automate more? check. sell more services to the same clients? check.
by hitendra patil
client accounting services: the definitive success guide
if you feel offering client accounting services will bring in a lesser profit for you compared to the other services you are offering now, you may feel it is not a fit. it may be because you may have experienced others providing a lower rate, lower profitability commoditized services that you believe are actually cas offerings. if so, it is not your fault because there has been a great deal of confusion in the profession about what exactly is cas.
more: why firms shy away from cas | how to tell who fits cas | cut cost by three quarters with cas? yes, please | client wants vs. needs | the big money in cas for small firms | the mindset you need for client accounting services
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you may still feel that some of the cas components are low-profit services, but those are like essential building blocks that lead to higher value, higher priced and hence higher profit services that you can sell to the same clients. what steps can you take to make cas one of the most profitable service segments for your firm?
first, let us see what the 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 cas survey respondents revealed about cas profitability:
- seventy-seven percent of respondents agreed that cas provided superior revenue growth. (only 7 percent disagreed. others were “neutral” because many such respondents had possibly just started their cas practices, and they were yet to compare cas profitability with other services.)
- sixty-two percent of respondents agreed that cas provided superior profit growth. (only 10 percent disagreed. others were “neutral.”)
these figures show that cas is superior compared to other services in bringing in new clients and also in generating profit. i have been regularly interacting with many cas firms over many many months, and i have seen some key differences in how more profitable cas firms operate compared to others. here are some of the proven ways to make cas profitable for your firm.
- again, take a hard look at your current services and identify what can get more and more automated by technology. for example, i have seen continuously 85-90 percent manual work reduction and the resultant 65 percent reduction in cost and 55-60 percent increase in profit in “write-up” work by deploying just one automation feature, i.e., bank feeds (accounting software pulls transactions data from bank and credit card accounts, intelligently identifies which transaction to allocate to which vendor/payee and hence to which account). and these results were possible with firms using bank feeds for about 75 percent of firms’ write-up clients. what it also did was the double-whammy positive impact on profitability by enabling the same number of staff to process between two to three times more number of clients. in other words, without adding resources or costs, your firm can service many more clients, i.e., achieve revenue as well as profit growth.
- there are cloud accounting and payroll solutions that are highly automated to enable your firm to send out routine, frequent and periodic alerts, notifications and emails to clients, automatically on completing some steps in your processes and/or reaching some threshold numbers in clients’ financials, e.g., when should the client have money in the account for an upcoming payroll; when client’s payables or receivable go above or below a certain amount, etc. such “client service automation” reduces the time it takes for your staff to manually identify such important instances and one-by-one email to the clients. your client service costs can go down quite a bit with such implementations. a ballpark estimate is that it can save approximately one hour per month per client in purely “client service” efforts. now you do the math of how many clients and staff you have, how much annual cost it can save for your firm, and what will be the impact on your firm’s profitability.
- provide a taste of cas insights to your non-cas clients. even without doing full-scale, end-to-end accounting work for your non-cas clients, you may still be able to identify insights that are relevant and useful for such clients. share such insights with them for one or two quarters stating something like, “here are some examples of insights that business owners find highly valuable. these are delivered as part of our silver-cas package. because of these insights, businesses can <provide a list of measurable benefits of such insights> <e.g., save on costs, do their tax planning better, reduce money blocked in inventories, price their products for more profit, etc.> which more than pays for the nominal additional investment into our silver-cas package.” of course, before doing this, review the financials of non-cas clients to know which clients will greatly benefit from your higher-level cas package. always make sure that you are doing this not just to get additional revenue from your clients but to deliver additional value to them so that they are thankful to you for making them aware that you can provide better help to their business.
- the cas survey results also revealed that on average, non-cas firms provide six different types of services, whereas cas firms provide an average of 11 services. in other words, cas firms develop capabilities to provide nearly double the number of services to generate more revenue and profit from their clients. to clarify, non-cas and cas firms of similar sizes provided this information, which indicates that cas firms do not necessarily have far more number of clients, but quite a few of their clients buy more number of services from the firms. if the cas firms did not offer such additional services, those clients would have obtained such services from other firms and ultimately become clients of such other firms. an example of how this works is a cpa firm from salem, indiana. in about five years, the firm increased revenue by about 75 percent, and cas/cfo services make up 65 percent of total revenue (up from 25 percent earlier). the firm now has clients in 20 different states (earlier mainly from indiana and a couple of bordering states). but the strongest indicator of the cas success is that the firm’s total number of clients has not changed, which shows that the firm is able to generate more revenue from the same clients because of cas capabilities. i have interacted with this firm’s owner multiple times, and i know the firm has not increased its staffing much. in other words, the firm’s profitability has increased too because of per-staff revenue going up much higher. hence, for increasing your firm’s cas profitability, invest in creating capabilities to offer more types of services.
- remote staffing/outsourcing and offshoring can not only help you overcome staffing challenges but also address profitability concerns.