Cost of Living Crisis: Finding Time to Help Your Clients

With big tech companies going through major layoffs, interest rates on the rise, and the cost of living still through the roof, it’s no wonder people are struggling. Businesses are trying to keep their wages in line with inflation, while their overheads are skyrocketing. Your clients are at the core of your practice, so how can you help them navigate through these stormy waters?

Turn to advisory services this Christmas

Clients will be looking for a helping hand this Christmas, more specifically, your invaluable support as someone who knows the finer details of their business’ finances. Whether it’s where they can cut expenditure or reduce overheads for the coming year, you have a mountain of data at your fingertips to steer them in the right direction.

Lots of AccountancyManager users have said that clients are looking for more advisory services lately, and rightly so. They’re facing very real situations with some incredibly important decisions to make. But how can you make room for more advisory services and individualised client care when you’re already time-poor and stretched thin?

Enter: practice management software

Practice management software to lighten your load

Practice management software strategically reduces your admin workload to make space for more valuable solutions to your clients. Clients still get the same exceptional service for all of their compliance needs.

Practice management software that’s integrated with CRO is a great tool to have up your sleeve. Rather than pulling teeth for client details and deadlines when onboarding new clients, all the info you need is pulled automatically from CRO. And the best part? These compliance deadlines drive your automatically generated task list.

Automated emails are another game-changer for your practice. How long do you spend each day writing up emails to clients? Let’s say it takes you 10 minutes per email. If you have 200 clients and send just one email to them each week, that’s over 33 hours you’ve just spent (almost a full work week) slugging away at your keyboard.

With automated emails, just choose when and how often you’d like to contact clients and the software does everything else for you. In AccountancyManager, we’ve gone ahead and saved over 40 different templates, specifically for accountants, that you can use in your emails from the get-go. If you’d rather write up your own (minus the workload) we have canned messages. These are paragraphs you only have to write up once, which are stored on our system to build highly relevant emails to your clients. Emails can go out in bulk or they can be tailored to individual client needs you’re in control.

With practice management software, you can also track all of your staff and client activity from a single tab on your browser. Everything is timestamped when a client opens an email, sends a document, or signs a form (weight off your shoulders, eh?). With the client portal, you save oodles of time by sharing documents and details with clients instantly. You can even add your own logo, background, colour scheme and custom URL to the portal too, so it’s a completely seamless experience for your clients. Having all of these tools can really help to reduce your manual workload. This lets you focus more on higher value services for your clients during these trying times.

“The time I’ve saved means I haven’t had to hire a receptionist. We’re talking hours and hours a week.” – Mark Francis, Francis Bookkeeping Solutions Ltd.

Not all superheroes wear capes, some use practice management software

While you’re out there being a superhero accountant, don’t forget to fill your own cup first. If you use a software like AccountancyManager, you can track staff costs against client revenue, to see exactly which jobs are most (and least) profitable. This is key for forecasting any new revenue streams and to identify those loss-making clients.

Implementing software that offers you a high level of automation and organisation can be one of your biggest tools for getting through these stormy waters. Just look at what Will from Sterling Accounting Solutions had to say:

“At the scale we’re at now, we couldn’t survive without AM. It would be a car crash to be perfectly honest. It just wouldn’t work”

You support your clients, we’ll support you

At Bright we put our customers first with the reputation to back us up. Our award-winning practice management software received an 84% satisfaction rate from our customer survey this year (check out the full list of results here). 81% of AM users agree that we’re continuously developing our software.

Oh, and did we mention that our customer support is free? We really mean it when we say we put our customers first. Stuck in a pickle and want to ask us a question? Just pick up the phone or pop us an email. We’re more than happy to help in any way we can, to make sure you’re using our software to its fullest (without any pesky hidden fees).

Worst-kept secret? Practice management software

All this automation and timesaving means that you can ease your team’s workload, while making room for more urgently needed advisory services. The best part? It costs peanuts compared to hiring another employee.

We’ve only scratched the surface on the opportunities practice management software can bring to your firm. From chasing up clients automatically for you, to digitalised signatures. AccountancyManager is the worst-kept secret of thousands of accounting firms across Ireland.

The best way to discover how AM could help you is with a free demo. Sign up below.

This content may have been developed with the assistance of AI tools. Content is reviewed by a member of the Bright team before publication. Guidance on legislation can be obtained from your industry body.