five ways to shift some of the heavy lifting to your lighter months.
by sandi leyva
the complete guide to marketing for tax & accounting firms
for some of you, summer can be a slow time in your business. if you do taxes, all the action is during busy season and in september if you have a lot of extensions. if you’re a bookkeeper, your busiest month is january. and if you do software consulting or training, it slows down in july and august.
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if you have a good relationship with your clients, you might be able to move some of your busy season work to off season. and if you have clients who are ready to take advantage of new technologies, there are lots of opportunities in the cloud. here are five quick ideas to stir up some revenue in the slower summer months.
1. mid-year tax planning reviews
convert your annual clients into semi-annual clients by piquing their interest about how their business is doing mid-year. offer to get their books caught up and provide some reports, a semi-annual review and/or some tax planning. the old saying here is “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” and after-the-fact clients really miss out on some great decision-making information they could act on earlier.
the really good part is you are partially freed up during busy season to take more clients (or just sleep).
2. move clients to the cloud
some clients that you have on quickbooks desktop software could benefit from moving to the cloud, whether it’s simply hosting the desktop or moving to an app such as quickbooks online or xero. encourage clients to move now rather than in the middle of your busiest times.
even if you prefer to wait until year-end so clients have a clean break, you can do a lot of prep work now, such as the selling, demos, cleanup and training that go with a conversion.
3. training
do your clients keep making the same mistakes month after month? do they need to learn their new cloud software better? do they need to know the new health care bill requirements? offer training sessions to answer your clients’ questions.
4. recordkeeping and year-end readiness
don’t wait until january to find out your client doesn’t know what a w-9 is. you can offer to collect them now, plus provide your client with a procedure for collecting the ones between now and year-end. it will save you time later when there’s no time to spare.
5. catch-up
encourage bookkeeping prospects and clients who haven’t done their books in a few years to hire you now and not in march! you might want to offer a special or simply let it be known you can take on large projects easily this time of year.
hopefully these five ideas will keep you busy in the summer and help you boost your summer revenue.