The proactive accountant

How to get your PBR and Budget day messages noticed, remembered and talked about.

On the 10 December we were emailed lots pdf files containing PBR summaries. Very worthy, but also very dull. As a result, none of them got more than a quick glance. Then we received one that we gave our undivided attention to. Why? Because it was so very different and so very good.

97% of accountants are failing to give even the most basic of tax planning advice to their unincorporated clients – and as a result are letting their clients down and missing out on the opportunity to earn fees of up to £21,000 per client.

On 2 July practitioner Paul Meades sent me the following story in an email (which he has kindly agreed I can share with you):

On 2 July 2009 CIMA published the results of their latest research study under the wildly misleading title “UK mid sized businesses brave the downturn”

http://www2.cimaglobal.com/cps/rde/xchg/SID-0A82C289-F1791776/live/root....

It is wildly misleading because when you read their pres release you quickly discover that only 83% of businesses expect to survive the recession, and only 80% of accountants expect to keep their jobs. So presumably fully 17% of businesses expect to go bust, and 20% of accountants expect to lose their jobs.

Last Wednesday I presented a “Beat The Recession Conference” at Heathrow. It was a half day event co-sponsored by a number of independent accountancy firms, each of whom took tables in multiples of 8 for their clients.

To give you an idea how worthwhile it is to run these kind of events for your clients, let me give you the results of one of the sponsoring firms. This was a small firm and they got eight different businesses to attend – both clients and prospects. From those eight:

On Tuesday I saw something truly amazing at The National Tax Conference in Birmingham.

A show of hands indicated that out of the 500 people present, only 6 were actively advising their clients on Tax Credits. So over 98% of accountants are ignoring it

This amazed me for three main reasons:

ONE: In some cases tax planning advice given without regard to Tax Credits is actually 100% wrong once the Tax Credit implications are factored in.