For accounting firms, the start of a New Year rings in optimism, but also stressful time constraints as the April 15 tax filing deadline looms from January through April.
Facing those deadlines, it can be tempting to push aside time-consuming tasks, even ones critical to achieving annual goals such as revenue growth, but we all know that each task moved back creates more pressure trying to achieve those goals later.
In his On the Air podcast with Accounting Today, the publication's editor-in-chief, Dan Hood, recommended 12 steps for accountants -- one per month -- to space out the tasks to lessen time crunches during your busy season.
Three of those steps could be easily outsourced to an independent Information Professional to save time and keep your firm moving forward during those busiest months, and all year long as well:
- Keeping your Prospect Pipeline full enough to generate the revenue needed to meet your growth goals
- Obviously, kicking this critical task down the road to May would inhibit any firm's ability to meet its revenue goals for the year. An independent Info Pro can help here by doing the research to qualify prospects in your pipeline based on your specific criteria to ensure that your marketing efforts target quality prospects while allowing your staff to focus on tax work.
- Outsourcing non-accounting tasks to external experts (also recommended by industry leaders in an Accounting Today survey)
- Research and information retrieval would be among the services an independent Info Pro could provide to an accounting service to free up time. Researching and retrieving Public Records, Fact Checking, and developing Competitor Profiles would be some of those services.
- Reading economic outlooks on either the industry verticals you serve or the economy as a whole
- Economic reports can take time to digest; thus, another task that can be handed off to an Info Pro. We can summarize our findings in the most easily digestible format for you (Word doc, PDF, Spreadsheet, PowerPoint, bulleted lists, Executive Summary, etc.) to save you the time of weeding through the entire report.
We can help your firm in other ways, too, including IT Consulting, media and social media monitoring of the accounting industry, prospects and competitors, and writing Case Studies and White Papers to highlight how you have specifically helped your clients.