Ways Accounting Firms Can Retain Clients Successfully

Good customer relationship is basic to a business

Customer relationship is a function of value delivered vis-à-vis investments made. It includes quality delivered, trust generated and the convenience guaranteed. For accounting firms and CPAs, it also entails ensuring that client’s business models are streamlined and transformed to ensure continuity despite disruptions, and to ensure future preparedness.

Good customer relationship translates to customer retention, which in turn translates to enormous cost savings. After all, according to a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one across industries.

Ways accounting firms can retain customers

Accounting firms that offer standardized, one-size-fits-all services have never been able to retain customers successfully. When firms fail to provide personalized services, customers will have minimal incentive to revise their contracts and continue their relationship.

This is distinctly different from the experience customers receive from an accounting firm that not only offers best-in-class accounting services, but also ‘goes beyond service level agreements’ to heighten customer experiences.

Here is a list of ways your accounting firm can bring the ‘edge’ into client servicing and client relationships:

1. Provide best-in-class service

This is about ensuring the basic – that of getting the quality right. Accounting firms handle the most critical aspect of a client’s business – their accounting books and money matters.

Hence it is of utmost importance to deliver accounting services that ensure the client’s books of accounts are accurate and compliant at all times. Accounting entries should be made on time, errors pointed out proactively in order to protect the client’s business interest, reports prepared to ensure effective and corrective decision making.

2. Deliver end-to-end offerings

Accounting firms and CPAs who have the capability to deliver end-to-end accounting services are far more likely to retain their clients than those CPA firms that offer piecemeal services.

Most businesses and clients will be comfortable to outsource their entire accounting requirements to one firm instead of having to handle two or more firms — continuity is maintained when accounting and reporting are delivered by the same accounting firm. Hence, build your capabilities to ensure all services are delivered ‘under the same roof’.

3. Design business-specific modules

It is important for accounting firms to factor in industry-specific and business-specific requirements in their offerings so that clients’ accounting functions are well consolidated, correctly aligned to business goals, and provide real-time visibility to operational and commercial transactions.

This will build long-term confidence in clients and will go a long way in retaining them through the years.

4. Offer value-based business outcomes

Today, most businesses are grappling with volatility arising from macroeconomic, geo-political and financial-market disturbances, and ever-changing regulations and compliance requirements. In such uncertain times, CPAs and accounting firms need to build more cohesiveness into their offerings for better customer experiences.

These can be done by getting their teams to simplify processes and workflows for better productivity, build shortened turnaround time (TAT) for key F&A transactions for increased working capital, automate subprocesses for greater efficiency, deliver accurate and actionable insights on key performance indicators (KPIs) for improved RoI and profitability.

Cogneesol can help you retain your clients and expand your client base

Cogneesol has been offering accounting outsourcing services to accounting firms and CPAs through the last fifteen years. Our team of qualified and experienced finance and accounting professionals align with client goals and strategies, and offer sustained and significant business outcomes.

With deep domain exposure from long experience and exposure to global clients, our team understands specific business and industry needs and provides efficient CPA accounting services across the spectrum.

Our accounting outsourcing services support accounting firms and CPAs by helping them set up their client’s processes, quality and compliance controls, maximize working capital, and assist regulatory reporting. Choose from our full-suite accounting services that include accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger accounting, payroll processing, tax preparation, and financial and management reporting.

• We support multiple accounting software – Intuit QuickBooks, Netsuite, Intuit Quicken, Sage, Xero, Myob, Wave, Intacct, SAP, Yendo, etc. – with fast learning curves.
• Our project management teams are adept at smoothly transitioning processes that ensure zero-harm to operations and business continuity.
• Our quality experts oversee process transitions and infuse operations with the principles of lean and six-sigma in order to make the functions productive and efficient from the very start.
• We also offer end-to-end finance analytics services to help accounting firms and CPAs service their clients with high-end analytical tools. These can help the clients with financial planning and analysis. Our analytics offerings include payables analytics, collections analytics, cash-flow analytics, working capital analytics, profit and loss account analytics, balance sheet analytics, and ratio analysis.

Our global and pan-industry exposure will help you get the market edge that you require to not only retain your existing clients but also improve your brand name and goodwill for an enlarged clientele.

Contact us at info@cogneesol.com / +1 8333133143 (Toll-Free) for an overview of our finance and accounting offerings, along with the analytics services that can help your accounting firm to offer better and high-end services to your clients.