3 Easy Ways to Grow Your Accounting Business

Accountants looking to grow their practices are entering a golden age of new opportunities. More and more people are turning away from accounting software, and turning towards local accounts and CPAs. Here are a few shortcuts you can take to quickly grow your accounting practice.

Become a Reseller

Finding tools and software you trust to help tackle time-intensive tasks is another great shortcut you can take on your path to operating an efficient accounting firm. 

As an accountant, you can add additional services to your practice that not only provide a great value to your customers, but also help generate additional regular income streams outside of tax season. 

Business Formation Services

Many of your clients who work as consultants or operate a business as  a sole proprietors could see substantial tax benefits by forming an LLC or Corporation to protect their finances. 

Imagine this scenario: You are reviewing your client’s small business taxes, and you notice they would gain access to massive tax savings by filing a s corporation election. 

Wouldn’t it also be great if you could help your client complete the filing while making a bit of extra cash, without even lifting a finger? MyCorporation offers incorporation services for accountants, making it easy for CPAs and tax firms to help their clients handle business related legal filings, like business incorporation, EIN filings, amendments, and more. 

Payroll and HR

For accountants who want to offer clients payroll, benefits, and HR support, working with Gusto through their referral program can be a great way to add a bit of extra money to the coffers while promoting your business. Gusto also provides training as part of their certification program, giving you some extra skills you can use to help your small business clients at multiple touchpoints throughout the year. 

Bookkeeping

When it comes to meeting the needs of your bookkeeping clients let’s be honest, well-kept records make the job much easier. By joining the Freshbooks affiliate program, you can offer your clients affordable, anybody-can-use software that will make the once-a-year task of wrangling their finances easier. Plus, they offer generous payouts for each referral. 

Modernize your practice

Offer Remote Services

More and more people are actively looking for services they can use from the comfort of home. Let’s be honest, sitting in a stuffy office watching your accountant crunch numbers is not an appealing way to spend a Friday afternoon.

By providing remote accounting services, you can vastly expand your service area, since customers are no longer required to meet at your office location. 

You can leverage secure file transfer tools and password protected PDFs to exchange information with your clients making remote work a breeze.  

Eliminate paper

Most accountants recommend keeping original documents for at least seven years.

We have all walked into an accounting office at one time or another only to see walls full of filing cabinets and paper clutter in every direction and thought, there must be a better way.

In many cases, paper records can be incredibly slow and inefficient to use, not to mention expensive to store. All that time spent looking for your clients documents is wasted time, and wasted money, especially considering the fact there are so many affordable alternatives to paper. 

You can use a document scanning service to convert your existing paper records into digital files, which can be searched, categorized, and stored just like any other kind of file.

Does that mean you should throw away your old files? Of course not! It does mean that you could easily offset the cost of scanning your documents with the time saved pulling up old documents digitally, as opposed to rummaging through piles of files.  

Build your online presence 

The biggest source for new clientele will almost always be online. The web is the first place people go when looking for tax help, and if you’re not listed, you are missing out. 

Building your online presence for your accounting practice doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

Add your business to online listing sites.

There are quite a few free options when it comes to listing your business online. Adding your business to Google Places is one of the simplest ways to help people looking for your services online find you, as local listings tend to be one of the top results when searching online. 

Bing places also has free business listings, and while they may not get as much attention, you are able to import your Google Places listings you own into bing in just one click. Twice the bang for your efforts!

Get a simple website

You can increase the impact of adding your business to listing sites by also including a website link. Building a website is a task most accountants put off, either because they don’t have the time, or they think it’s too expensive. If it’s been a while since you looked into it, you might want to look again. With affordable options to build a quick DIY website online, look to WIX, one of the most popular web builders out there. You can build a simple one-page website with your hours of operation, services listed, a few images, and more in just a couple of hours