When it comes to providing good service to your bookkeeping clients, you have lot to keep in mind.
For one thing, you need to make sure that there are no errors in their accounts. After all, there is nothing more important than making sure that you don’t make mistakes while handling someone else’s finances.
No matter how careful you are, though, there might be times when you and your clients have differing opinions. When that happens, you’ll want to know how to deal with your clients and sort out your differences with a minimum of fuss.
We offer some suggestions here for resolving differences and providing better service to your online bookkeeping clients.
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1. Consult with Another Professional
Let’s suppose you have a client whose honesty you question. As a matter of fact, their situation makes you wonder if their finances are one hundred percent legitimate. If this ever happens in your bookkeeping business, it might be a good thing to forward your questions to the person who prepares your client’s taxes. Together, the two of you can decide how to proceed.
There might be other cases in which your client’s onsite bookkeeper has made some additions to the client’s chart of accounts without conferring with you. In this case, you would probably want to consult the business owner himself or herself about the changes. If you still have questions, take the step of consulting once again with the client’s tax professional.
2. Analyze Historical Cash Flow Trends
It can be said that the data that you have isn’t worth a dime unless you know how to interpret it, analyze it, and provide solutions based on it. Therefore, never fail to have conversations with your clients about how they can plan their cash flow in the future, based on trends you see from the materials they provide to you.
For example, by analyzing your client’s cash flow, you can project sources and applications of funds for upcoming periods. You can also identify any cash-deficit periods in advance. With this knowledge you can advise your bookkeeping clients about corrective actions to alleviate those deficits.
In other words, determine the trends that led your client into the situation they’re presently in. Then you can readily suggest solutions for them. Apart from that tools such as QuickBooks Hosting on a cloud PC from desktop as a service provider may also help you in accessing your bookkeeping work remotely from anywhere on any device as per your convenience.
3. Proactively Provide Reports for Your Bookkeeping Clients
Continuing on this point, it is important for you to understand every aspect of your clients’ finances. This includes their history, their funding, their cash flow outcomes, their investments, and any other holdings.
You might doubt that all of this information is relevant for your bookkeeping needs. However, the more you know and understand about your bookkeeping clients and their finances, the better you will understand what they need in terms of managing their finances.
Therefore, utilize technology to provide them with relevant reports. Moreover, make those reports interactive on a mobile dashboard whenever you can. That’s because visuals are extremely important for your bookkeeping clients. With graphics and charts, they will be able to follow along with whatever you’re reporting to them.
4. Leverage Technology
Technology has greatly affected all aspects of accounting and bookkeeping. On one day, you might be connecting with your client’s expense management software. On another day, you could be syncing a point of sale to a client’s accounting software. Or perhaps you could be figuring out how to sync your client’s data from one machine to another.
The point is that whatever accounting or bookkeeping task you’re dealing with, technology is probably playing a role. These days, you can count on a technological advancement of one kind or another to have created a better process or given you better leverage. All in all, technology helps you to provide your bookkeeping clients with more clear-cut results today.
In other words, because of technology, you can work faster and more accurately. This allows you to take a more proactive role in understanding the needs of your bookkeeping clients. Therefore, you can provide them with superior service.
