managing for profits beats price-cutting.
by frank stitely
the relentless cpa
in the beginning, the irs created the 1040 and saw that it was good. shortly thereafter, the first cpa crawled out of the primordial muck and asked, “how can i make money preparing tax returns?”
more stitely: what the value-pricers get wrong | four amusing millennial myths | the annual tax meeting is dead. clients killed it. | 3 rules for asking great tax-return questions | where workflow management runs off the rails | three ways your office tech is ruining your firm | when value pricing works | the 4 dark clouds hovering over cloud accounting software | value billing on the 19th hole | the irs and big data gone bad | will zero data entry end your tax practice? | three trends that will transform your tax practice or eliminate it | value, billem & dunn: a value billing case study | how to make an extra $72,000 by working smarter
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the green eyeshade-wearing neanderthal cpas eventually evolved into cpas experienced in electronic data management, but today, we are still trying to answer that first question.
effective project management isn’t the entire answer, but it’s an essential building block.
in the neanderthal era, cpas made a good living transcribing numbers onto paper forms. we evolved into typing numbers into personal computers. we wowed clients by creating beautiful 1040 replicas on blank paper using software magic. life couldn’t get much better in our garden of eden. we were the gods of the tax universe.
then turbotax killed that era as surely as an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. cpas evolved to preparing tax returns people couldn’t prepare using turbotax, but we still didn’t really change what we did or how we did it. individual tax preparers prepared returns from beginning to end, from data entry to printing to e-filing. we functioned as autonomous little islands within firms, venturing out of our offices for lunch and bathroom breaks. every return was an individually crafted masterpiece. no two returns from a firm were prepared in the same way.
then the era of price competition began.
with price competition came commoditization, which is where we find ourselves today.
clients perceive no difference between tax returns prepared by top practitioners and anyone else. throughout the 1990s, firms with $1,000 minimum 1040 prices lost 20 percent of their clients every year.
no problem. we could just specialize in business tax returns. diyers and bookkeepers will never be able to prepare 1120s. not true. they don’t prepare them well, but they do prepare them. and they compete with us.
clients can no more judge good 1120s than they can good 1040s, and they don’t care. just tell them how little it will cost. we all know the difference between a good tax return and a bad one. the good one has a higher refund.
welcome to the commoditized 1120 era.
3 responses to “the cure for commoditization”
frank stitely
this is a snippet from the book “the relentless cpa” that you can see to the right of the article. the answer is there as well as a whole lot more about running a firm in the 21st century.
jonathan tierney
i thought there was a cure for commoditization here?
卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 research
effective project management isn’t the whole answer, but it’s part of it.