how to create effective systems.
by penny breslin
it’s not just the numbers
open and clear communication is essential when you provide back office support (bos) services. you cannot take on this type of work and not stay on top of it. previous examples have shown what happens when you do it right. here’s what happens when you don’t.
more: how to craft a service level agreement | three examples: pricing your bos value add | use timesheets for productivity, not billing | revisit your back office support procedures | federated search: what it is, why it matters | accounting tech tools to minimize your pain | do your apps play well with others? | it’s ok to have favorite clients | ten questions for teamwork | yes, you can be an outsourcer
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case study: when you don’t keep up your side of the agreement
a cpa wanting to provide bos services to his clients contacted us to help with the first setup. the software of choice by the business owner was quickbooks.
surprisingly, the cpa and his staff were unfamiliar with quickbooks, so we recommended at least the bookkeeping manager (bkm) go through training and certification. that never happened.
we also recommended bill.com, which the client loved and implemented successfully. we performed the first sync for the accountant and set up a schedule of syncs going forward. the cpa didn’t sync bill.com to quickbooks for more than seven months. as you can imagine, the ensuing mess took a lot of hours to correct.
the client wanted detailed daily reports and so we set up his access to the asp where he happily placed his quickbooks file, giving him access to all the reports he wanted. because the sync was not done and the bkm only knew how to do journal entries, the detailed reports never happened.
after some initial analysis of what went wrong, we discovered that not once after he initiated this service with a client who requested this service did he change the manner in which he was supporting this client. this client had done everything the cpa asked:
- moved his quickbooks to the cloud,
- linked all his accounts to the online banking features of quickbooks,
- trained his staff to enter the receivables (as it was easier for them to do this), and
- utilized bill.com for ap approval and payments.
the cpa/bos was to manage the reconciliations and cash flow management reports, develop detailed reports that the owner requested for his business and keep the accounting file up to date. not only had the bill.com sync not been initiated, but by midyear no moneys were reconciled from the undeposited funds. even typical financial reports were worthless. the lead bkm was not even aware of the schedule of work that was required.
we often hear from cpas that their clients just do not give them the information they need when they need it. another excuse is, “my clients would not give me access to their online accounts even through the accounting software.” business owners need an accountant to make sure that the numbers are in the right places so they can make good business decisions. the cpa in this example forgot what was important and went back to putting out daily fires. he never focused on process improvement, nor was his staff ever brought in to be part of the team.
this virtual bos service is very profitable when it is systematized, managed and directed. when done well, it is a win-win situation for you, your staff and your client. this example shows how it can easily (or not so easily) become a disaster.
adapting to the communication needs of your clients
part of dealing with our client base is transparent communication with varying levels of contact. we adjust to the needs of the work and the client. some want pure slack communication only. frankly, those are the lower-level contacts and tend to be non-growing clients. some want slack with zoom conferences on a set schedule and occasionally ask for a zoom on the fly. they also allow us to ask for one and, even though the hours are weird, they accommodate our request. our weirdest is the client with ceo and cfo in spain, cpa in florida, administration in peru, me in wyoming and of course the ladies in chennai. those are 3 a.m. zoom meetings for me.
the importance of keeping up communication during crises
a few weeks into the covid-19 lockdown of 2020, we had a scheduled bimonthly meeting with a client firm in texas. the first questions are always “how are you doing? how is your family? are you safe? do you feel ok?” and those questions go both ways. i am always impressed with the care and concern they have for our team in chennai.
another thing we were cognizant of during the covid-19 lockdown was the work falloff for accounting firms dealing with small businesses. even though we were still receiving the monthly base work, the transaction levels were down. we work with all our clients on adjustable terms and we support them as they support us. this particular firm in texas was heavy on client accounting services and had opted to not do tax returns early on. but rather than seeing a drop in our tasked work, we saw a pretty solid steady stream of work, so i asked him some of the questions that came up on a webinar put on by accountingweb.:
- how are you interacting with your clients during covid-19?
- what are your thoughts on charging your clients during this time?
- are you working on any tax returns regardless of the deferred timeframe?
- have you been seeing an increase or decrease in work?
we noticed a trend in the work we were receiving. we were drawing patterns based on the firm ecology. we could tell in advance which ones were going to do well and so i wanted to see if what we thought we saw happening was confirmed. this particular firm was our first dive into our theory and the subsequent meetings held the pattern.
the firm managing partner said they had planned and implemented a new digital marketing program just before shelter-in-place became de rigueur. in doing so, they were getting contacted by businesses in their targeted markets. and they were picking up clients that already had a tax accountant and/or write-up accountant. the partner told me, “i know i told you years ago we were not going to do tax returns, but it seems now we are.”
in one week, they had engagements with four companies that typically paid their cpa an average of $1,500 annually for a tax return and tax advice. however, since the advent of covid-19 these small business owners had not heard from their accountant. the partner gave them some free advice on the government loan programs, some methods for cash flow management and signed them up for an average $400 per month engagement to provide full support with a tax return. four new clients all opted to change from their current firm, because that firm appears to them as only a tax compliance function and never called or contacted them.
our meetings with other clients over the next two weeks gave us similar feedback. work was keeping steady because of the contact, transparency and commitment to reaching out and advising clients in a supportive manner.
sandi levya with accountant’saccelerator.com put on a wonderful series of how firms can holistically assist their clients with a particular focus on the cash flow projections they will certainly need.
technology makes communication easy
a distinguishing factor in today’s interconnected society is clear and transparent communication. staying in touch with clients has never been as easy as with today’s cloud technologies. there are a myriad of applications that will allow for internal as well as external communication. teamwork from office 365, google g-suite, skype, liscio and slack are common in this industry.
below is our case for slack. even though slack is the story here, it is by no means the choice you must make. slack works for our firm, but we also must use other methods with some of our accounting firm clients and those are just as effective. and by stating they are effective, that means they are being used consistently across the firm and by the clients.
if you implement a communication technology, set up rules of engagement. if you only have a percentage of your team on the system, it’s not going to be effective. this is teamwide. your team is everyone who communicates with you in the course of doing the work. this includes the non-accounting staff and your client.
a case for slack
emails are messy and often unsecured. we all know this and as a group – accountants, tax professionals and bookkeepers – we are forever jumping through hoops to exchange information with our clients when email is not a suitable option.
several years ago, we instituted slack within our company. since that first setup of one channel, we have maximized and continue to maximize this communication method. slack is texting on steroids. emails have become secondary and we utilize them at a minimum. however, we do have an integration with our slack to push emails to different channels automatically. for example, anything that comes into our website as a lead automatically gets pushed to the #marketing channel. we can also direct emails from specific clients to go directly to their channel on our slack. nothing unique there as some of the cloud-based workflows we use for clients also have this neat feature of pushing emails to workflows. karbon is one example of such an app.
internally we communicate exclusively with slack. having a virtual workforce, slack has become the hub for texting, calling and videoconferencing. we quickly integrated our zoom to slack so anyone with permissions can open a meeting right from within a slack channel and the link to the recording is then saved to the slack channel. all we have to do is type /zoom, hit return and voila the meeting is ready.
although we are all on the same cloud server internally, slack is a quick way to share any local files from a client that are needed fast and may even have to be uploaded from a mobile phone or tablet securely. we really do not encourage relying on slack as the best method for transferring files for internal use, but when our clients have something local we need right away, we have found it very handy. the files are in the slack channel in seconds and can be viewed from within that channel, downloaded to our server or sent to our linked dropbox or google drive.
later we delete those files. that task is assigned to an admin as a recurring task. having a good deletion and cleanup policy is important.
each of our clients has their own personal slack channel. as a result of slack, our level of communication and response from clients has increased immeasurably. the transparency is helpful to the client and to our bookkeeping managers, who are the admins of the slack. our bookkeeping managers have a 60,000-foot view of all work and can in seconds click into a conversation and supply feedback or support.
slack does have a price tag but so far, the benefits outweigh the cost. in fact, all technology has a cost, but the good news is that we have seen a correlation between increasing our use of slack and increases in requests for work – which has in turn been an increase in revenue.