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Five Tips & Tactics to Grow Your Accounting Firm

Are you overworked due to the increasing demands of your business? Managing clients, practice management, and business development demand tremendous work and time. These challenges can hinder the growth of your business and potentially cause you to lose business to competitors. To streamline business demands and work towards increasing revenue in the current market, we propose five tips and tactics to grow business faster in 2022. These methods help you focus on core competencies and improve your overall business operations.

1. Assure Client Satisfaction

Make client satisfaction a priority. This can be a challenge, as managing clients and their requirements can represent an extensive amount of work. However, as a business owner, your responsibility is to ensure that your clients are satisfied and that they feel like you have delivered exceptional service. It is an excellent idea to help them identify their core issues and scale their operations. This sets the stage for repeat business and recurring revenue.

Often today, many accounting firms provide additional, complementary services to their clients to help increase revenue. To accomplish this, these firms often partner with other companies to deliver these services while “selling them” as their own. Additionally, it is a great way to expand your business, products, and services.

2. Accounting Automation Tools

Start adopting and investing in technology that helps improve process automation, data integration, and machine learning to automate data processing tasks, gain insights for better decision-making, and quickly accept new trends and strategies. Integrating advanced accounting and business management software can help you automate regular tasks and reduce workload. Moreover, you can leverage your employees to do more comprehensive and strategic tasks. Many growing companies pursue these tactics to gain market share and leadership.

3. Strengthen Engagement Models

Listen to your client’s needs and concerns when engaging with them. Better collaboration allows teams to communicate efficiently and complete projects faster. Sometimes a single point of contact is more critical for a client to streamline communication, whereas at other times, interacting with the team performing the function or operation is a better strategy. If possible, remain flexible in how you engage with clients. Adopting seamless collaboration methods can allow businesses to perform well and allocate resources effectively.

4. Improve Existing Process

If you are looking for better ways to improve productivity and reduce workload in the organization, then focus on monitoring the existing business process. It will allow you to change weak strategies and improve operations and functions. Such steps can change the turnaround time of the projects, allocate resources more efficiently, and help distinguish business performance. There is always room for improvement, even if it is simply closing some process gaps. The sooner you start identifying these gaps in your current process, the sooner you can grow your business.

5. Say Yes to Outsourcing

Outsourcing provides expertise that can help you to scale your business operations. It is the best way to hire on-demand, experienced, dedicated resources to work on challenging tasks. Outsourcing firms have access to a talent pool that allows firms to obtain immediate solutions at competitive rates. Moreover, their pay-per-use model simultaneously helps manage costs.

Outsourcing Benefits

  • It helps you focus on core competencies
  • Expands your team
  • Reduces workload
  • Assistance with Project management
  • Supports timely delivery of projects
  • Benefits business thanks to detailed analysis and reports

Core Accounting offers a strategic partnership to clients to ensure steady business growth and confidence in delivering high-quality and accurate work.

Five Ways to Keep Your Books Up to Date

The three most important factors for keeping books up to date and clean are organization, consistency, and reconciliation. Managing and recording each transaction into correct accounts and books daily helps reduce the workload when reviewing your books. Likewise, regular bank reconciliation helps you crosscheck transactions and catch any mistakes quickly. This gives you a chance to rectify errors that can give you a headache later. Here are five tips to make sure your books are up to date:

Organization

To run a company effectively, business owners should streamline activities like managing invoices, paperwork, bills, and receipts. Organizing business documents reduces workload and creates an opportunity to save time. Moreover, it allows you to track information faster and easier. Nevertheless, you should organize your files chronologically and save each receipt in digital format for easy recovery. This is a great option to update your books faster.

Consistency

The simplest way to ensure your books are up to date is to follow a schedule and a process. Experts believe following a routine to keep your books updated can help reduce your overall workload when filing and reporting taxes.

To promote consistency, assign a specific time of your day to review your books, make updates, and perform bank reconciliation. In addition, you can also keep a note as a reminder for adding specific transactions into books. This way, you will not miss anything.

Automation

Technology advancement is necessary to run a successful business and reduce workload in today’s market. Implementing and integrating the latest technology can keep your books up to date and automate back-office tasks like payroll management, accounting, and bookkeeping. Accounting and bookkeeping software automatically connects with your banks, POS, and other systems, while collecting all the required information to update books without human errors.

Bank Reconciliation

Bank reconciliation is a crucial task to promote accuracy and rectify errors. It is advisable to crosscheck books and bank accounts for each transaction and record them now and then. Bank reconciliation is one of the best ways to review books and add missing details. It also allows you to understand your revenue and expenditures. Nevertheless, we suggest you separate personal and business accounts to keep track of your business expenses.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing offers an excellent opportunity to reduce workload and bring in the expertise required for the financial management of the business. If you have a heavy workload and do not have enough time to do bookkeeping-related functions, outsourcing financial operations can help you manage accounts and books effectively and increase revenue. In addition, outsourcing firms offer an end-to-end solution and strategic partnership to help you scale faster in the competitive market.

Do you need an extra hand to manage your accounts and books? We offer our clients dedicated and experienced accountants and other services like IT and business management. This allows them to focus on comprehensive tasks and core competencies.

Accounting Trends in 2022: Grow Your Business Faster

Given that the consequences of the pandemic are still relevant, businesses across industries are looking at different ways to ensure sustainability over prolonged periods of economic uncertainty. The year 2020 saw businesses adapting to technology at an unprecedented pace across diverse industries. Accounting as a function has been gradually adapted to technological advances over the past few years. According to reports,  83 percent of accountants agree that investing in digitalization is necessary to keep up with the market. This fact is separate from the adoption of technology, which has helped businesses operate remotely and remain sustainable.

As we work through 2022, here are a few accounting trends to help your business grow faster and improve your business’s profitability.

Accounting automation and software solutions

Automation for accounting processes has been gaining ground steadily; it helps reduce the workload for time-consuming and attention-intensive tasks while ensuring higher accuracy and reduction of errors.

Accounting Trends

Additionally, increasing labor costs (29%) represented one of the biggest concerns for accounting firms in 2020. Therefore, the need to shift certain functions to automated processes makes sense. This situation also aligns with the high furlough rate that occurred as a result of the pandemic. Together, these factors make a stronger case for accounting automation.

It also helps to keep in mind that automation of accounting processes does not make accounting professionals redundant. Instead, automation takes over high-volume, time-consuming work from human capital. This step ensures that trained and skilled accounting professionals can shift their focus from resolving accounting and bookkeeping problems to actual business management.

Reports reveal that accountants are either already training for or considering training in other areas, including client management and business advisory services (63% respondents) or business management (59%).

Outsourcing accounting functions

More businesses realize the benefits of outsourcing as economic uncertainties continue to loom. The numerous benefits of outsourcing “detailed attention” intensive functions such as accounting and bookkeeping include:

  • Ensuring reliable, error-free accounting and bookkeeping work
  • Freeing up trained resources so they can shift their focus to higher-priority work, including financial management and auditing of accounting reports
  • Delivering value to existing work by making it more accurate through automation while extending support to new business efforts through a proven system and infrastructure.
  • Reducing expenses associated with hiring, training, and retaining resources

Shifting to Cloud Accounting

From on-site operations to cloud-based accounting, the shift has been gradual and noticeable. Reports say that 67 percent of accountants feel cloud technology improves client interactions and service offerings. Given the multiple benefits of cloud-based accounting, businesses can add value to deliverables without increasing costs and expenses. Here are some key considerations why shifting to cloud accounting makes sense for accounting practices:

  • Cloud accounting helps businesses store and save information in the cloud and access it easily.
  • Cloud-based access saves on expenses associated with needing a physical location;  renting or owning can be costly, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. A Forbes report says how moving to the cloud saved businesses 30-50 percent overall, compared to refreshing their on-premises infrastructure.
  • Cloud accounting helps ensure better security and safety of data, including customer data, because of digital measures like password protection, encryption, and authorized access to select individuals.

Leveraging professional assistance: Partnerships

When it comes to cloud accounting, electronic storage, and secure backups, all of these require a robust infrastructure. These requirements can prove to be expensive for a business just starting out. Outsourcing accounting and bookkeeping functions or partnering with professionals can help ensure your practice aligns with industry norms. Given the proven systems professionals possess, partnering with them allows businesses to access resources otherwise inaccessible to them. Because cloud accounting is technology-based, it also needs expert deployment. For professionals, this is easier because they have resources ready to hit the ground running.

Top 5 Accounting Tasks That Are Key to Growth for Small Businesses

The success of your small business depends on how well you cater services to local businesses and the overall community. Serving local clients boosts your business. Here are the top 5 accounting tasks that are key to growth for your small business.

Financial accounting is essential for any business and often involves tedious tasks. Accounting and bookkeeping, financial reporting, and tax filing should be set precisely to execute projects seamlessly. Developing a process helps eliminate errors and gives you enough time to focus on crucial tasks such as business development.

Nevertheless, managing projects help you set accurate deadlines, which in turn allows you to complete projects faster and provide exceptional client services.

The success of your small business depends on how well you cater services to local businesses and the overall community. Serving local clients boosts your business. Here are the top 5 accounting tasks that are key to growth for your small business.

Go beyond to serve to better

Provide exceptional and comprehensive services to your client. One of the best ways to attract more customers is to provide end-to-end solutions that include more than the minimum they are seeking.

Small businesses have the significant advantage of getting referrals and signing up more customers through personal connections. Companies like to work with small businesses like yours when you can provide unique services that guarantee return over investment (ROI) to your clients.

Here are some specific ways you can go above and beyond to serve your customers:

  • Provide precise solutions to their problems
  • Focus on a strategic solution (e.g., reducing taxable income)
  • Offer more services at a competitive price
  • Improve your customer service
  • Focus more on client management

Leverage your local community

Financial management of the business is vital. To gain the local community’s trust, you need to offer excellent customer service, provide dedicated resources and assistance, use social media platforms to promote your solutions and market your services to the local community.

  • Hire local talent and create new job opportunities
  • Uplift your community and create an identity
  • Focus on innovation and supporting local businesses
  • Offer strategic partnership solutions
  • Invest and innovate in local businesses

Automation

Scarcity of funds and insufficient time can stop you from growing your business. We live in a tech-savvy world, and it is imperative to utilize the latest accounting technologies and other business software to stay competitive in the current market. The newest accounting software aids in automating routine tasks such as recording journal entries, accounting and bookkeeping, bank reconciliation, and payroll management.

Here are other tasks and functions that can be automated:

  • Cloud Computing
  • Marketing automation tools
  • Latest accounting software
  • Client Relationship Management
  • Content management systems

Process Management

The best way to grow your business is to move strategically and adjust the work process repeatedly. This allows you to improve productivity and eliminate lagging processes. In addition, you will have more opportunities to reduce workload and understand project requirements. Having a proper plan and schedule will allow you to manage your business better.

Manage your business more effectively by:

  • Following a strict schedule
  • Reprocessing your work management cycle
  • Reviewing and tracking work
  • Emphasizing internal communication and team management
  • Intaking suggestions and obtaining feedback from clients and team

Outsourcing – A Strategic Partnership

Team management, client management, and other business activities are time-consuming when running a small business. The tedious business management process can stop you from providing consultancy services and adding new clients. To ease the process and focus on your core competencies, consider outsourcing your business operations to a reputable company. This can help reduce your workload and allow you to provide more services to clients. Outsourcing firms have access to the latest technology, resources, and experience required to understand and efficiently carry out your work processes. These firms will analyze your business requirements from time to time to ensure your business keeps growing in the competitive market.

Here are the main benefits of outsourcing your business operations:

  • Team expansion and hiring dedicated resources
  • Reducing business management costs
  • Enabling cross-selling and enjoying commission
  • Business reporting and analysis
  • Improving productivity and reducing workload for the internal team

Bottom Line

There are many ways to improve your small business. Utilize the latest tools and technology to grow faster and reduce workload. To stay competitive in the demanded market, organize your small business with the newest technology, initialize business and project processes, provide exceptional services, and expand your team without investing huge amounts of money in infrastructure and management. If you want to know more, follow these next steps.