Friday, July 24, 2009

You are the trusted advisor


The accounting professional has always been seen as a business advisor - a trusted partner that understands the conditions that impact business performance. This advisor not only reports on the business performance, but may make recommendations or judgments on certain situations or processes that are key to the business model. Leveraging your direct participation in your clients' financial systems can be a very successful component of practice building - mining out other opportunities that may exist in current client engagements.

In some cases, your clients will want to process their own bookkeeping in-house. Rather than taking a hands- off approach to these clients, engage them by providing training or consulting services to support their in-house bookkeeping.

If your firm provides real-time guidance and reviews, the quality of the financial information is far better and requires less work to adjust and report. Ultimately, saving your client time and money will reward your practice with more opportunity to engage the client in other efforts.