During Uncertain Times it’s Your Accountant that will see You Through
Accountants are the health workers for business. NHS Workers may save lives but it is the accountant that saves livelihoods. This blog explains how accountants manage advisory work effectively.
- If you need a loan or need to find out how the job retention scheme works, ask your accountant.
- If you need to set up a time to pay scheme or need help with cashflow, ask your accountant.
Accountants are methodical and know a whole lot of stuff. They advise and work to support businesses with these kind of issues.
But many accountants are not well set up to manage a high demand for advisory work. Most are used to working with structured compliance programmes. Practice Management systems that offer structure for jobs such as accounts production and tax returns with a smattering of advisory work.
Advisory work on the other hand is all about building and maintaining relationships and the work needed is not always structured. By way of example, an accountant must be able to identify which of its clients are not cash rich, which clients will need help to reduce their cost base during hard times or which may need to furlough workers. Conversations need to be had with each client. And in a pandemic, these conversations need to happen now. Post conversation, immediate action needs to take place. As work mounts up, the accountant is going to become busy.
Very busy.
A good CRM will come to the accountants rescue. This type of advisory activity is best managed and tracked in a CRM system. CRM answers the important questions like:
- Which clients have we not been in touch with about COVID-19 support?
- Which clients are at risk?
- Which member of staff has too many client issues to deal with right now?
CRM makes life easier for accountants too. For example
- Makes it easy to identify segments of the client list to send topical communication (e.g. to notify all clients about a new government scheme where those clients are applying for a loan or grant)
- Ensures that nothing slips through the net. Everything is logged and amongst the noise, relevant items are brought to the surface at the right time.
And at the end of everything. When everything is calm again. The CRM’s Advisory Module will help elevate a firm’s reputation and client loyalty. Get this right, look after clients thoroughly and they will be advocates for many years to come.
We, at FibreCRM, applaud accountants worldwide for their relentless work. They may not be saving people’s lives but they will be saving businesses and people’s livelihoods.
We wish everyone a safe, healthy and speedy recovery.
