How your firm can unlock data to win work and keep clients 

Brian Coventry, CEO, Symphony – APS 

Accountancy practice management software has come a long way. Today, features like automated billing and reconciliations are easily integrated into the day-to-day practice workflow of Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting UK customers.

Our employees work side by side with our customers to create and manage these solutions – driven by a deep understanding of their needs and addressing the rapid changes in their environment.

However, it’s often hard to look beyond improving performance in day-to-day operations. Amid Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and other disruptions, accountancy practices and their clients are dealing with an unpredictable economic landscape. Future business planning can appear daunting.

However, technology can support accountancy practices (and their clients) in making informed business decisions, and planning for the future. In the first part of our Accountancy Practice Management for Future-Fit Growth series, we’ll explore how they can use technology to define and easily track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Doing so gives practices closer control of performance tracking, and deeper insights that will inform strategic growth plans.

Saving Time

For several decades, business technology platforms have enabled practices to track performance metrics that they have customised. This highlights areas that qualify for improvement and underpins strategic planning.

Contemporary technology, such as CCH KPI Monitoring, makes setting up KPIs faster and easier for accountancy practices than ever before. This is vital today. The current business landscape demands that firms assess and amend KPIs more frequently, based on fresh market variables. KPIs such as client retention rate and business time-to-recovery have become increasingly prominent performance indicators in the past year. If clunky technology makes KPI management difficult, practices have less time and insight to plan future growth.

Reducing Risk
CCH KPI Monitoring makes it far easier to track KPIs and report on them. This is fundamental in minimising risk. For example, if a KPI is set to track and escalate debt filtered by overdue dates, the ability to easily set alerts and automatically generate reports is critical to practice performance management.

Some practices are manually running monthly reports to measure KPIs. Others are running real-time reporting engines, a key feature of CCH KPI Monitoring. This latter solution allows practices to review essential data at any time – covering both performance management and compliance requirements. They can do so remotely or on-premise.

This means that firms can assess issues before they become problems, and thus act proactively. Real-time reporting is a true asset in building a future-fit practice.

The Proof is in the Practice
A number of Wolters Kluwer customers have been using CCH KPI Monitoring for several years now. Our customers look to us when they need to be right. Ryecroft Glenton has successfully integrated CCH KPI Monitoring with its own system. This consolidates information from several sources, including CCH Central and CCH Practice Management.

“We can use the year end date to trigger a sequence of reminders. Have we asked for the books? Have they been received? If a request to a client has been outstanding for a certain period, the partner will receive an alert via email. For limited companies, we can monitor the corporation tax and Companies House filing deadlines – as well as the different deadlines for pension schemes”

– Ian Smith, partner at Ryecroft Glenton

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

Corporate events agency who benefited from greener graphics initiative

“Apogee are not just aprinting company, theyconsult with us and go onto deliver a full end to endservice from concept toinstallation. They go aboveand beyond and we lookforward to continuing ourjourney with them”

These unprecedented times have highlighted just how critical communication is. 

Key during this crisis period is to make contact with the right people at your client’s firm ensuring you can provide help where it’s most needed. 

What’s crucial is these connections must be direct person-to-person contact. However, you need to know who the best person in your business is to establish that connection. 

Unfortunately, you know that some of your clients will be forced to make changes to their team. You may well have to do the same. 

Therefore, you cannot rely on generic outbound emails and lists. You need real time accurate data so that you can have empathetic conversations as to how the crisis is impacting their roles and the firm.
 

What has data got to do with relationships? 
Your firm likely has a large network or known contacts, clients and referrers. These relationships are what drive revenue, yet few firms have the visibility required to identify, protect and grow these relationships. 

Working tirelessly in the background, your firm’s communication systems likely manage hundreds and thousands of transactions each day. Email and other systems not only facilitate digital communication, but they also log and store data about each of these transactions. This data is something that often goes unused by firms, yet when put into context, can provide a myriad of Business Development and Client Retention benefits. 

Busy professionals need easy to use intelligent mechanisms that ensure client and prospect contact records are not out-of-date and that where possible the firm is capitalising on opportunity. 

Identifying known relationships 
Leveraging accurate and real-time data presents a whole new range of opportunities. If, for example, you queried your Practice Management or CRM system to understand if the firm has a relationship with a business or contact you are looking to win work from, having no results returned may mean that the firm has had no contact. But it may also mean that no one had entered their contact into the system. By connecting automatically to the firm’s communication systems, your ability to identify a known relationship increases rapidly. Having visibility can help a firm enormously when pitching, looking for lateral hires, prospecting or looking to cross-sell into an organisation. 

Managing and maintaining referrer relationships
 Referrer relationships can significantly drive firm or group revenue, yet these relationships can easily dissolve if overlooked. The data captured by your systems can help you to understand where there has been a lapse of contact with one or more referrers, potentially helping to protect and maintain these revenue sources. 

Many firms will report monthly or quarterly on fees generated by key referral sources, yet by the time a decline or absence of referred fees is detected, the referrer has likely begun referring work elsewhere. Using real-time data can allow firms to proactively manage these relationships, with no effort or input needed by staff. 

Cross selling / cross servicing 
Winning more work from an existing client is typically much easier, less costly and more likely than trying to win an entirely new client. Using data to identify which groups have and have not had contact with a particular client, can quickly and easily allow the firm to identify cross selling opportunities. Cross selling not only provides the opportunity to increase firm revenue and develop new practice areas, but it can protect a client from being lost to a competing firm who manages to cross sell their services sooner. 

Succession planning 
Accessing data in real time can also be leveraged to support a range of other initiatives such as succession planning, managing or creating invite lists or developing and maintaining email distribution lists.

This access to live communication data ensures that when a colleague leaves you can understand communication patterns and gain relationship intelligence insights into the best person to be the successor. You also know who the best person you need to speak with at your client’s firm. 

The benefits of a data-drive approach 
The good news is that these capabilities are not limited to large firms or firms with large in-house IT teams and data analytics skills. Developed specifically for professional services firms, Client Sense provides a simple and a cost-effective solution for firms of all sizes. By leveraging existing data, Client Sense allows firms to quickly and easily enhance their Business Development capabilities and improve client retention. 

Having a clear picture of existing communication data can help you understand business development possibilities. A software solution that can be installed quickly and remotely such as Client Sense will help you automatically joins the dots, providing you with the visibility you need to manage, protect and grow the relationships that drive revenue. If you are interested in discussing how you can enhance your firm’s business development capabilities, please contact the team at Symphony for a demo. 

May 2020

Are you maximising client engagement and collaborating with purpose?

The coronavirus pandemic has brought many things into sharp focus, not least how critical it is for organisations to collaborate with purpose. Additionally, it has enforced a mass move to remote working and, in turn, catalysed digital transformation. These are three central, but interlinked, pillars for any progressive business in 2020.

For crying out loud: Why now is the time to invest in a cloud DMSlot

It seems that because of system constraints and limitations, many accountancy firms are struggling to deliver normal client services during the pandemic. In this article, Colin McArdle, Tikit’s Senior Account Director for the Accountancy sector in EMEA, is therefore asking if it’s now time for firms to think about upgrading their digital capacity with the introduction of a cloud-based document management system.