Introducing your bundled service packages

Now that busy season has passed, it’s time to assess your firm’s workflow, the value you provide to clients and opportunities to improve. Some of the common challenges cited this season include clients delivering tax information late, cleaning up accounting records during busy season and probably the most difficult challenge, long client conversations about tax liability changes. Most of these challenges are a result of traditional workflows and services that haven’t been updated in years or even decades.

With a few changes, some firms are leading with higher value planning and advisory services for all of their clients and creating a collaborative advisory workflow to proactively engage clients all year. The result is avoiding uncomfortable client surprises, reducing the need to nag clients for information, streamlining workflows and delivering a much better client tax experience.

Firms who are ready to lead with tax planning services and embrace an advisory workflow to proactively collaborate with business clients all year often ask how to communicate the changes and new services to clients. It’s important to communicate how your services are changing, why you are making changes and the benefits for clients. Your clients already trust you and respect your recommendations.

Here is a sample communication outline, including the topic of bundled services, to modify and use with your business clients. Of course, you’ll want to customize your list of tax planning and advisory services and have pricing ready for client meetings.

Introducing our Tax Planning and Advisory Services

Our goal is to minimize your tax liability and help power prosperity for your business to reach your financial goals. With tax reform changes, we are updating our service offering to include tax planning with all our engagements and to focus more on tax strategies to save you money, instead of just tax preparation.

With advances in technology, we’re moving our services to a cloud accounting platform, where we can easily engage and collaborate with you during the year, which saves you time collecting and organizing tax and accounting information. The cloud enables us to be more engaged with your business, and helps you automate more of the back office work so you can focus on running the business.

We are including tax planning and a cloud accounting platform in all three of our levels of service. The following summarizes the services included in each bundle, and we look forward to discussing the right level of service for you and your business.

Why Businesses Choose Cloud

More than 80 percent of new businesses choose cloud applications to run their operations. The cloud is better, faster and cheaper than traditional software applications. Desktop- and server-based software leads to siloed information, enormous application and data maintenance, and doesn’t scale well across devices or locations. The cloud helps solve all of these problems and scales as your business grows in size and geographic reach.

We use and recommend QuickBooks® Online (QBO) because it:

• • • • Provides mobile access to data. Over 96 percent of small businesses rely on the internet to run their business; more than 67 percent of business owners say they could not survive without mobile access to data. QBO easily renders data and applications on PC, Macs, and mobile phones, provides multi-user access, and increases collaboration.
      • Automates work. Small businesses spend more than 21 hours a week on accounting-related work, and QBO automation cuts that time in half, saving the average business more than 40 hours per month. The cloud also facilitates outsourcing and work sharing.
      • Improves cash flow. QBO can automate subscription billings, facilitate integrated shopping carts, automate electronic invoicing and collection, and provide quick access to operating loans.
      • Grows the business. The cloud removes geographic barriers to reach new customers, enables faster response to new leads, helps finalize proposals in the field, and helps you better manage remote employees, which all help the business grow faster. Over 96% of customers agree that QuickBooks helps them grow their business, often using integrated apps from third party providers that easily integrate.
      • System maintenance and security. The cloud eliminates the need to install software, maintain, update, backup, swap data files, or provide support servers and workstations. QuickBooks utilizes strong encryption and multi-factor authentication to better safeguard data than desktop storage.

Are you ready to have the conversion with your business clients to begin the move to advisory services? Here is a sample brochure that may help you as you discuss moving to the cloud.