Guide: How to Be a Scalable and Future-Ready CPA Firm

Recently updated on March 8th, 2024 at 05:20 am

CPA firms often struggle to grow and keep up with the competition. This may be because they focus on revenue and traditional accounting practices, missing out on strategic opportunities.

Further, changing technologies can be difficult to keep up with, especially when they force you to acquire new hardware or software. It’s also hard to scale when you’re trying to be cost-efficient, especially because new clients and business systems often require significant investments.

To overcome these challenges, CPA firms can:

• Evolve to work more intelligently and efficiently
• Prioritize the adoption of technology
• Focus on client and value-added services

Tips to Help You Be Future-Ready

The key to being future-ready is identifying your unique selling point, your niche, as well as your expertise in specific verticals and industries. For example, you can focus on accounting for:

• Small to medium-sized businesses
• Nonprofit organizations
• Franchises
• Healthcare
• Individuals
• Professional services
• Retailers
• E-commerce companies
• The manufacturing sector

You can also diversify your portfolio by honing in on companies of a specific size, choosing small, medium, or large businesses as your bread and butter. Because tax preparation services often result in more revenue, you can focus on providing these, not just during tax season but all year.

Pick Your Principal Service Offerings and Manage Your Bandwidth

If you focus on specific services, it will be easier to scale when needed, especially because you will only have to identify individuals and technologies that can help you serve a specific clientele. Focusing on a specific niche can reduce the bandwidth you and your employees expend while managing the business because the range of daily activities is narrowed. You only have to focus on a certain selection of services and the work those involve. For example, you can target:

• Bookkeeping/accounting
• Accounting advisory services
• Business consulting
• Tax prep

Your next step is to pick an accounting outsourcing partner. This gives you a backup—an extended team to help you handle your day-to-day tasks.

Personalize and Regulate Everything You Do

The key to ensuring all systems are personalized according to individual customer needs is to set up operational controls driven by regularly taking into consideration the goals of clients. For example, before anyone on your staff provides accounting advisory services, they can be encouraged to have a conversation with the client, asking where they are now and where they’d like to be in the near future. These conversations should be a part of every department’s standard operating procedures. Also, all employees should be in sync, understanding the value of providing a personalized approach for all clients they interact with.

Adopt the Right Tools and Technologies

To remain agile enough to scale when needed and adjust your business to accommodate future events, you need the best available tools for you and your staff. These should include:

Accounting automation: Automation can play a vital role in your accounting advisory services because it frees you and your employees to personally help clients.

Real-time accounting: With this, you can use an accounting dashboard to see the current state of clients’ financials.

Cloud-based accounting: Accounting business intelligence software operating in the cloud gives you the freedom to refer to your accounting dashboard anywhere you have an internet connection.

Payroll automation: This gives you and your clients more flexibility, especially when you may be adding employees as you expand your accounting advisory services.

Workflow automation: Another facet of accounting business analytics software, this can do repetitive tasks for you. Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Cash Management, General Ledger, and Assets Management automation can save time, improve productivity, and eliminate tedious waiting and approval delays to give better process transparency.

Reporting automation: The reporting automation made available in business intelligence software gives you the ability to generate reports that are automatically populated with the right data—and outputted on your accounting dashboard. With business intelligence software, you can also automate the reporting of stats out to a performance dashboard, giving you the latest insights for clients.

Invoicing and billing support: When you have support for your invoicing and billing, you can focus more on scaling your business and less on time-consuming minutiae.

PathQuest Scale can help you evolve, grow, and be future-ready. With PathQuest Scale, you can increase productivity, save time, save money, and improve your bottom line. To learn more about how PathQuest Scale can keep your business ready for growth and anything the future throws at you, reach out for a free demo today!

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