Professional Service Firm Marketing Tips & Strategies

Accounting Today Goes Digital

The inaugural digital edition of Accounting Today was recently released.

Personally, I enjoy reading magazines in digital format. I preferred to change the default setting on their reader to display one page at a time vs two. That's probably because I work on tablet pc with a relatively small screen. Anyway, the reader gives you plenty of options to customize the display to your liking.

One of the things that has annoyed me about older digital magazine formats is they made it difficult to share information with people.  I was very pleased to see that Accounting Today provides several ways to share information. Here is a screen shot of the sharing options

As you can see, you can share with your friends on social networks

They even allow you to build a widget to insert into your post or web site

	Look inside >
Contents

When I read magazines like this, I'm often in "collection mode" - meaning I like to skim through and tear out pages or highlight items that I want to spend more time with later. Digital magazines have always frustrated me because they are difficult, if not impossible, to cut and paste from. I don't see how to cut and paste from AT, but with the ability to use social bookmarks and using third party tools to take screen shots, I can live with that limitation.

There is one thing I wish I could add. AT always has a nice section where they review business books. I would love to be able to save books to my Amazon wishlist by right-clicking on a link inside the magazine.

Great job by the folks at Accounting Today.

How Much It Costs To Start A Business

Many of you who read this blog are accountants, attorneys, and other professionals who help small business owners start and grow their business. Our friends at Palo Alto Software have a number of business calculators that you and your clients may find helpful in your business planning efforts. Some of the calculators they provide include:

1. Cash Flow Calculator
2. Starting Costs Calculator
3. Email Marketing ROI Calculator
4. Pay-Per-Click ROI Calculator
5. Break-Even Calculator

Click here to see all of the available business calculators. You can even add these calculators to your own website.

FAQ Pages for Accountants and Lawyers

Michelle Golden has a great post about creating effective FAQ pages for accountant and lawyer websites. Here is my favorite quote from her post:

"For complex issues, some accountants and many lawyers have GREAT FAQ pages, and they are usually called blogs. "

As Michelle points out, professional service firms need to stop telling people how much they know and start showing them WHAT they know.

Read the rest of Michelle's post here.

6 Tips For Marketing Your Tax Practice

If you are a tax preparation professional, it is quickly becoming that time of year when you need to start thinking about how to get profitable new clients to know, like, and trust you. Here are 6 marketing tips that you can start working on now so you can enjoy your most profitable tax season ever.

1. Have something unique to say - How will you tell your market that you are different from the hundreds (thousands?) of other tax practices who say they do what you do?

I will tell you how not to say you are different. Reasonable rates and years of experience are not differentiators - they are table stakes. If you cannot stand out from the crowd, you will be forced to compete solely on price - not a good place to be in the day of Internet based tax preparation services.

2. Have a specific audience in mind - This goes hand-in-hand with #1. If you can be the "go to" tax specialist for a certain group of people, people with a particular need or problem, your job as a marketer becomes easier. Remember that trying to be all things to all people will make you special to no one.

3. Update your web site - You do have a web site, don't you? While you might not gain new tax clients just because you have a web site, chances are you will lose potential clients if you don't. Your web site is often the first point of contact with a potential client - don't drive prospects away with a web site full of outdated content.

Do you have a blog? Posting tips and tricks, explanations of changes in the tax law, and how those changes impact your ideal customers is a great way to demonstrate your expertise.

4. Make sure people can find your web site – Recent research shows 70% of American adults use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for goods and services. In addition to optimizing your web site with keywords that are important to your ideal customers, make sure that your site is registered in the local search engines.

5. Have a referral system in place - While most tax accountants admit that referrals played a key role in growing their tax practice, few of them have a system in place for consistently generating referrals. Create your one page referral plan and identify your potential strategic partners before tax season begins.

6. Create a marketing calendar – Success in marketing comes from doing simple things consistently. Set appointments with yourself to work on your marketing. Give these appointments the same respect you give appointments with your most important clients – that means no rescheduling at the last minute and no phone call interruptions.

Salina CPA Firm Makes Top 100 List

Congratulations to Kennedy and Coe, LLC for making AccountingToday's Top 100 Firms. Kennedy and Coe is headquartered in Salina, KS (where I went to high school) and has Kansas locations in Garden City, Goodland, Pratt, Topeka, and Wichita. They also have locations in Greeley and Lamar Colorado.

Kennedy and Coe is the only Kansas based firm to make the list. Click here for a copy of the report (registration required)

Create Software for Microsoft Office Accounting 2007

I don't do software development anymore, but if you do, you may want to check out this new site for developing applications related to Microsoft Office Accounting 2007. According to a phone call I just received, the first 50 people that submit an application for testing can do so free of charge.

If you are developing an application for Office Accounting and would like to talk with a CPA that has software development experience, leave a comment or give me a call.

QuickBooks and Vista

With the launch of Microsoft Vista, Quickbooks users and ProAdvisors need to be aware of a couple of incompatibilities between some versions of Quickbooks, Microsoft Vista, and Internet Explorer 7.0.

If you are going to purchase a new computer in the near future, it will likely be loaded with Microsoft Vista. For Quickbooks users, that means that you need to be running Quickbooks

2007 in

order to work on Vista.

The other issue, and this one is a little more sneaky, is that if you upgrade to Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0, you must be using either a 2006 or 2007 version of Quickbooks. The reason I say sneaky, is because IE 7 will be delivered to your computer via the Windows Update function, so you or your client can get the update without taking an explicit action to get it (as opposed to purchasing a new computer or upgrading to Vista).

It is possible to roll back to IE 6 if IE 7 gets installed. I would only do this as an emergency fix. You want the extra security features of IE 7, and if you are using Quickbooks properly in your business, you are getting a great value for the cost of upgrading Quickbooks.

If you are a ProAdvisor and you want to upgrade to Vista but you still need to support clients on older versions of QuickBooks, take a look at Virtual PC. As the name sounds, Virtual PC lets you create "machines" within your machine. For example, you can create a virtual machine that runs Windows XP and QuickBooks 2005. You work on this "machine" in a window, just like another application. This allows you  to run several different operating systems on one machine without having to resort to dual booting.

Free Accounting Software for Small Business

Small business owners and individual professionals have a couple of new choices for free accounting software. Microsoft recently released Office Accounting Express 2007 (download here) while Intuit announced a free trial version QuickBooks Simple Start (download here). Both products can help you get your accounting system started and provide upgrade paths as your needs grow.

You will find similar features in both products. The interface for both products includes a graphical flow chart that depicts the different accounting tasks and procedures. Data entry forms are designed to represent their paper counter parts (checks, invoices, etc.).

As the name implies, Microsoft Office Accounting Express has the familiar look and feel of office. In addition to basic accounting, you can manage employees, project time sheets, keep track of multiple contacts for each customer and do on-line banking. You also have the ability to customize layouts and user defined fields so you can capture the information that is key to your business. If your business involves selling items on ebay, you will want to check out the integration features for managing auctions and receiving payments via PayPal. When you outgrow the Express version, you can migrate to the Professional version, or Microsoft Dynamics.

The free-trial version of QuickBooks Simple Start 2007 is limited to 20 customers and vendors. There is no expiration date. The list price for the full version is $99, but you shouldn't have to pay that much (contact me if you can't find a better price). The "less is more" philosophy of design makes Simple Start ideally suited for those who aren't familiar with accounting. Even the labels and captions are written in non-technical, every day English. By providing only what you need to complete a task and nothing more, Simple Start will allow you to get your work done and cut down on data entry mistakes. You can upgrade Simple start to the Pro or Premiere versions of QuickBooks.

So, how do you decide? There is no-one-size-fits-all answer to that question, but here are some things to consider when making your decision.

• Do you already use Microsoft Office? If so, you will like the familiar look and feel of the program.
• Do you sell on ebay or collect money through PayPal? If so, you will want to check out the integration tools in QB Simple Start.
• Do you need on-line banking? QB Simple Start does not support on-line banking. MS Accounting Express will, but check with your bank to make sure they offer compatible services.
• If you work with an accountant, ask them which programs they can work with. QuickBooks has been around so long that most accountants are used to working with it. Microsoft Accounting for Office is a newer product and not as many accountants are familiar with it. Microsoft is working to change that with several outreach programs aimed at accountants.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me or leave a comment. You can use the links below to find help in your local area.

Find a QuickBooks ProAdvisor in your area

Find local help for Microsoft Office Accounting

Importing data into Small Business Accounting

[Note - I haven't had a chance to use this product yet, but it seems like a very useful, well documented tool]

A frequent complaint that I hear about Microsoft's Small Business Accounting is the lack of support for importing data. If you have run into this problem, you may want to check out the DP Import Suite from DP Dynamics. This tool will import historical as well as on-going transactions. You can use Excel to build your data lists and then import them into SBA. This suite will let you import the following types of data:

• General Ledger journal entries.
• Sales transactions including sales quotes, sales orders, sales invoice, cash and credit card sales and customer payments.
• Vendor transactions including purchase orders, item receipts, vendor bills and vendor payments.
• Employee transactions including time sheets and payroll entries.
• Banking transactions including debit card or credit card payments.
• Custom data fields values for Master Accounts items including Customers, Vendors and Employees.
• Support Lists including Class lists and Jobs.

They have a nice screen cast demo available on their homepage. You can download the beta version of their product for MS SBA 2007. You can also view\download the documentation.

Save Money on Quickbooks

I have several coupons to save $50 on the Premier and Pro 3-user editions of QuickBooks or $20 for the Simple Start or Pro 2007 editions. Right now, I have 2 coupons for each of the following stores:

• Staples
• CompUSA
• Best Buy
• OfficeMax
• Office Depot
• Amazon

If you would like one of these coupons, leave me a comment or send me an e-mail and let me know which store you prefer. If you need help deciding which edition you need, I can help with that too.