Today's Features
CHARTS & GRAPHS

Payroll Leads Job Gains in Tax & Accounting Sector

line chart
Overall accounting profession employment

 

Everyone is earning more this month, and most downs are slight.

By Beth Bellor
CPA Trendlines Research

The tax and accounting profession is not a bad place for job seekers, it seems. A new analysis by CPA Trendlines shows a lot of up notes, including some in the double digits.

MORE ON JOBS: Let Interns Fix the Staffing Shortage? | Accountants Bullish Locally, Bearish Nationally | Accounting Hiring Hits Another High | Compensation’s Up, but Up Enough to Retain Staff? | Staff Wages Hit Record High | Despite Staffing Crunch, Firms Freeze Pay Raises | Tax & Accounting Firms Grow for 9th Straight Month | Tax & Accounting Profession Grows, but Wages Don’t
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New highs are coming in:

  • The accounting profession overall
  • Staff earnings
  • Payroll staff
  • Payroll staff earnings
  • Women overall and in CPA firms

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MARKETING & SALES

How Life Cycle Changes Your Marketing

illustration of business life cycle

Startups have different needs than mature businesses, so the messaging must be different.

By August J. Aquila
Price It Right: How to Value Accounting Services

The business life cycle refers to the stages that a business goes through from its inception to its eventual closure or exit. Each stage presents unique challenges and opportunities, and it is essential for accounting firms to adapt their marketing strategies accordingly.

MORE: Eleven Possible Pitfalls of Mergers | Dodge the Four Curses of a Production Orientation | Client Acquisition Never Stops | ‘Sales’ Is Not a Four-Letter Word | Maybe What You Need Is a Marketing Audit | Three Types of Marketing Message, and Which Is Best | Why You Need Progress Billing | Five Tips for Cross-Selling and Upselling | Five Keys to Successful Marketing | Twelve Fundamentals of Planning | One Question to Guide Your Growth Plans | Four Ways to Prepare for New Business Development
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Here are some marketing strategies that can be effective during different stages of the business life cycle. Take a fresh look at your existing clients, and sort them according to their business life cycle: startup stage, growth stage, mature stage and transitional/decline. You want to make sure that as your clients go through these different cycles, your marketing messages and services change and address the right business concern.
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ABOUT US

Meet Steve Yoss: Quick Tech Talk

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Quick Tech Talk
With Steve Yoss
CPE Today

My life is really kind of split right down the middle.

I spend about half my life writing, talking, teaching, and researching technology. I’ve published and written over a hundred courses for financial professionals on how to leverage and utilize technology effectively and efficiently in your personal lives and in your organizations. I really try to help find ways that you can use this tech to help you save time, to get more work done, to make your life easier, reduce your risk of data breaches and security issues, uh, and more.

Click here for more Steve Yoss

Outside of my work as a speaker and author, I also work as a software developer. I come from an accounting background with my father being a CPA and growing up in the profession. But my love and passion has always been with technology. I got my first computer when I was seven years old. It was an IBM 386 running DOS, and it was an incredible time in my life. I fell in love from that very moment and created my life’s work of really trying to learn and utilize technology the best way I can.

And throughout my life, I’ve explored that countless times. Now I work in the other half of my life as a software developer, leading a very talented team of developers and engineers to build software solutions – typically in the accounting space or enterprise resource planning space – for niche industries to help them find technology, to make their operations more effective and efficient. Ultimately, everything I do has a common thread of tech and accounting.

It’s something I love to my very core, and I’m excited to share with you some of the things I’ve found that have worked for myself and for my clients, to, hopefully, give you the knowledge and wisdom to make good and effective decisions down the road for yourself, for your family, and for your organizations.

PRO Member Exclusive

Three Steps to Becoming a Millionaire

Dump “nonprofit” tasks and focus on the high-value ones.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

Let’s do the math. To earn a million dollars in a year, you have to bring in $83,333 per month. Assuming you bill hourly and work for the standard 1,000 billable hours per year, you need to charge $1,000 per hour. If you want to make $5 million in one year, you will need to charge $5,000 per hour.

MORE: Five Business Development Mistakes to Avoid | Twelve Ways Your Business Card Can Hurt You | Got FOMO When It Comes to AI and ChatGPT? You Should: Here’s What You’re Missing | How to Weather Any Economic Storm | Ten Ways to Have More Energy This Tax Season | Seven Steps to Keeping Your Clients Forever | Give to Receive, and Eight More Ways to Boost Sales | Five Things That Clients Don’t Know about Accountants | Five Ways to Wow Your Clients | How to Fight Feeling Overwhelmed | You’re Missing 60% of Your Revenue | Make the Most of CPE Conferences
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Here’s some breaking news: You won’t get there doing tasks that are worth $10 per hour. Even if we drop a zero and aim for six figures in a year, you won’t get there doing $10-per-hour tasks either. At six figures, you’re worth $100 per hour.

The difference between poor people and rich people is simple: One values the scarcity of their time and uses every minute wisely, and the other doesn’t.
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ABOUT US

Bissett Bullet: Your Greatest Successes

Today’s Bissett Bullet: “The most powerful marketing weapon you have in the fight against the competition is the stories of clients you’ve helped in the past.”

By Martin Bissett

Client success stories are one of the best ways to interest potential future clients. Are yours clearly documented as a part of your marketing literature? If not, why not?

Today’s To-Do:

Reflect on some of the best outcomes you’ve achieved for your clients. What service did you deliver? What was the outcome and what savings were created for the client? Write this into a case study to share with potential future clients.

See more Bissett Bullets here

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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

Why Pricing Is So Disruptive

Kick familiar to the curb and get paid what you’re worth.

By Jody Padar
Radical Pricing  – By The Radical CPA

The familiar is always more comfortable than something new. Shifting your pricing model is bound to be disruptive because the billable hour is what we know and have always known. It is the default billing model of every new firm. It’s comfortable, familiar, embedded in our DNA and seems like the easiest billing solution.

MORE: The Radical Pricing Model: Start with $25K | Three Critical Factors Drive the Value Pricing Trend | Accounting Disruptors Are Heading Your Way … with Deep Pockets | The Convergence of Trends Makes Pricing Changes Imperative | Stop Looking for Talent that Does Not Exist | Advisory Work Must Be Priced by Value, Not Hours
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Certainly, there are some pros to billing by the hour. Profits remain relatively stable. If you work 40 hours, you know you’re going to bill and hopefully be paid for those 40 hours. There’s a clarity and certainty to it. But there are only so many hours in a week. By embracing the billable hour, you’re putting a profit ceiling on your firm.

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AUDIT & ASSURANCE

S Corp Clients Beware

“Reasonable comp” audits are coming.

By Eric Green

“The IRS never audits reasonable comp, so don’t worry about it.”

Have you ever heard this phrase? Well, when it comes to IRS priorities and increasing enforcement, S corporations and their owners will find themselves in the crosshairs of the IRS.

MORE in TAX: Eight Steps to Getting Started with AI: A Guide for Tax Professionals | What’s Your Value to Your Tax Clients? | Are You Excited About Tax Season? | What the Corporate Transparency Act Means for Accountants | Train Now Before It Costs You Down the Road | Surge Pricing: What Works for Uber Could Work for CPA Firms | Uncooperative Partner Might Not Be the Problem | It’s Time to Fix the Problem of QTIPs and LLCs

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In 2020, the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reported more than 10 million non-filers, many of them high-income earners. Then, in 2021, a TIGTA Report told the IRS to begin cracking down on S corporation owners who take little to no compensation to avoid employment taxes effectively.

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MARKETING & SALES

Stop Operating from a Scarcity Mentality

Coins and small bills in a plastic box

Ten questions for reconsidering your prices.

By Martin Bissett
Business Development On a Budget

Undercharging – or lowballing as it’s also called – is the scourge of the profession. It has always been present, and unfortunately, it will probably be with us for the foreseeable future.

Undercharging is directly related to fear – fear of rejection.

MORE: Firm Not Thriving? Five Fixes | Five Questions About Facing Challenges | Be Clear About Your ROI Proposition | It’s Time to Prepare the Next Generation | Who Are You More Committed to, Your Firm or Your Clients? | Nine Checkpoints Before Every Prospect Meeting | Three Questions about Conversion | Six Keys to Turning Prospects into Clients | Don’t Overlook Internal Communication
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When you are building your pipeline according to the process, you have assigned fees you think might be in the ballpark of what you believe you could get from a new piece of work or a new client. You may tend to estimate on the low side, which is not a bad idea in theory, because it lets you be pleasantly surprised when it’s anything beyond that.

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