An accountant's guide to benchmarking

If you want to see the business case for benchmarking (regardless of which benchmarking tool you use) and hear other accountants explain the sort of results it is helping them to achieve, you can watch a short online video here…

www.avn.co.uk/Library/Videos/Player/TabId/270/VideoId/15/Thinking-About-...

For example, on the video practitioner Darren Austin FCA explains how it helped him win c £20,000 of new clients in the first few weeks alone.

NB: Cut and paste the above link into your browser if it doesn’t play when you click

Steve Pipe FCA

steve@avn.co.uk

www.avn.co.uk/benchmark

www.proactiveaccountant.co.uk

ProfitCents is a sophisticated set of tools that not only has the ability to benchmark your clients and provide them with a detailed financial analysis, but also gives accountants the capacity to use technology to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their analytical review and risk assessment documentation.

If you are interested in learning more, then please don’t hesitate to email me at jaime.harvey@sageworksinc.com.

Jaime Harvey
Sageworks Inc.

What the article doesn’t mention is that a subscription to the AVN Benchmark software is only £300 a year for AVN and/or IRIS customers. And for that small amount subscribers can use the software to:

1 Produce short taster benchmarking reports for an unlimited number of clients or prospects at no extra cost

2 Produce fully mail-merged marketing letters containing key benchmarking data for an unlimited number of prospects and clients – again at no extra cost

3 As well as producing very detailed full reports on your own practice and 80 clients/prospects

As a result it is possible to use the AVN Benchmark software to help every single client and prospects of your practice for a total annual cost of £300. So the average cost per client could easily be less than £1.

NEW “BEAT THE RECESSION" FOCUS

Recently the software has also been updated to help you provide more support to clients and prospects in recessionary times.

Healthy cashflow is the key to surviving a recession. So the AVN benchmarking software now puts the focus on measuring how well they’re doing at generating profitable sales and getting paid for them. In particular it now:

1 Has a special focus on the key measures businesses need to manage right now – gross margins and debtor days

2 Automatically creates letters to send to an unlimited number of clients and prospects, fully tailored with insights based on their performance in these areas

3 Gives you everything you need to follow up by helping your clients improve their profits and cashflow

You can get a free trial (which allows you to explore the software and produce full benchmarking reports for 5 clients at no cost) at www.avn.co.uk/benchmark

Steve Pipe FCA
AVN

www.avn.co.uk/benchmark

www.proactiveaccountant.co.uk

CCH Software has a product in this area called Strategic Planning. It can import data from Excel or CCH's Accounts Production and has benchmark data derived from Companies House. The program includes reports designed to explain key accounting ratios to the general businessman in a simple graphical format. It also has "What If analysis". The accountant can change the value of variables such as debtor days and instantly see the effect on profitability and cash balances. This helps the businessman see the likely effect of financial decisions before he makes them. The product is priced according to the number of workstations it is installed on allowing unlimited useage.

The idea of Strategic Planning is that if the accountant provides extra value he will retain existing clients and attract new ones.

For more information contact jeremy.foster@wolterskluwer.co.uk

Jeremy Foster
CCH Software

Just a quick clarification on the usage of credits for reporting on AVN BenchMark:

Each credit can be used to produce unlimited reports against 1 clients accounting period. Although you are limited to 1 only one activity selection (more in depth than the SIC) or SIC when entering the data, you can broaden your SIC search (to the higher levels), select another report for that client, or limit the reporting data by company type, turnover, region or dates without incurring further cost.

It is also possible to modify some (not all) of the clients details after producing the report as long as that clients data is still set as draft accounts (which it states on the reports), and run the report again without a cost penalty.

If anybody would like any more information then please do not hesitate to call me or the AVN Team on 0845 226 2371, or info@avn.co.uk

Andy Bond
AVN

For practices responsible for accounting/auditing for companies and public organisations that use SAP, you place a heavy reliance on the "system". Benchmarking using KPI's can be an effective way of looking inside "the black box" and exposing issues of cost, quality, performance, productivity and compliance. West Trax has some 900 analyses of real SAP systems in its database, across 14 countries, and 13 sectors. Unique in the SAP world. To find out more, visit www.westtrax.com or email kgorf@westtrax.com.
Ken Gorf
CFO, West Trax International