As clients demand more, accountants and bookkeepers are being called on to expand beyond the traditional bookkeeping, accounting and tax services. Clients are looking to their accountants for much more than just balancing their books.
A large majority of 77% of business owners polled in a recent survey stated that they are willing to pay accountants to provide Client Accounting Services (CAS) if they can help their businesses grow.
The demand for advisory services is good news for firms that are committed to incorporating comprehensive CAS and Financial Planning & Advisory (FP&A) tools and technology into their workflows and service offerings because it provides the perfect pivot point to shift away from traditional compliance-based services to higher revenue advisory services.
How can your firm take steps to expand your services from simple bookkeeping and accounting toward a more forward-thinking and strategic mindset?
If you feel that you don’t have enough time, one key strategy is automation.
Think about the technology you can implement to automate tasks and free you to spend more time building client relationships. It also is important, when moving toward a CAS offering, to create a plan to evolve your technology that will allow you to scale your CAS.
For example:
- QuickBooks for core bookkeeping services
- Gusto for payroll and benefits administration
- DocuSign and Box for document file management
- Avalara for sales tax
- Bill.com for AP/AR automation
In addition to automating CAS, growing firms are leaning more heavily into FP&A as the springboard for offering strategic, forward-looking insights and analysis. The future of accounting is moving from quantitative to qualitative.
Accountants need to embrace the role of a strategist while using technology to handle the numbers. This is where exploring purpose-built FP&A technology can help automate the traditional bookkeeping and more transactional work while also providing the data and information required to exceed your client's expectations.
While FP&A services may sound cumbersome to start, with the right tools providing higher value services will ensure your firm is a partner in your client's growth and success.
Consider the following FP&A services:
- Forecasting and budgeting
- Deep financial analytics
- Financial modeling
- Strategic business planning
- Integrated operational reporting
- Consistent, reliable, recurring insights
Jirav makes providing clients with financial planning and advisory insights simple and seamless.
Imagine being able to easily provide high-demand advisory services with budgeting, forecasting, and business planning beyond the monthly accounting services you provide now.
Not only will having deeper, accurate insights into your clients’ businesses allow you to serve them better, it can also exponentially increase revenue for your firm.
DOWNLOAD the eBook "Achieve Higher Revenue with QuickBooks FP&A" today
Jirav, a cloud-based FP&A tool, is an all-in-one solution that can support your firm in providing higher revenue advisory services. Using Jirav, you can provide your clients with a 360-degree view of their businesses, hindsight on past performance, insight into the present, and foresight for what’s next.
You can easily adopt the strategist role with the use of Jirav, which integrates with key technologies such as QuickBooks® to automatically pull in all of the financial and non-financial data so you can analyze it in minutes, then use the information to create high-margin deliverables like forecasts, budgets and plans.
Make the shift to higher revenue advisory services today by implementing Jirav into your tech stack.
For more strategies to transition from CAS to CAS advisory services, DOWNLOAD the ebook, "Achieve Higher Revenue with QuickBooks FP&A."
This eBook will help you leverage Jirav and other automation strategies to increase revenue for your CAS service line while supporting the future success of your clients.