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4 tried and tested ways to use technology to make your tiny clients profitable

26th Oct 2018
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Accounting and banking in one place.

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4 tried and tested ways to use technology to make your tiny clients profitable

Are there good profits to be made on small clients? Or is the way to being a profitable firm just focusing on winning £3k+ clients? To help us answer this question we asked Heather Townsend, Author and Founder of The Accountants Millionaires’ Club® for her ideas and thoughts on how to use technology to make the really small clients in your accountancy practice profitable. Over to you Heather.

Getting a decent profit margin on your tiny clients comes down to two things. Firstly, using technology wherever possible to speed up any manual processes. Secondly having clear expectations with clients on what they are paying for and what they are not paying for. The focus of this article is the technology that can help you make a decent profit out of any size of client.

Using automation to speed up bookkeeping

Over five years ago the world of accounting was just starting to get to grips with the benefits which cloud accounting can bring. These days the early adopters of the cloud are now looking to automation to help them increase their practice efficiency. For example, reconciling bank accounts becomes so much quicker when:

You can use supplier and bank rules to automatically code and reconcile a purchase and sales invoice in the right place

You can harness the power of Zapier to automatically bring in and code invoices from your shopping cart software or ecommerce store.

You have a business account that automatically reconciles transactions such as Countingup.

Try out the new digital and challenger banks

Gone are the days where you need to go to a bank in person to open up an account and then wait a few weeks (or more) for a new bank account to be opened. The new challenger banks, such as Countingup, which are typically mobile and accessed via a mobile phone, allow your clients to set up their bank account in under 5 mins. Countingup, which is both an accounting platform AND a bank, is ideal for your sole traders and small limited company clients. And because you know the grind is taken out of their bookkeeping work, you get less of a mess to sort out at year end.

Using automation in onboarding

Automation isn’t just about how you can take the grind out of the bookkeeping. Automation can be used to good effect when it comes to onboarding clients. Tools such as Practice Ignition and GoProposal will allow you to instantly get a letter of engagement signed and an invoice for the client set up in your cloud accounting platforms. Both of these tools have good integration with specialist and non-specialist accounting tools to then get the new client seamlessly into your firm’s workflow.

Practice Management Tools

There are some great new cloud based practice management tools now on the market, such as Karbon, Senta, Accountancy Manager and Glide. These tools will allow you to build in automatic reminders for clients to send in their data. Of course, there will still be the few where you have to pick up the phone to prompt them to send in their records. But the majority of your clients will appreciate the automated nudge. Having a good Practice Management System means less chasing of clients, which means a higher profit margin per client.

 

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