Accountants – How Well Do You Use Technology to Onboard New Clients?

Client onboarding is an essential part of establishing an effective relationship with your client and is often the first impression clients get of you as a firm.

But how good are you at client onboarding? Not only from the perspective of your clients, but also in relation to the work, time and effort that is required of you and your team.

Does information flow smoothly from the prospect stage all the way through to creating the new client in your firm’s Practice Management software?

If it doesn’t you could be wasting valuable billable work hours and creating inefficiencies and complexities that sap your time, resources and more often than not, patience.

Technology should work to make this process easier, but the convoluted, patchwork of programmes, apps and integrations employed by many firms ultimately serve to further frustrate and complicate matters.

At FibreCRM, our approach is one technology. Not multiple disjointed Apps. You want one place to go to find something. Not double or even triple entry. No clunky processes.

Sound a bit too good to be true?

Employed by a number of firms in the UK, US and Canada, we have seen first-hand how our solutions can more than half the time it takes to onboard a new client. 

This has freed up valuable time so that our clients can take on more clients without needing more staff. And it means your new clients interact with a modern, digitally astute, practice.

Think about the tech you use today to manage these onboarding tasks and ask yourself if your existing processes fall short. 

What technology are you grappling with to cover these points?

1. Tracking the sales opportunity
2. Creating a proposal
3. Electronically signing the proposal
4. Linking to Companies House so all the beneficial owners are captured
5. Gathering sensitive data from the client
6. Managing the KYC, due diligence and risk assessment
7. Carrying out AML checks
8. Creating an engagement letter
9. Electronically signing the engagement letter
10. Sending the Professional Clearance letter to the clients previous accountant
11. Checking all data is provided
12. Creating the new client in CCH, IRIS, Star, Xero etc.
13. Sending a client satisfaction survey
14. Automate ongoing monitoring of PEPS and sanctions
15. Automatic sending of engagement letter renewals
16. Linking to phone system so all this information is to hand when the client phones in
17. Linking to Outlook so all the important email communication is visible to everyone across the firm

You might be surprised at just how many solutions you have invested in already and use, and the cost to maintain these and train your team on them.

Having one system, not only saves time, it minimises data silos, helps manage the security of your clients data and supports the firms GDPR compliance.

Not forgetting of course, the client experience of visually seeing automations, such as e-signing or providing their personal data securely and just having confidence that they have made the right choice of accounting firm.

Factors such as this can be a huge differentiator in not only winning work, but retaining it over the longer term.