Accountants – Can you do more in 2023?

While we may all have personal goals that we want to achieve this year, it is also important that you set professional goals and define the aspirations for your practice.

Most of us will want to focus on the positives like growing the client base, launching new services or simply making more money.

But just like personal goals, such as losing weight or drinking less, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to look at the things that detract from your life.

This could be reducing the amount of time spent on completing work, delegating more tasks to others or doing more to connect with clients.

This last point is a critical one and something that all accountants try to achieve each year. However, at the end of the day, there are only so many work hours in a week.

With the recent focus on well-being and mental health within the profession we can all appreciate that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” – and no one wants to be a dull accountant.

So, if we accept that our time is limited, how can we improve our relationships with all clients and deliver a better service?

There are some things you can do personally, but you also need someone or something to lighten the load a little. Why not take the more mundane client relationship tasks and touchpoints and automate them?

This is where client relationship management software can help – even more so when it has been designed from the ground up for accountants, with integrations with Xero, IRIS and CCH.

• Want to spot cross-sell and referral opportunities – A CRM can do it
• Need to onboard a client or prepare an initial proposal – A CRM can do it
• Managing and recording marketing leads – A CRM can do it

Ok, you get the picture. A CRM can do a lot, and yet the take-up of these systems among mid-sized accounting firms is still fairly rare.

While firms have been keen to invest in cloud accounting software that helps their clients, they haven’t been so quick to take the leap and use automation to help their back office and business development functions.

With all of this in mind, why not make exploring CRM automation a priority for 2023? You might be surprised just what it can achieve for your practice.