Experience the power of a customer service management system for Accounting and Tax

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picking a practice management system in an accounting firm is absolutely brutal too many choices it's too high stakes hard to tell what the tools even actually do and a lot of them like aren't even I don't know practice Management Systems now like the lines are getting blurred on exactly what these tools even do so how am I supposed to pick one listen bring it in Squad I'm going to run you through a four-step process to help select a system and then share a mega report we just released for firms under 100 employees that is a comparison of over 200 features across 14 systems it was a lot and I am tired okay but that's going to save you a whole bunch of Blood Sweat and Tears figuring this all out for yourself okay step one what is important to your firm what do you need from your new system better I don't know workflow management a killer client portal file management automated client requests this is very firm specific let's say I run a tax practice for the elderly and I spend my nights and weekends at the retirement home me meeting with the olds I am not looking for a sweet sweet client portal then right if I have a tool that I love that does proposals really well I don't need engagement letters let's say I got a time and billing app that I don't want to leave my PM doesn't need to have time and billing you get the idea now if you don't even know where to start like what should I expect from this system here are six categories to be thinking about and you need to rank these in their relative importance number one workflow management tasks projects that sort of thing number number two client Management number three portal all the client facing stuff number four file management number five email cuz that's a thing number six time and billing so jot those literally jot those down if you need to pause the video and make a list of what is the most important for you because by the end of this video you will know which systems are the very best for your needs ing to that ranking step two what do you expect from this functionality you may say workflow but that means very different things to different people for example on workflow should it have subtasks custom statuses do I need to be able to make a task recur on Monday and Friday or shift to due date recurrence when it falls on a weekend 100 different examples of this but for your top couple categories jot down the most important functionality to you because these systems do a ton of things and some systems try to do everything While others do a few things really well and what you don't want this to become is just like this feature arms race you want to choose the platform with the most meaningful implementation of the functionality that is most important to the success of your firm step three the report I'm going to show you how this report that we put together works but do not skip step four arguably it's the most important we're going to talk about that last so get your hands on this report that we put together I'll show you how to use it basically there's three sections here you've got a summary page a product page for each of the 14 products and a massive data grid of over 200 features now again this is not a feature arms r race many tools will implement the same feature in different ways for example some features may not even be necessary because of some alternative approach for example tags versus custom Fields but the goal here is to find the tools that are heavily invested in the things that are most important to you now on the flip side if your goal is just to find a system that'll do anything and everything then we've got platforms that are trying to do that as well so a really easy place to start here in the report I'm going to go to the summary page and you'll see this is like a heat map so this is a reflection of the percentage of features in each category that a tool has to give you a sense of who is investing where are they heavily invested into a couple categories are they trying to do a whole bunch of things so for example if the email integration of my system is really important to me here we can see the players with the greatest level of email support those are going to be the ones that are lit up but ultimately what is important to you is that uh you know who's investing in their portals who's got the most workflow functionality this heat map is a great place to get started but again from there what you probably want to do is look at the specific tool pages of those that look like they could be a good fit those tool pages are going to do stuff like highlight notable features that they both have and don't have you're going to see G2 and cap Tera reviews these little radar charts that we use as a visualization of what they do and don't do and even some commentary from the company themselves about what they're building next because that also matters like you are hitching Your Wagon to this thing long term but then the data grid the big boy this is really helpful how many many times have you been deep into a software and realized what the hey it doesn't do this are you hecking me man this is what we want to capture in this report is all the fiddly stuff like can I filter client views can I filter on tags can I filter on custom Fields can I do multi filters can I share views with my team can my client tags or custom filters be visible inside a task for that client can I filter my tasks on those client tags or custom Fields I mean there's so many different things like that right where you run into it and you're like well crap it turns out that I actually really need this and this is now a problem and this isn't just like a a view or workflow thing this is across everything so many things like this in every category workflow portal time and billing you name it the data GD is where you want to dig deep into the data on the systems you're learning more about to ensure that you've got everything that you need and fourth probably the very most important step to this process and what most people still don't do start talking with people start having conversations about the tools you're thinking about using now I got to go talk to the providers of the products you absolutely need to do that ultimately those conversations will be much more nuanced than a generalized report like this can be but also start talking with other practitioners who use these tools this is so important put out to your Professional Network that you're thinking about making this change and being able to talk with real firm owners who have made the change you're considering it will save you so much time and stress now your sales rep they will be helpful and they still need to be involved in the process but you've still got an incentives issue there right like ultimately they are sales people and the firms that your sales rep will refer to you to ask questions of while better than nothing those are still handpick firms who will do nothing but speak glowingly of the software and that's not what I want what I want is the real story and nobody's perfect here let's like let's be real absolutely no tools going to be perfect I'm not looking for that but I want to talk with folks who are actual users how was onboarding anything surprising on the positive or negative side how is support how is support after they've sold you on the product does it go off a cliff or does it get even better well you need to talk to the software company and you need to work with your salesperson please please please don't just make decisions based on what sales people tell you that's a that's a that's a losing strategy talk with real practitioners who are using the products this is the value frankly of network working with other pros at conferences on social media and in online communities now before we wrap up last week we talked about challenging assumptions and accounting firms it was a good one and with this video sponsor live flow I'm going to show a killer idea to take the pressure off those financial statement delivery deadlines so LIF flow it's an easy way to sync your Quickbooks data out to Google Sheets they got a whole pile of templates you can use I'm going to pop over here let's create a starting point like uh how about this live update budget versus actuals this is a template they provide that I can just swipe I'm going to say use template once in man all I got to do is connect it to my company so I hit the drop down I'm connected to two QuickBooks companies right now I'm going to connect this to Acme and say swap company okay and now it is updating live if I come in here I can see this report can even drill into these to pull you straight into QuickBooks but if I'm thinking about what a real time dashboard would be for the client that ticks all these boxes I'm going to need more stuff than this so I'm going to pull in some other reports hop back into templates what are some other things that my client needs like real time how about a live AP dashboard managing bills what else how about expense management for sure here we got expense management by vendor they've got loads of other templates in here to make this as easy as possible to build out or if you want you can build your own from scratch and just like that you can bang together your own real time reporting that is what your client actually wants to see and I would Hazard a guess that they're probably not even going to look at those financials most months now still got to do them can't just forget about them but absolutely completely takes the pressure off that delivery deadline right pretty cool learn more about this one at the link in the video description below now that big sweaty report we showed off go swipe it links in the video description I wasted years using the wrong practice management system and this report would have saved me so much pain and a special thank you honestly to all of you who tune in each week and the sponsors we get on this channel for making frankly big cool projects ambitious stuff like this possible now if you got value from all this be sure to hit the like button subscribe enable notifications we got some really cool valuable stuff on the way and I'll see you in the next one bye