Tips and Tools to Help You Scale Your Accountancy Practice and Manage Real Estate Clients

Growing your accounting firm is about more than adding staff and finding customers. You have to consider a whole host of other factors, from delivering value-added services to helping clients save time and money in their business.

As such, it’s essential you ensure you have the right software and processes in place to work efficiently and increase your client’s productivity while making everyone’s lives easier, is essential.

In this article, we take a closer look at five tips and tools you can employ to help your accountancy firm grow within the real estate niche.

1. Understand how scaling your firm will impact your client services

A leading selling point for many accountancy firms is the hands-on service and advice that you can provide. Offering high levels of value to clients is essential for client retention and can have a big impact on gathering new clients through word of mouth.

However, it also comes with the downside that clients have high expectations. Because of this, you need to make sure you thoroughly understand how scaling your business will affect your ability to deliver these client services.

As we explore further down in this article, one of the best ways to achieve scalability without impacting service delivery is to explore software and tools. The right tools will enable you to optimize your time and maximize your impact on clients’ businesses.

2. Determine how many staff members you need and when to add more

As mentioned above, a primary decision-making factor for many clients is the expectation of exceptional service. This means value-added consultations, authoritative advice, and realized rewards at the end of the financial year.

With the innovation of new software and technology, people can do more with their time and you can deliver a lot of this value-added service quite easily. However, as your firm continues to grow, you will necessarily need more staff. Everything from receptionists and administrative workers to additional accountants and CPAs.

Making sure you understand how much work will need to be done, and efficient ways to manage this work is essential.

3. Adopt digital tools to save time

Scaling your accounting firm means more than just adding clients’ staff. You need to have the tools to support your growth. For example, essential tools for a growing firm might include communication tools like Zoom or Google Hangouts for online meetings, secure document management, and E signature capabilities for digital document management, allowing you to more efficiently communicate and work with your clients in a digital format. Other tools might be a scalable CRM system and a process for client management to ensure that nobody gets forgotten.

And of course, when it comes down to the actual bookkeeping and digital accounting side of things, you are only as efficient as your clients are going to let you be. Having a tool specifically designed to meet your client’s needs will help ensure that they keep accurate and up-to-date books throughout the year.

Landlord Studio makes this easy. Unlike generic accounting software, our accounting features are specifically designed for real estate investors and our time-saving functionality includes integrated bank feeds, receipt scanning, rent collection and automated income tracking for efficient, error-free bookkeeping wherever you are. See how Landlord Studio compares to QuickBooks for rental property accounting.

4. Improving your client processes

As mentioned, you can only work as fast as your clients let you. If you have a Schedule E client who comes in with a manila folder with a year’s worth of paper receipts, printed-out bank statements with all of their commingled funds, and a messy spreadsheet of expenses, then you’re going to have a massive task untangling their end of year finances.

The alternative is to educate them in the use of industry-specific software such as Landlord Studio. This will allow them to keep their books up to date in real-time, digitize receipts at the point of sale, and automate rent collection and income tracking. The mobile app means that they can manage on the go and they won’t have they won’t have to spend hours at their desk each month going through reams of statements and receipts.

On top of this, Landlord Studio is designed to make it easy for accountants to work with their clients. Use our accountant view to gain access to the complete reporting functionality for your clients and assess their end-of-year finances with ease.

Plus, our Xero integration allows all of your clients transactions to automatically be pushed into Xero, where you can take full advantage of their powerful customizable reporting functionality.

5. Understand your niche

Niche practices enjoy competitive advantages including economies of scale, expert capabilities, and marketing residents.

Real estate is a great example of a growing niche. By targeting this specific niche, you can be more specific in the research and education that you and your team undertake. This will enable you to give the best and most valuable advice and help to your clients and be more targeted with your marketing efforts.

Final words

Being busy is a good thing. It means you’ve got plenty of work to do. However, being busy isn’t always best for profitability. It’s essential then to make time to take a step back and review how your tools and processes could be more efficient and how you can add additional value to your firm and more importantly, to your clients.

Find out about our partner program and how Landlord Studio can help you grow your practice and better manage your real estate clients →

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