond the compliance work.
- the importance of technology should not supersede the cpa’s intuition and business acumen.
trepeck’s message is as relevant to today’s young professional as it is to well-experienced managers and partners.
the transcript:
steven sacks: hello, i’m steven sacks, owner of solutions to results, a firm that assists practices and organizations in the area of communications, culture, education, and training. i’m here with judy trepeck today, senior vice president in charge of customized training with the michigan association of cpas. judy previously played critical roles with the aicp in both domestic and international initiatives, and also was a state and local tax judge in the state of michigan.
she also served on numerous boards providing her expertise as a cpa and a cgma. today, judy and i will discuss some of the issues related to cpa services and the use of technology, both the pros and cons. welcome, judy. thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
judy trepeck: thanks, steve. it’s a pleasure. thanks for inviting me.
steven: as you know, we’re so immersed in technology today. the cpa profession is moving towards a number of different areas, specialties, ai, data analytics, data visualization. it’s part and parcel of our daily regimen in providing accounting services. we’re known for generating financial statements. given the fact that technology is saving a lot of time working with clients and generating financial statements, the time that’s saved, what should cpas be thinking about in terms of providing value to their clients?
judy: it’s a good question because you’re going to presume that they have more time now to deliver something else. the big game for it now is cas, client accounting services, and what those services do and how they can lead to consultancy. it shouldn’t be presumed that they will lead to consultancy. it’s something that needs to grow out of that delivery of technology services. the typical one, especially in a smaller practice, is when you have clients who are using quickbooks or using another type of technology. everybody tells them how easy it is, but the reality is they should be the entrepreneur. they should be running their business, and they should find somebody to do the backroom, the accounting services for them. sometimes, they look to their cpa to say, “can you do this? do you have somebody that does quickbooks?” because i don’t know how to do this.” the idea is that it provides that source of income really for a practitioner, but on the other hand, it allows the practitioner then to say, “a-ha, we’ve got some other things that we can do besides just the technology service.”
steven: that also assumes that the cpa is taking a broader view of potential opportunities because they’re always fixated on generating the financial statements for those that have the understanding of accounting, the debits and the credits, but what about providing value-added services to the client?
judy: in theory, we always want to do that, or most people would want to do that unless you’re just building a practice side of doing the accounting services. in previous conversations that you and i have had, i was reflecting on when i came into the profession, we would go to the client, we would take the client’s check register and their sales journal, and we created a general ledger, and we posted everything, we balanced it, we put it all in a nice little package to look like a financial statement, and then we go and we talk to the client about it.
we did it right then and there, in that same day, and we did it monthly or we did it quarterly. then, we did the tax returns at the end of the year. in essence, what we were doing is delivering advisory services based off bookkeeping services because, at the time, it was just handwritten bookkeeping as opposed to using the technology that’s available now. we were doing it back then.
now, we have to remind ourselves that it’s so important to do that because in and of itself, providing the accounting is not a cpa function. anybody can do that. there are people all around. there are bookkeepers who are proficient at recording transactions and do that for business owners. those business owners then get their tax returns done, and they don’t get advisory services from a professional.
it’s an opportunity to put this layer in there that says, “you’re already doing the accounting for somebody. let’s take the results of that accounting, let’s take the results of that transaction, the recording of that, and let’s help the client whether it’s with inventory management or whether it’s–” in this day, supply chain management just went out the window in february and march of this year.
it’s all those things that can be layered on top of the bookkeeping services, but i think that the practitioner has to be very careful on a number of levels with providing those services. you and i have talked about the importance of engagement letters. we’ve talked about the importance of understanding what you will do and what you won’t be doing so the client isn’t looking to the cpa and thinking that the cpa is just minding the store for them and not talking to them as opposed to really consulting with them and helping them with those inventory issues, the receivables issues, or whatever it might be that’s important to them.
steven: good points, and it also is the result of clients becoming a little bit more sophisticated today to start asking the questions because they read a lot, they want their business to not be successful short term but, “what can you do for me, mr. or ms. cpa, in terms of long-term performance?” they’re going to start asking questions of their cpa.
there are stories that i’ve heard where you could be at a cocktail reception and you’re talking to somebody who’s the cpa, and let’s say i’m the business owner, and i’m talking to the cpa, and they start mentioning something about saving on state-local tax, doing a review, and i say, “wait a minute. tell me more about that,” and the cpa explains. i said, “you know what? my own cpa doesn’t do that. i’m going to have to find out any–” i’m sure you’ve run into situations like that or heard anecdotal information.
judy: of course, that’s happened to all of us, but the other thing is, it comes from both sides. the cpa shouldn’t sit and wait for the client to ask about something they heard about. the responsibility is for us as accounting professionals to offer that and to tell the client what they need and create the opportunities that way as opposed to saying, “the client never asked for that.
the client never asked me to talk to them about my receivables and whether they were a year old, how old they were, and whether i was collecting properly. they never asked me that.” i’ve always been, and i know that you, when you worked in public county, and even in all the work you do, we tend to be proactive people. we put it out there. do you know what i mean? we’re the ones that are going after permission or agreement from the client to offer that kind of advice and those kinds of services. it’s a two-way street.
sometimes, the client doesn’t know what to ask, they don’t know what to ask for, and in some cases, they just assume they’re getting it like they might be getting at quickbooks, and they’ll get the financial statement that is pushed out by quickbooks, and it gets sent electronically to the client. they may think that there is some oversight, that there is some modicum of review before it goes to them when there isn’t. the whole issue of communication is so critical to the outcome both for the client, for the business owner, and for the cpa.
steven: it’s interesting because we both understand the dangers associated with assuming things. the client assumes the cpa did this. what could basically be the consequences of the client assuming that there’s been analysis on the cpa’s part when, in reality, the cpa just looked at the transactions that generated [crosstalk], or didn’t?
judy: sometimes, especially in a cash basis business, there may be deposits or there may be transactions coming in that look like deposits or cash in the ordinary course of business, and they’re recorded in the ordinary course of business. the quickbooks person is debiting cash and crediting income, but the reality is, maybe it didn’t come from the delivery of services. maybe it came from someplace else.
maybe it was a refund for something, maybe it was a loan of some kind. without looking at anything, if the cpa doesn’t look at it, the recorder of transactions is going to make some assumptions based on the lack of knowledge that they have about the business and send it back to the client. in the case that you brought up, the client assuming that it must be okay, that the cpa must have looked at it before the client received it, but in fact, nobody looked at it. the person doing quickbooks is not an educated person when it comes to accounting principles and financial statements. they are a technician that understands how quickbooks works.
steven: it’s like taking an amorphous blob of financial information, just put it in the form of a financial statement.
judy: right.
steven: it’s the expectations. that’s the way the profession was always viewed. you and i have talked about this on numerous occasions. if you really don’t understand the client’s business, then you don’t know how those numbers were generated and if those numbers are legitimate. one of the founding tenets of the code of professional conduct, if you will, it’s “do professional care,” but we also learned when we were in school that you tour the client’s operations, if you will, just to learn a little bit about it, especially for the new professionals that are coming into the profession.
they have to understand that it’s not just numbers, and providing a financial statement. if you’re talking about an audit, let’s say it was a 1231 year-end you’re giving the audit, march 31, you’re presenting the financial statement, and the client is already in the second quarter of their new year, and you’re providing the snapshot of what occurred the prior year, and you’re not providing any advice. now, that’s on a macro basis. if you’re talking on a micro basis with a smaller client, you’re just providing financial statements without any context or any value.
judy: you bring up the code of professional conduct, which is a really good point because not only are we expected to have competency in the principles or understand the client’s business, we have responsibility for due professional care, and we have a responsibility for proper supervision of those who work for us. if you have the accounting function going on without looking at the outcome on a monthly or quarterly basis, whatever it might be, i think that there’s a violation there in the code of professional conduct that says that there’s a lack of supervisory activity.
the engagement letter probably doesn’t say anything about it. maybe it’s different today, but certainly, even as early as a couple of years ago, i’m sure the engagement letter was just about monthly financial information or processing, that it really wasn’t descriptive enough on what was going to be done and what was not going to be done, that you couldn’t rely on what you’re going to get from my person doing quickbooks in the next room because it’s gone from her to you, and i need to be clear that i haven’t looked at that.
if you want me to look at that and you want my consultancy services, then this is what that means. you should charge for it. when i was saying, when we got into public accounting, it was all bundled in the same thing. when you were doing a financial statement and going out to the client, this is what the fee was, whether it was by the hour, or whether it was a standard amount each month. it was included in the fee. you got to be careful today and make sure that the client understands what is and is not included in the fee. it is then the opportunity to make more money.
steven: yes, that was one of the things i was going to mention, that it always comes back from the client’s perspective. “how much is this going to cost me?” now, if you find additional things that would help the client, well, that’s not really what i asked for. you wrote this out in the engagement letter of what you’re going to do, a, b, and c. now, you’re coming back to me with some additional stuff. the fees, it’s always fees. how does the cpa respond to something like that?
judy: it is a matter of fees, and maybe the fee for the client needs to be bundled in a different way, but then the engagement letter should all also have an addendum to it. it should also have something that says exactly what you’re going to do because if you don’t do that, the expectation is that the client’ is going to have higher expectations than often some smaller practitioners are going to deliver. it’s not a meeting of the mind unless you describe it properly and you agree on it.
steven: it also brings up something you and i have been exposed to for years that people have talked about, this value billing. don’t be afraid to ask for more because the return on the client’s investment will be either to generate more income or to reduce operating costs. that’s like a leap of faith for the client to start looking at this and say, “whoa, this is more than i thought.” then, it’s up to– how will the cpa go about selling the idea of value billing?
judy: that’s an interesting point because a lot of smaller practitioners have billing rates that are, in my opinion, too low. they’ve been in public accounting for 30 years, 40 years, maybe even 50 years. their billing rates should be, let’s say, $350 or $400 for that advice that they’ve accumulated all this time, but they’re only billing $190 an hour. then, at some point, a cpa may say, “they’re not paying me to do this. they’re not paying me enough to sit and look at this.”
it’s that, “what’s it worth? what’s the value of it?” i took a course in billing rates and billing procedures a long time ago. there was a guy that was going around doing a lot of seminars on it. he used to say, “stand in front of the mirror and tell the client what the billing rate is for that.” when you stop laughing is when you know you’ve reached the level of an appropriate billing rate. somebody, maybe, who’s charging $175 or $190 as a partner should stand in front of the mirror and start at $350 or $400. at the point at which you can say it without laughing, smaller practitioners will find that they can make a lot more money for what they’re doing because they have way more expertise. they always say, “it’s not the hour that i talk to you, it’s all those hours that i spent.” understanding these issues that you really need to be remunerated for.
steven: exactly. it’s also from the client’s perspective that if he hears about it or she hears about the billing rates, they’re always looking to get lower. a lot of times, there’s this perception that if somebody is charging too low, maybe the quality of the product is not there. if you paid too low for something, you could lose everything because the service wasn’t worth it anyway, and if you pay a little bit more, you lose a little bit because you budgeted for a certain amount. there’s quality behind it. i don’t think anybody is going to charge $350, $400 for lousy work.
judy: right. i used to do that with tax audits. if a client was being audited, my billing rate for audit work was always more than my general billing rate because the responsibility and the preparation, and the intensity of those meetings when you would meet face-to-face with an irs agent, it’s way different than just looking at a financial statement and then meeting with the client. you have to understand yourself, that it’s worth something more than what you’ve been billing.
steven: we began this discussion talking about the advent of technology playing a bigger role in the profession. how can a cpa go about identifying the different types of services for which technology can be applied? there are some businesses that are a lot more sophisticated or complex than others. how can a deliverable be sold? how does a cpa take a more effective approach in selling these types of services that the client never even gave any thought about?
judy: it goes back to the principles that underlie each one of those types of businesses, whether it’s manufacturing, and you understand like we were talking about the supply chain. you have to be comfortable that you have the knowledge of that industry, which we’re supposed to be doing anyway from our code of conduct, that it is worth something. it’s that extra layer over and above accounting, over and above bookkeeping, over and above the back room.
you want me to look at your inventory levels. you want me to look at the month of may and say, “last may, the inventory didn’t look like this,” or, “even in february, inventory didn’t look like this,” or, “work-in-process didn’t look like this,” or, “receivables didn’t look like this.” you have to be able to be comfortable saying to the client, “i’m going to look at this on a comparative basis, and i’m going to tell you when it’s off the tracks.” that’s what you’re paying me for, to scrutinize it because that’s harder for you to go back and look at than it is for me to sit back and look at that kind of information.
steven: because the idea of looking for more– i won’t call it exotic but more sophisticated types of services using technology and the capabilities that technologies provide. how do you think that new professionals coming into the profession will start to view the practice of public accounting and how they can maybe chart their own career path? because it’s not like what you and i did 40 years ago.
i mean, particularly when it comes to having more client exposure, i think about the idea of a partner bringing in a first or second-year person. he doesn’t have to ask any questions in the client meeting, but by osmosis, internalizing the type of questions and listening to the client’s answers, that gets them better prepared to provide the services or to look for things in the course of the engagement. how might that change going forward as opposed to when you and i first started?
judy: when i was building my practice in law firm management, i had two people that were on staff that were working with me in that arena. i was attending the partner meetings. we created an executive committee at the law firm, and i was part of those executive committee meetings. i drew up the agenda with the managing partner and i was in all of the discussions.
i couldn’t take them with me to all of those meetings, but i certainly came back, i wrote up everything that went on at that meeting, and we sat and we talked about it because they needed to understand the business of law. they needed to learn how to run that business because when they do the tax return, or they’re doing any other work, or maybe they went in and they were the one that was looking at receivables and making a judgment as to what is old and what’s too old, if i don’t teach them about the business of law, then they don’t know what they’re looking at.
sometimes, you can’t take them with you. that’s what they used to profess in our day, take them with you. sometimes, you can’t do that, but we have a responsibility to teach them the competence to be competent in the business of the client.
steven: that also means that undergraduate curriculum is going to be different too, not just technology but some of the– what we call life skills, the ability to communicate because you’re dealing with technology, but now you have to communicate in an articulate fashion to the client about the consequences of doing an action or not doing that action. other variables that go into the meeting of the minds, how are schools going to be looking at this, or what should they be looking at to prepare the students with life skills so when they enter the cpa profession, they’ll be best equipped to chart their career path?
judy: i’m hoping that in this cpa evolution that the profession is working on, that the fifth year of education will change a bit and it will address some of these issues and allow them to be more effective. we’ve talked about the fact that companies along with firms are hiring technology students who came through the ranks of technology. the question is, do you hire a technologist and teach them the business and the issues, or do you hire – like in tax, we’ve talked about this at our tax conference at the micpa.
did you take a tax person and did you teach them technology, or you’re hiring a technologist and teaching them the tax? they’re hiring the technologist and teaching them the tax. they find that that’s a better pathway. there’s no question that the sides of those equations don’t live without the other because it goes back to our very premise. you can’t just be a technologist. you have to understand what you’re looking at in order to be effective and use it as a tool to help the client. that’s the ultimate goal. the ultimate goal is to help the client be as successful as they can and want to be, and you can’t do that if all you’re doing is recording transactions however that looks.
steven: absolutely. again, technology is simply a tool. not the panacea for success in helping the client. it’s just merely the tool. it’s not just about adopting the right technology. firms need to know how to package it using their knowledge of technology, marketing, delivering, and charging for those services.
judy: right. one of the things that bill reeb talked about at engage was that you have to put the right people in charge of these offerings to clients or it doesn’t work, because if you just put one person who’s going to concentrate on selling the accounting services, you’re not going to get to the point where you’re actually delivering the outside cfo services or the other consulting services that you could offer.
you have to have that blended outlook that overlays the accounting services. there was another article that you and i shared where they talked about piling newer technology on top of the existing technology. that’s not the solution either without the proper analysis and the proper answers to why. why are we doing all of this? nice to have, but why are we actually using all this technology? where is it going to get me?
steven: absolutely. the most important question is why. it’s not how. it’s not when or where. it’s why.
i think we covered a lot of ground today. i really appreciate your taking the time for providing your insights about how cpas can think beyond the latest tech tools and how to use a more big picture approach to provide value to clients. thank you very much, judy. it’s always been a pleasure.
judy: thank you. thank you for the opportunity. i really appreciate it. it’s always great to talk about these professional issues with you, steve.