How accounting firms can help their clients embrace digital transformation

This post explores accounting firms’ imperative to build trust and why that may increasingly mean supporting clients to adopt more advanced accounting tools.

Generally speaking, accountants are a trusted profession. But how do long-term relationships really flourish? By putting customers’ best interests first and combining your expertise with genuine care and honesty.  

For mid-tier accounting firms with a client base of burgeoning small to medium businesses, forging stronger bonds means continually seeking ways to add value. Empowering your clients to take their business further results in loyalty, glowing referrals, and in turn helps you expand your own business.

The Australian Financial Review’s list of top accounting firms in 2018 showed a jump in the number of firms that report ‘advisory’ is the fastest growing part of the business. Your firm’s ability to provide strategic business advice is likely to be a greater competitive advantage in future than your capacity to simply offer operational assistance.

And as more businesses seek to reap the benefits of digital transformation, accounting firms that expect to maintain close connections to their clients will inevitably play a role to play in helping SMBs ‘think big’ when it comes to cloud accounting, and business process management more broadly.

Are you showing enough sincerity in order to earn your clients’ trust?

A report released in February 2019 by industry body Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (CA ANZ) revealed that high-end trust relationships in business lead to increased revenue and lower costs overall.

The report states, “While people remain confident in the technical abilities of an expert, our research found that people are less confident in the ability of an organisation to provide unbiased advice reflective of their own personal values. This was particularly true for accountants, which presents a trust opportunity.”

It’s not enough to do good work, or even to simply be honest and ethical—you need to communicate and demonstrate that you have a clear purpose that transcends profit.

One important way to do this is developing a culture within your firm where client interactions are driven by unselfish and honourable motives. What’s best for your customer isn’t always the option that creates more work for your firm—at least in the short-term.

Giving advice clients need: accounting technology may be a key pain point

As your client’s capabilities and needs evolve, it’s only natural that your relationship with their business will evolve too—that means your ‘service’ won’t always relate to balancing the books.

Eliminating pain points for your customers is a great way to cement your role as a trusted advisor.

An excellent example is a client that operates a group of companies with multiple ABNs, potentially with branches across Australia and overseas. Their business may be growing rapidly and as a result they’ve become frustrated with their entry-level accounting system.

Even if the software they use is a great product, perhaps it no longer aligns with the scope and scale of their business. You can see they are crying out for more control and visibility internally to understand performance at the group level.

Firms interested in building trust and a long-term relationship can grasp this opportunity to work with clients to help them adopt more powerful technology—say, a solution that can help them to automate accounting tasks and complete group reporting in a much quicker timeframe.

End of support for AccountRight Classic: an opportunity to help your clients

One of Australia’s most popular cloud accounting providers, MYOB, plans to end support for its desktop product, AccountRight Classic (also known as Version 19) in September 2019.

Saying goodbye to AccountRight Classic is a looming reality for many Australian SMBs that now need to make a decision about upgrading to the cloud-based version of AccountRight or take this chance to revisit their software needs and switch to a new solution.

If you’re an MYOB-certified accountancy firm and one of your clients is currently at this crossroads, offering your guidance now could be a wonderful chance to open a dialogue and create a deeper connection.

You’re in a unique position to help them determine:

• What accounting and financial management features they need from their software?
• What gaps exist in their ability to assess financial health and business-wide implications?
• Where could digital tools streamline workflows to save time and improve accuracy?

If we return to the earlier example of a customer that has multiple business entities and growing complexity, it might make more sense for them to transition to a more sophisticated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system like MYOB Advanced.

The benefits of MYOB Advanced include:

• True cloud-based convenience and mobility – which also means external accountants can simply login remotely to seamlessly collaborate with clients as needed.
• Robust accounting and financial management functionality is integrated across the business so that workflows and data can be shared across areas including customer management, supply chain management, project accounting, and business intelligence.  
• Powerful group consolidation capabilities including reporting across multiple entities in multiple countries and managing a group BAS, all within one database.
• The ability to manage the Fixed Asset Register within a unified accounting environment making it possible to do automatic depreciation runs that write journals to the general ledger, reducing duplication and manual effort.

MYOB Advanced includes a free external accounting licence so your customer can provide you with access to their database at no cost to ensure you can easily provide support.

[WHITE PAPER –  MYOB AccountRight Classic (v19) End Of Life: Where to from here?]

Putting clients’ needs first lays the foundation for a long-lasting relationship

If it’s what your client genuinely needs, it’s not counter-intuitive to support them to undertake a digital transformation that equips them with advanced finance tools, even if that reduces their reliance on the support your firm provides.

Here’s why: clients with more sophisticated business management software may still need support with audits, fixed assets, reporting and taxation—and they’ll be more likely to trust you to take a greater role in offering strategic advice.

Plus, a happy client with high levels of trust will become one of your strongest allies, significantly boosting your word-of-mouth marketing efforts.

Do you have clients that might be ready to step up to MYOB Advanced? Interested in learning about the MYOB Advanced partnership program for accountants? Talk to one of our experienced consultants today.