Why Your Firm Should Pivot Your Services from Yearly to Monthly
As we enter into the final crunch of tax season, it can be a demanding time for both clients and accounting firms. This is the peak period where accounting firms are in frequent communication with their clients. However, this constant communication offers a great opportunity for accounting firms to grow post-tax season. If you are serious about growing your accounting firm, now is the time to pay attention to more than just providing your usual tax services.
Many firms don’t have a plan for growth post-tax season and simply rely on the seasonal year-end services they provide to their clients and hope they can get enough clients to meet their business objectives. If you want to successfully stay in business, and prosper, you have to build a client-focused firm. These firms are changing their narrative about how they run their accounting firm from selling your time to selling your knowledge and expertise. That’s why pivoting from a year-end model to a monthly subscription with a value-based pricing model is gaining momentum. That means, building a relationship with each client, satisfying their requirements, and providing top-class services throughout the year. This will require pivoting your business model from year-end services to monthly services and tax season is the perfect time to start thinking about it.
Here are four key reasons why your firm should pivot its services from yearly to monthly:
- Consistent Year Round Cash Flow
This allows the accounting firm to have year-round cash flow and get paid for value-added services. For the client, there are no hidden fees, year-end surprises, the communication is clear and the relationship is able to evolve into a partnership between the client and the accounting team.
- Added and Enhanced Advisory Services
When you pivot to monthly services, you no longer have to restrict yourself to year-end compliance bookkeeping. You can now provide value-added financial stories with which your clients can monitor their cash flows and operational health in real-time.
Adding additional value to your clients through advisory services is a win-win: more revenue for your firm and a better service offering for your clients. From the clients' point of view, they’re not only investing in your bookkeeping and accounting services but rather gaining access to the operational finance expertise of your entire firm.
- Evolve Your Client Relationship with a Trusted Advisor
Along with streamlining your revenue, monthly services can improve existing client relationships. Your clients want to grow their businesses, but they still have accounting-related tasks that eat up their time and distract them from core activities that can drive their businesses forward.
As a firm, you can take care of important things like bookkeeping, cash flow management, payroll, and even virtual CFO services so that your clients have more time to do what they do best. This allows you to be a more integral part of your client's growth story naturally improving and nurturing these relationships. In addition, this expands the number of referrals you get from your clients which is the most cost-effective way to promote your firm.
- Avoid Catch-Up and Crunch Time Bookkeeping
Tax season can be draining when you operate on a year-end model. Year after year, it’s the same story. Clients wait until the last minute to turn in their documents, there is never enough capacity, and it feels like you're working around the clock.
By pivoting to monthly services, you can streamline your process for managing tax season as you will have worked out the kinks in their financial processes throughout the year. Managing client data in monthly batches avoids processing a year's worth of overwhelming data at once. You close the month and add the correct information to the financials, providing your clients with a real-time snapshot of their business.
Summary
As you can see, by pivoting your firm from year-end to monthly services, you can increase your cash flow, reduce churn and provide predictable revenue, giving your firm stability and supporting its long-term plans. For your clients, it can often mean healthier business habits, value-added financial inputs for their businesses, and more effective communication throughout the year.
To learn further about how to make that pivot, join our webinar: From Year-End to Real-time Bookkeeping: How to Pivot Your Services from Yearly to Monthly
