Why Accountants Need a CRM To Make Their Business Future-Ready
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Why Do Accountants Need a CRM?
As an accountant, you may work with tight schedules on a daily basis. You may need to focus your limited time on the analytical and consulting side of the business, but that shouldn’t happen at the expense of other important parts of the business.
Customer lifecycles and brand building are equally important for consistent growth.
An accounting CRM software can help you manage and scale your small business with several features:
1. Access to Client Data
An accounting CRM offers your team a centralized dashboard for accessing client history. It lets them pick things up from the previous client interaction and develop a deeper connection with the client.
You can provide role-based access to your team and allow them to autonomously work on tasks and communicate with clients when required.
Your accounting CRM may offer a wide range of integrations to migrate and sync client information directly from other apps. Once the client data is compiled, your team can continue collaborating by creating custom reports or using automation to optimize data quality.
2. Easy Collaboration With the Team
An accounting CRM lets your team interact with other members, departments, and clients directly. Your team can access the resources they need in a minimal time to speed up their operations.
For instance, an accounting CRM might help you create a knowledge base for employees. When they need help with a task, they’ll have access to tutorials, guides, and other knowledge base assets.
Employees who need help from another department benefit from a ticketing system. If a team member can’t process a transaction on the IRS payment portal, they can raise a ticket for IT and ask for help.
3. Automate Parts of Your Workflow
As an accountant, you may know how automating repetitive tasks can contribute to your profitability. It can directly impact your bottom line.
Besides freeing up human resources, automating parts of your workflow ensures you can take the right actions at the right time to keep things moving.
A feature-rich accounting CRM automates the creation of clients’ service tickets — create a ticket as a client fills out a form or sends a query via email or live chat.
You can also automate reminders for your team and clients. Suppose you’ve had a client in your pipeline for a certain number of days. You can trigger a notification to the relevant team member and request a follow-up or an update.
You can also set reminders for critical dates, such as the last date for tax payment.
4. Software Integrations
You can use accounting CRM integrations to transfer data between your CRM and other apps.
For instance, you can use the deal record data from your accounting CRM to create an invoice on accounting software like QuickBooks Online if your CRM platform supports Quickbooks.
Integrations streamline your business processes and remove the possibility of human errors from your pipeline. Instead of manually transferring data into spreadsheets or double-checking invoices, you can focus on higher-priority tasks.
5. Streamline the Client Onboarding Process
An accounting CRM helps streamline onboarding and minimizes administrative load. You can sign and exchange documents, schedule reminders for the client, and perform other administrative tasks via your CRM.
It simplifies client management and frees up your administrative resources.
6. Customer Lifecycle Overview
You need to stay on top of your sales process to convert leads into customers. When you have an overview of where each lead is in the pipeline, you can effectively target them with your marketing efforts.
Even with a sales team, monitoring the customer lifecycle provides valuable insight. It helps you identify the parts of your strategy that need improvement.
Besides that, an accounting CRM will help you answer important business questions like:
- Is your business generating enough leads?
- Are the leads converting well?
- How long can you retain clients on average?
7. Brand Building
Instead of using separate tools to build your brand, you can rely on a CRM that consolidates your brand-building efforts on a single dashboard.
For example, the best CRMs let you run email marketing campaigns without the need to hire external help by offering built-in email templates. You can run email campaigns using existing customer data and always deliver relevant content to your clients via email. Doing this can help you position yourself as a thought leader and improve your credibility among your clientele.
8. Analytics
An accounting CRM can produce analytical data and provide a visual summary of performance metrics. Analytics are key to understanding how efficient your business strategy has been for a certain period.
For example, if you run an email campaign, an accounting CRM can provide answers to:
- How many people opened the email?
- How many of them clicked through to the product page?
- How many leads did you generate?
A 2022 study by Grandview Research reveals that 82% of companies use their CRM for sales reporting and process automation. You can do the same and get more control over the direction in which your accounting business is headed.
Monitoring marketing and pipeline data can help optimize your future strategy and forecast the business’s growth.
Benefits of Using a CRM for Accountants
A CRM for accountants can offer intangible benefits in efficiency, profitability, and client relationships.
In dollar terms, Dynamic Consultants Group shares that CRMs return an average of $30.48 for every dollar spent.
Here are the benefits you can expect to derive by using a CRM for accountants:
1. Build Long-Term Client Relationships
A flexible and robust CRM for accountants helps nurture your existing clients and build long-term relationships.
You’ll have access to features that will give you a competitive edge over competitors to strengthen long-term relationships, such as:
- Providing quick responses to clients’ queries
- Offering clients real-time access to their documents
- Giving clients the option to track the progress of tasks without having to call you
Besides that, you’ll have the current and historical data needed to stay on top of the client’s business and deliver the best-in-class accounting service.
2. Understand Client Data Better To Optimize Business Strategy
An accounting CRM will provide you with relevant data to measure your client’s performance and help you categorize clients by industry or turnover. Doing this will help you optimize your marketing and overall business strategy.
You will be able to know if you have enough clients in a certain industry to position yourself as a niche accounting firm or if you can market yourself to bigger clients than before.
Why HubSpot CRM Is the Best CRM for Accountants
HubSpot helps accounting firms streamline their customer relationship to focus on the more technical aspects of their business.
Here’s why HubSpot is the best CRM for accountants:
- Sales-focused automation: HubSpot automates various parts of your business, such as sending reminders to the team and clients, letting clients pick a time you’re available for meetings, and adding the contact information of your prospects.
- Automated ticketing: HubSpot also helps you provide excellent customer support with automated ticketing. A client can use email, chat, or a contact form to create a ticket, and HubSpot will automatically route them to the relevant team member.
- Comprehensive portfolio of inbound marketing tools: HubSpot offers all inbound marketing channels you can think of, including blogging, social media, email, and paid ads.
- Compiles client data in one place for easy access: HubSpot works as a central database for all client interactions, regardless of who the client interacts with from the company.
- Excellent customer support: HubSpot offers 24/7 customer support to its users and helps them unlock the full potential of the HubSpot CRM through the HubSpot Academy.
If you’re an accountant looking for a best-in-class CRM for accountants, sign up for HubSpot’s free CRM here.
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