What changes are you going to make before another tax season hits you?

I’ve recently got back from a tour with CCH, where I was a key note speaker on their “Practice Innovation Tour” visiting Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg, Red Deer and Vancouver.

Where ever we went, the issues facing practitioners were almost identical across the country:

• Finding & Keeping good employees
• Using technology to improve profitability
• Managing work flow in the office
• Finding ‘Best Practices’ to run their firms

It seems that all firms share common concerns.

I had the absolute pleasure of co-presenting with Mark Holton, an Australian practitioner who was one of the first people to use Profit Driver in his firm to give clients what they really want – practical help in improving their business performance.

For over eight years Mark has been pioneering the use of Profit Driver, and has now done over 800 presentations with clients.
So it was pure poetry in motion to watch him go through his presentation, where he showed delegates exactly how he gave a consultation using Profit Driver.

Imagine sitting with one of your best clients, and walking through any number of ‘what-if’ scenarios with them and viewing the effect on their business results BEFORE they made any decision.

For example, ‘what would happen to my business if I bought a factory instead of continuing to rent my existing premises?’ or ‘How would my cash flow look if I collected my receivables a few days earlier than last year?’ or what would happen if interest rates when up by half a percent?’ and so on.

These are real-life examples of the type of scenario management that Profit Driver can calculate and then show to the client in graphical form – a format that many clients will understand a lot easier than reams of reports that look like financial statements and cash flow forecasts.

Putting the information in a format that the client can understand is the key.

How often do you think clients, despite your best efforts, leave their year-end meeting with you truly understanding the numbers in the financial statements? If you’re brutally honest, I’d wager that it’s not that many.

Sure, clients understand how well their doing by how much cash they have in the bank, but that’s not the whole picture.
While cash flow is very important, we all know, there’s much more to running a business than that.

This is where many practitioners fail to deliver what their clients really want – clarity, understanding and direction.
Yet, we are ideally placed to provide this, we just (in most cases) don’t have the time required to be able to do so.|

If you don’t give your clients what they really want, eventually they will find someone else who will.

Don’t let that happen to you!

In May 2010, we will be doing it all again, and I urge you to come out and see the technology available to you.

Only a year or two ago we were all thinking ‘wouldn’t it be nice if, when scanning T-slips, the software could populate the tax forms by reading the numbers on the forms and dropping them in?’ well, now it can.

Scanning and OCR (optical character recognition) now combines to deliver exactly that in the CCH Scan and CCH Document programs.

This also reduces time your staff will have to devote to filling in the boxes this coming tax season, while they can also have an automated clock recording the time they spend on each client’s file, removing the need to complete time sheets and wait for the data to be entered into your time and billing system.

Also, the CCH Accountants suite will give you, in real-time, up to date management reports, monitoring the progress of each client’s file in the office, with up to the minute work in progress reports, by client, staff member, partner or any other configuration you’d like.

If a client changes address, make the change once, and all your client’s files are automatically updated, removing the risk of error (if you have more than one database) and cutting down the time to do the task dramatically.

All in all, technology is moving us upwards and onwards, so my question to you this month is what are you going to do about it before another tax season hits?

There are, of course, many other excellent sources of software out there, your choices are wide and varied, so check out all your options, of course, but I think the CCH Accountants Suite has to be on your shortlist of potential changes.

And if you need some help with where to start – look at scanning documents, going paperless and implementing Profit Driver. You’ll be glad you did.