Blog · Industry
Which clients take compliance from you and advisory from someone else. Which filing season is three weeks away with clients who have not been contacted. Which partner's fees depend on four clients. From the practice management and time systems, client IDs only.
How an accounting firm turns the data it already holds from compliance work into an advisory pipeline: the events in a client's filed accounts and returns, turnover crossing a threshold, a first overseas sale, R&D spend appearing, a director's loan, a property purchase, that map to an advisory service, the clients with a trigger and no service, valued at the firm's own fee for that service, and the partner list that comes out each filing season.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow an accounting firm turns its engagement list and filing calendar into a load curve per manager: filings due per week, the hours each typically takes from the firm's own time entries, the hours available from the roster, the weeks where load exceeds capacity months ahead, and the reassignments and early starts that flatten the peak before the season does it the hard way.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow an accounting firm finds the clients paying well below what similar clients pay for the same services, from the fee ledger and the client master: fee per client per service line, the norm from clients of the same size and complexity, the gap valued, the partners whose books sit lowest, and why the fix is a scoping conversation at the next engagement letter rather than an across-the-board increase.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow an accounting firm turns time entries and the filing calendar into a weekly list of clients whose returns have not been opened by the date they usually are, why the client's own history is the right norm, the roll-up by partner and office, and the two lists that come out: at-risk deadlines and clients who may have gone elsewhere.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow an accounting or tax practice measures which service lines each client uses against the norm for clients like them, values the advisory gap, and builds a season watch of clients with a filing deadline in the window and no engagement opened, reconciled to billed fees.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow accounting firms should choose analytics software: start from the questions, check the data you hold, ask vendors ten questions, avoid the traps.
24 Sept 20264 min readThe ten practice KPIs a tax or accounting firm should run on, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: service lines per client against the norm, fee per client against the norm for its size, season watch, deadline load per manager, advisory triggers acted on, realisation by client, client retention by fees, lock-up by client, scope creep on fixed fees, and new client onboarding time. Also the three measures most firms miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe complete season watch calculation on five accounting clients, small enough to check by hand: each client's usual start date from the last two years' time entries, the margin, today's date, whether this year's engagement has a time entry yet, days late, the deadline, the split into the deadline-at-risk list and the possible-attrition list, the client marked closed who drops off, prior-year fees as the ranking, and the identity that every client with a recurring engagement is in one state, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own practice management export.
17 Sept 20263 min readClient analytics for accounting firms. Every client, every service line, every filing season.
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