Delivering on the Promise of the New Proactive Client Relationship

It’s astonishing how quickly business needs have changed! Not so long ago, business owners were able to manage their day-to-day accounting functions, “keep the books,” and then engage their CPA to produce that annual tax return, compile those pesky payroll tax forms, put together the financial statements needed for the bank, or audit their financial statements. Sometimes the CPA would come in to discuss that occasional tax planning need.

Technology advancements have enabled business managers to automate many of these functions to a certain extent and drive the business toward more paperless processes overall. While this has helped with daily financial tasks, proactive, intelligent insight is something technology by itself can never deliver.In some instances, technology can even lead to less business insight.

Client needs have evolved

Those of us in the accounting profession were all too happy to mold our client service lines around these traditional needs, settling in on the three main, standard service lines of accounting, auditing and tax. Unfortunately (or fortunately for those CPAs nimble enough to change and take advantage), our client needs have transformed to something much greater, threatening to disrupt the traditional CPA-client relationship.

For most businesses, the rapid pace of change on all levels has intensified their competition. The challenge of recruiting and retaining talent, and the need for faster, more effective data to provide financial clarity have converged on businesses. Business managers are looking for that trusted, proactive advisor to help them make sense of it all – now more than ever before.

Frankly, these needs have our clients asking (and sometimes demanding) more from us. Much more. A service that requires a transformative approach. A service that requires expertise to be provided quickly, proactively and at a much higher level of strategic insight. The exciting thing about all of this is that we are the only profession that is uniquely qualified to deliver if we can step back, really listen and interpret our client’s true needs, assess and refine what our skills can bring to the table and then retool our technology, processes and data intelligence to fulfill those needs.

How can CPAs provide high-level insight?

To make this happen, accounting professionals looking to step to the plate in this arena have found that they need to be more engaged with their clients’ workflow architecture. More willing to “get their hands dirty” to change or be a part of client systems if necessary, and more willing to be “financial systems architects” that enable data to flow in such a manner that regularly produces higher level insight. In the past, the only way to accomplish that was to be at our client’s place of business. Effective, certainly – but not scalable. In steps the magic ingredient: technology!

By leveraging technology and harnessing its power by designing rapid data workflow streams that produce clear, impactful, proactive insight – coupled with a trusted advisor to interpret this insight – accounting professionals can fulfill the need.

Outsourced accounting is part of the solution

Future-oriented accounting firms have realized that a fundamental starting point should be to design outsourced accounting functions that can be brought under the traditional brick and mortar of an accounting firm. When the outsourced workflow is designed with a view toward automation and scale – but with the ultimate end product not only taking the place of in-house bookkeeping tasks but even more importantly the production of high-level strategic insight – the service is a real game-changer!