will there be more work? most likely.
by alan anderson, cpa
transforming audit for the future
when you’re a client-serving firm, the service doesn’t end with delivery of the financial statement audit. client service should be perceived as a continuous, ongoing process that is supported by the culture with accountability measures. client service is a relationship that is developed by habit.
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cpa firms tend to get bogged down in the work, so i developed a process for developing those relationships. i would sit down with the team and tell the senior accountant and the manager that they needed to meet at least quarterly with their counterpart at the client. the senior would meet with the controller. the manager would meet with the cfo. my responsibility would be to meet with the ceo or the business owner. these meetings could be phone calls but at least one of those meetings would be for lunch. if they desired, the senior and manager could have a joint lunch meeting with the controller and the cfo.
these meetings were not just to talk about the audit, but to talk about what else was going on in the business. there wasn’t a fixed agenda, but team members had a responsibility to develop a relationship with their counterpart at the client. the concept we built into our culture was that these meetings were at least as important as chargeable time.
these meetings needed to be scheduled in the calendar so i could see that they were happening. we built structure and organization into these meetings to establish a rhythm and to develop the habit of client contact. otherwise, client relationships tend to be ad hoc and can easily fall by the wayside when team members get too busy.
we would share the intelligence we gathered by documenting the conversation in our crm. we were using salesforce at the time. after a meeting, the team member would write a debrief about the meeting so we could all keep track of what was happening with that client. firms that are using workflow tools to manage their audit workflow can easily add client relationship tasks to those tools.
i learned the importance of these regular client meetings from my mentor at mcgladrey, who would go out to meet with clients when times were slow so he could, in his words, “create a crisis.” and then he would come back to the office with a new project to fix that crisis. i learned from him that you don’t just go out to the client for the pleasure of the conversation, but you go out with a set of questions you want to ask to find out what was going on.
those questions were not formulated with the agenda of identifying a service to sell, but the intention was to listen extremely well. in that listening, often an opportunity would surface. the clients saw value in those meetings because they could express what was keeping them up at night. by understanding what the client values, only then can you provide value to the client.
now there were times when we were so busy that i was reluctant to go have lunch with a client because i knew i would walk away with a project or something they wanted us to investigate. but i knew that somehow, we would figure out how to get it done.
the benefits of establishing the habit of regular contact and deeper relationships extended far beyond the simple act of making a friend. the biggest benefit was that through careful attention to the client’s concerns, we always had more projects. my metric was if the audit fee was $20,000, then i was pretty sure we would get at least $20,000 more in additional services throughout the year.
the second big benefit was that problems with client readiness improved drastically when the controller and the cfo had strong relationships with the audit senior and manager. they didn’t want to let the audit team down by not being ready. through all those conversations and lunch meetings, they knew that the auditors cared and that they were engaged.
this contrasts with auditors who only see the client once a year, and the audit senior emails a sloppy and incomplete pbc list. the controller won’t believe that the senior sees them as a high priority when they get schedules that don’t have the right dates on them because the senior just hastily cut and pasted the new schedules from last year’s list. the message that sends the controller is that they are just a cut and paste in the auditor’s life.
another benefit to these meetings between audit team members and their counterparts is that you cement the relationships at the right levels. at many firms, the partners have a greater connection and loyalty to the cfo or the controller than they do with the owner or ceo or upper-level manager of the business. but the partners who bring value to the audit are the ones who recognize that while the audit managers they oversee need to have that close working relationship with the cfo or controller, the partner needs to have the relationship with the owner.
when the partner’s loyalty is to the controller, this demeans the cpa firm because we end up protecting inept controllers. we don’t tell the topline executive that their controller sucks because we think that if the controller gets mad at us, they might get us fired. if the relationships are aligned at the right levels, we shouldn’t really care what the controller thinks. they’re not the one signing the check for the audit fee. we owe it to the owner or manager to be very transparent about the skill sets of the cfo or the controller.