Your clients no doubt expect to be charged for the advice you give. If they don’t, then either you are giving advice away free-of-charge or you are advising clients who are unappreciative and unwilling to pay a reasonable price for the advice you provide.
If the latter scenario applies, then perhaps you should reconsider working for that person?
If the former applies, perhaps you are more driven to please than to see the economic value – the price – that your advice is worth?
Notwithstanding this dilemma, most of the time accountants get paid for what they do and that’s entirely appropriate if the advice given matches up to the price charged.
However, the commercial world in which we all operate in is constantly changing, witness the annual enlargement of our tax code for example. It is impossible for practitioners to communicate all these changes on a face-to-face basis, there are simply not enough hours in the day to do this.
Which is why it is imperative to find an alternative method to keep clients in the loop and one that does not demand a reduction in your practice chargeable hours.
Under the GDPR, we are entitled to contact clients, keep them informed of changes in legislation etc, if this makes a positive contribution to their fiscal well-being. Most letters of engagement have clauses that provide the necessary permission-giving that is required.
If you take care of say 200 clients, and if you spent 30 minutes each month talking them through major changes that may or may not affect their personal or business finances, and were unable to charge for this time; then at an hourly charge out rate of £150 per hour this would result in a loss of potential billing of £15,000 per month.
Or you could call in a specialist firm, like Informanagement, who could make this information available to your clients and staff for approximately the cost of 2 billable hours per month.
If you are struggling to keep clients and staff advised in this way, please get in touch. We have solutions that will enable you to add a service of real value to your practice, and for next to nothing in terms of cost.
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