Of course, most practices these days have an electronic document filing system. Beats a room full of filing cabinets.
If you switch on the higher level search facilities try searching for the phrase “Inheritance Tax” and see what results you get? For Inheritance Tax you could substitute any words that would call back any recent piece of tax planning that was successful.
The rationale in doing this is not to provide you with an opportunity to clap yourself on the back: job well done. It’s to see if the advice you gave is relevant, and would be of help, to any other client in similar straights?
Could you turn a one-off piece of advice into a tax product that could be sold again, and again…?
After all you have put in the hard work, done the research. You may need to review the technical aspects to cover off any changes in legislation since the tears of appreciation were streaming down your satisfied customer’s cheek.
The process we are alluding to is leverage: do something one time and sell it many times.
And why not get some unexpected payback from your document management system. The more data you store in electronic format, the more opportunity you have to access. Worth thinking about.
HMRC are certainly making the most of this line of thinking. Unfortunately, they are using their Connect data mining software to join up the dots in our data, and use the results to winkle out tax evaders. After their gain is our loss.
Give it a go. For the future, make sure that all your high level fee earners share their winning strategies, just in case colleagues have clients that would benefit. Better still add a search tag to your filing system so it’s easy to search for those archived nuggets. Time to retire your picks and shovels, there are simpler ways to pan for your gold.
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