7 minute read
You already know that tax practice management software is used to improve your firm’s organization, efficiency and communication. But if you’re considering investing in a tax practice management software, what should you specifically be looking for? There are two overarching themes every good tax practice management software has: customer relationship management and document management. Let’s begin with the customer side of things.
The best tax practice management software contains various levels of customer management tools. The purpose is to help you collaborate with clients by keeping their information up to date, maintaining and sharing documents securely and communicating quickly and easily.
In short, your tax practice management software should have a client portal that acts as a central hub for all your client communication. This means no more stray emails; instead, all your inbound and outbound communications with existing clients are done through the portal.
Staying organized. You should be able to see a full audit history for each client file and have fast access to all their documents, messages and tasks, each organized in a simple timeline. An important part of managing clients is having automatic message reminders set up so you never have to chase down missing data.
Making information accessible. Other features to look for include the ability to pin vital information at the top and give your staff access to each customer file as well. Why do you need all this? Because you don’t want to be scrambling each time a client calls to check on the status of something — you want their information to be organized so each staff member can quickly check the history.
Remember also that no tax practice management software will do all the work for you. Many of these systems are only as good as what you put in them. If you want an alert to make proactive contact, such as on client birthdays, you have to enter them into the software. But the more you put into them, the better you can manage your contacts.
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In addition to client collaboration, the best tax management software has the ability to manage documents, including tax forms, workflow management and due date tracking. Ideally, you should have a dashboard that gives you a bird’s-eye view of your firm’s work, such as what’s happening now, what’s coming soon and what’s recently been completed.
Filtering and prioritizing. When managing documents, your software should allow you to do things like filter by due date, client and status. It’s helpful to know which CPAs are doing what each week and for which client. A good tax practice management software will likely allow you to prioritize or reprioritize tasks within the system.
Email syncing. Another aspect some software has is automatically pulling in your entire email inbox so everything is in one place. This could allow you to post a comment for other tax preparers in your firm and tag them to take an action.
Workflow templates. As you build out your processes, you’ll want to automate them with workflow templates. For example, once a task is marked complete, the next one should be automatically assigned to the right staff member and appear on their to-do list. This helps keep client projects moving without delays between steps.
Automating payments. Finally, document management wouldn’t be complete without the ability to track billing and invoicing. Automating payments is a big convenience for many firms. A software that also organizes this for you is a huge plus.
Again, there are several good options for firms looking for cloud-based document management solutions and customer relationship management. If you want to delegate and communicate with team members, ensure projects are completed on time and have high client satisfaction, you’ll likely need to invest in a tax practice management software.
As you consider your current processes, there are likely workflows that can become more efficient. If you’re unsure of how a tax practice management software could benefit your firm, ask yourself the following questions:
As you consider these questions, keep in mind we built Corvee with Client Collaboration features we think you’ll like, all in one secure client portal:
We built this Client Collaboration software to help firms monitor the status of requests by clients and track the percentage of progress completion, as well as to securely message specific requests to clients, set email and SMS reminders and have great overall back-and-forth client communication.
Ultimately, every firm wants quicker and more streamlined searching and organizing of client files. They also need to securely share tax returns and avoid sending sensitive information over email. Lastly, they want each piece of information they’ve received from a client to be in one secure, organized system.
Corvee was built for accountants, by accountants. Request a demo today.
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