The term “Modern Practice” I believe was coined by Dennis Howlett, an SAP accounting software evangelist. SAP is big business software that costs big dollars. So this price crunching world of SaaS and Cloud Computing has seen commentators and software companies adopt the Modern Practice theory to picture the perfect practice. This has been bugging me, it’s lacking and off focus.
What my Mum taught me – Robyn Lehmann used to say to me as a youngster, “Marc, just make sure you give great service, make sure they are happy and don’t worry, you’ll be wealthy in more ways than just money.”
I saw my mum turn simple businesses into amazing ones so obviously I took that advice on board after seeing it in practice. I also took on her example as an approach we call Service as a Sales Channel. It’s not really an expense, she knew this way before all the MBA’s in the worlds top universities figured this out.
A business that just designs itself for it’s own sake at the expense of customers will suffer the loss of Service as a Sales channel. A good example is how many technology companies these days don’t have a phone support offering. The catch is that when you “don’t give the love”, as we call it, you will have to “give the cash” to the advertising companies. This will mean charging your clients more for the product.
Seduction in Lieu of Service – So what’s the point of this? You’ll have to start marketing and schmoozing at levels that justify the price differences and missing personal service. A form of seduction in lieu service. Saasu is different. We are clearly in an alternate service and value category.
The Future of Accounting – To begin with it can’t just be about “Practices”. It involves business owners. They are the client, the reason for the existence of the accounting industry. As an accountant you service and bill them as efficiently as possible; you want to give them upfront or pay as you go pricing certainty if you can. You want to communicate with them before they call you. You want to be party to the business owner’s success. So this means there is always a balancing act around practice efficiency, the number of technologies you support and the businesses systems efficiency. Complacently falling for incumbency or beauty is often lethal for your client business owners productivity.
An efficient practice outcome for managing a business client can cause an inefficient outcome for the business owner. Conversely a business run exactly how the business owner wants it run may not suit your practice’s business model. You may have to deal with systems you don’t understand or support.
Getting real. Future Practices – Future Practices would look at the net efficiency/cost gains of both stakeholders. They would recommend a system to their client based on the total outcome for the client and themselves. The real situation is that both business and practice have internal efficiencies. A system may serve the practice well but serve the business owner poorly.
We see these decisions made every day. A practice is aligned to a certain software vendor, their processes are best optimsed to that software vendor. This is natural: you iteratively move toward best practice for your firm within the constraints of the systems you adopt and support. Clients are then channeled into that system.
The Problem – There is a major catch with this model. The “single vendor practice” I call them. The regard for client business efficiency is missing. Future firms will have a technology adoption curve that balances the number of systems they support with the efficiency of their firm and their client’s business. They are unlikely to evangelise a single product at the expense of business owners. They are likely to support three or four solutions. A toolbox with one tool will never trump one with many.
An example – We recently had a client who had been put onto a competitor product. This client approached us upset by the situation. His accounting firm was an evangelist for a particular platform and wasn’t prepared to provide our solution. The client wasn’t having their needs met by the accountant’s preferred system to the point where he was prepared to leave the accountant.
What went wrong – In this case it was easy to see. The accountant was completely focused on the practice. Possibly they were prepared to filter this client off their list. Possibly they felt that they would have to charge the client more for using a non-standardised approach to doing the tax remittances and returns. Many factors could be at play but the reality is that they didn’t want to deal with the client wanting to use Saasu.
What could have happened – The accountant could have engaged the client in a manner that was centric to the client need. Why did the client feel Saasu was so important to them? Was it workflow reasons? Was it more than an accounting system to them?
Beyond Accounting is Process – The business owners life is a process driven one. The reality in this situation, and many I see like it, is that process and workflow is now a major part of accounting system requirements. The business owners life is a mixture of manual and automated workflow processes. The world has changed, it’s multi-channel, multi-system, procedural, and services have been commoditised into their components.
What I find separates out great accountants is their ability to see a businesses accounting system as a business workflow system. They see through their clients eyes that the systems they need and use serve workflow, converting manual into automated workflow. It’s not just about tax and reporting. These things are important, but are only one part of the picture. Time is sunk in workflow, it is the constraint, the operational glass ceiling on business growth.
Operational glass ceiling – At Saasu we refer to the workflow and processing burden as an operational glass ceiling. Good accounting systems are designed to solve issues in this area just as much, if not more so, than the requirements of the accounting practice. This creates an interesting opportunity for companies like Saasu.
We are business centric but are now becoming more accountant centric. We have built features that helps with some workflow nasties. Our recent automated fee handling upgrade for PayPal is an example. Workflow and automation tools in a business can be the be the causal element behind rapid business growth. 100′s and often 1000′s of hours in workload can be saved over a year whilst it may only impact an accounting practice’s efficiency by minutes or hours at year end.
Order of magnitude – I think the scale here is what get’s missed. If we get real about this a business owner can often save entire salaries by adopting systems that attempt to achieve what Saasuians call “Automation Maximisation”. I’ve seen businesses adopt Saasu and reduce admin and operational functions by several full time hires. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Now their accountant’s bill may increase if they aren’t a supporter or familiar with Saasu. It will have the converse effect if the accounting firm is Saasu savvy. In either case though the order of magnitude results in the business owner being much happier with their accounting firm for the big dollars saved. The accountant’s bill becomes a semantic issue with such value add behind it instead of a highlighted payable. I believe when accountants achieve this goal for their client the gods of karma, the gods of good luck, will repay in kind.
Don’t underestimate it, business owner word of mouth is pervasive. It’s why we have managed to stay ahead of much better funded competitors without spending anything on advertising. Thousands of new clients from “word of mouth” and “word of web”. p.s. we charge less for Saasu because we aren’t spending the big dollars on advertising.
Automation Maximisation – We have another saying at Saasu. You are what you haven’t automated. We talk about it all the time. What task or feature will next best remove that operational glass ceiling. It makes life hard because we get feature requests for things that won’t remove much at all, but the requester thinks is really important. So we do struggle with this.
As an example we auto-email statements really well. It’s caused receivables ageing to improve for our customers. Now we are working on a new Statement format, a “Statement of outstanding invoices”. We are also working on bulk printing statements. These are the two next biggest time savers in this area of Saasu.
Win-win There are practice systems coming onto the market that also manage your tax returns, can manage your practice website and run your firm. Acclipse iFirm is one such solution. Mike Chisholm the CEO of Acclipse is a believer in supporting multiple platforms. I agree with his view and it’s one of the main reasons we enjoy each others partnership in business. Conveniently Mike is embedding Saasu and Banklink inside his iFirm platform.
So the slam dunk is that you can have systems that work really well for clients but also create efficiency for your practice. The business owner and the accounting firm both win.
I love a TV show called the Good Wife. It’s a story about a lawyer who always tries to do the right thing. I am an open type of person as some of you know so I do refer to these client loving accountants who put their business owners first, The Good Accountants. If you are one come join us!
Good Accountants – All the good accountants I know are driven to put the best solutions and products into their clients. This will create profitable results for the business owner and help you keep the client long term. I don’t believe a firm is a sustainable business model that expenses practice efficiency to the business owner’s account. They pick a portfolio of technologies they will support and this creates a win-win situation. They do this because they believe in the solution they have designed for their client and not because they feel the need to pander to any particular software company. It’s your business, don’t be owned by anyone.
It’s your business – Design your business or practice the way you want it. Ignore all the fear, uncertainty and deception software companies lay on each other. Adopt the platforms and technologies you like based on good due diligence. Accountants should take the time to be business owner centric in thinking about and recommending systems to businesses. If that system is not Saasu then that’s ok, I don’t want a poor result for the business owner. I want them to win at life. If Saasu isn’t in that picture that’s ok. We’ll win the race because we believe that by servicing your clients interests we will be repaid by you for upholding those ideals.
