Working Closer with Business Clients
Accounting professionals are increasingly asked to provide more meaning behind the numbers they report on. Small business owners care about the bank balance and their tax bill, but they care far more about how profitable and productive the business is operating. And small business owners care about how they can improve performance – earn more profits and keep more of it. Accounting professionals can help their small business clients do this more efficiently using cloud and hosting technologies.
Small businesses need their accounting professionals to take a more direct level of involvement in support of daily processes than larger companies do.
For small and mid-size businesses, the accounting office may be asked to handle bookkeeping, payroll processing, bank account reconciliations, paying bills and invoicing customers and more. In order to have close access to the information and applications supporting these processes, it becomes necessary for accounting pros to be able to connect remotely to client systems. This isn’t a new requirement, but the technology available today to make it work allows for closer and more immediate interaction between the client and the accounting professional.
When a small and growing business runs their applications on a cloud platform, the variety of users that need to work with the information are able to access it regardless of where they are located because the Internet becomes the network. This model doesn’t in any way require that businesses adopt web-based applications instead of the desktop applications they have come to rely on. Desktop applications like QuickBooks, Sage50, Microsoft Office and more can be hosted on cloud platforms, allowing business users to login and use the software they are familiar with and that supports their various processes.
With a cloud hosting model for running business applications and storing business data companies can take advantage of fully-managed deployments of their software and systems without having to employ the IT staff to implement and manage it all. This allows small businesses to have the advantage of high performance IT without the typically high-cost budgets required to support it. The other advantage is that the accounting professionals working with the business are able to access the systems in real time from their offices or other locations, enabling the close working relationship the business needs.
The key value proposition for the accounting professional is the improved profitability to be found in existing client engagements.
Whether it is through an increase in the number and type of services offered to the client or through an improved level of efficiency found with operating on the hosted system, professionals can increase revenues and reduce costs of supporting existing clients. That’s the secret to success in working with the small clients: earn enough working for them while at the same time keeping their costs down so they can grow into larger more profitable business clients.
Make Sense?
J
Cooper Mann Company 