Practice management is about people, not software – but software certainly helps! Smart firms use it to enable more and more meaningful connections between partners and clients, not to take their place.
What drives the development of Capium’s cloud accounting and practice management software is efficiency. We’re always trying to find a way to remove steps, reduce clicks and give accountants back some of their time.
But it’s not about efficiency for the sake of it. You get two options when it comes to reinvesting the time and money it saves:
- Pursuing and onboarding more clients, in a highly competitive market.
- Spending more time on those you already have, increasing the average revenue per client by providing a better customer experience and upselling additional services.
In practice, most firms will rightly choose a blend of the two. In both cases, it’s about freeing up people to do what people do best: connect with other humans.
Capium’s software is good but it can’t yet listen to a client talk about their divorce and convey real sympathy. It can’t pick up on the slight note of worry that tells you a client needs some frank business advice before starting a new venture. And it won’t be able to show the kind of enthusiasm for your clients’ goals and ambitions that makes them want to work with you as their business grows.
What it can do, like an efficient personal assistant, is take care of the routine, repeatable stuff that makes human-to-human contact run more smoothly.
For example, you can use a customer relationship management system (CRM) – Capium has an easy-to-use version built-in – to automate check-in emails to clients at specified intervals. Then, if that prompts them to reply or get on the phone, a human can take over.
At the simplest level, having notes on each client close at hand – what did they last call about and where was that conversation left? – makes relationships run more smoothly.
Nothing knocks a client’s confidence as badly as hearing the person on the end of the line struggling to remember which sector they operate in, or repeatedly calling them Brian when their name is Bimal.
Beyond communications, making the day-to-day business of accounting more efficient, and automating as much as possible, frees up brainpower to make more meaningful interventions.
Let’s say you’re using Capium’s corporation tax module to handle the bulk of the calculations and submissions process. When we’re talking about one client, that saves time. Across a hundred, it potentially gives you back entire working days, or weeks. That’s time you could use adding real value through business planning or tax strategy.
A single version of the truth for each client, stored in the cloud, also makes it easier for anyone at your firm to have a meaningful conversation with a client, not just their usual contact. This is a great asset when it comes to customer satisfaction and retention, helping to avoid the dreaded phrase “I feel as if I’ve been pushed from pillar to post…”
You could achieve all of the above by hiring more people, of course, but software has the additional benefit of being cheaper, more flexible and less likely to complain when you ask it to do the same thing for the thousandth time.
Book a demo to find out how Capium can help you manage your practice to focus on connecting with current and prospective clients.
