Retain and Acquire New Clients in Tax Season with Tax Outsourcing

Problems abound in the tax season. There is always the threat of not doing more and seeing competitors run away with a huge amount of tax preparation work. The work that you think your firm should be doing. Unfortunately, your firm cannot, because it doesn’t have enough resources. 

Sometimes, the tax season throws up challenges of client retention. The problem is client expectation management and your inability to do so. QX Accounting Services has a webinar on this topic that is available on-demand and is a must-watch. The problem that rears its ugly head here is again the inability to build enough capacity, which interferes with your ability to do more work and handle client engagement better. 

If you cannot retain existing clients, you will be wise not to focus on client acquisition. But this impacts your firm’s growth outlook.

Let’s look at these problems in detail and then move on to the solution. 

The Problem of Client Retention

A typical problem encountered during tax season is that the overwhelming amount of work coming your way means accountants working on accounting and bookkeeping projects are routed to do tax prep. The result can be mismanagement of other services, in turn resulting in client dissatisfaction that can’t be sorted quickly. 

You can imagine what happens next. A client is trying to reach you, expressing disappointment and not getting problem redressal, and finally moving on to another firm (that can handle client expectations better in the tax season and beyond). Do what you will, but it isn’t easy to get such clients back on board again. This is a disaster, especially if the remaining client is a marquee client. 

Imagine the reputation damage if this client doesn’t have good things to say about your firm’s services and client management. 

Another problem that rears its head in Tax Season is managing your tax work and the associated clients. The sheer amount of work coming your way means your hands are full preparing all the taxes, crunching those numbers, and filing returns well within the deadline.

Here, you might find some clients not sending in the requisite information in time. Read our article on tax season deadlines (give a link here), to know why this is important and how you can stay on top of these dates. The problem is that your firm is hard-pressed to prepare tax returns, and in the midst, you will come across missing information. This leads to a back and forth between you and your clients. But what if you miss reaching out to a few clients. You might reach out once for the missing information, but you might forget to reach out again if they do not send it in. 

Result: You might find out late in the day (imagine the deadline being a week out), and you have information that is wrong or missing and remains to be filled. You scramble but still might not get this info in time. While it might not be your fault, the client can still blame you. 

The Client Acquisition Challenge

It is cheaper to retain clients than acquire new ones. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to keep adding more clients to your firm’s list.

Easier said than done. 

In order to add these clients, you need to put in a load of marketing and sales efforts and for this to happen, you need time and free resources. It would help if you focused on creating marketing collaterals, cold calling and any other way of reaching out to prospects and putting in the paces to convert them into clients. 

This requires a huge amount of marketing expertise and resource allocation.

You need to have both money and expertise to acquire more clients. But this is not the end of it. Once you convince clients to work with your firm, you need to have the resources to get the work done. Or you will get into a never-ending vicious cycle of not being able to satisfy client expectations and demands.

Not good. 

So, the question is, how do you achieve both – acquisition and retention so that your firm grows its business. The answer is outsourcing tax preparation to an outsourcing provider.

Outsource Tax Preparation

Here’s a question for you: What are the primary barriers that interfere with your firm’s retention and acquisition attempts. Lack of resources and time are the ones that immediately come to mind. 

The inability of your firm to scale and that too in time for the tax season is one of the key limitations that can be addressed when you outsource tax preparation. 

By outsourcing tax returns in the tax season, you are freeing up valuable time and resources that can be put to good use elsewhere, whether it is other services or client engagement. The key here is to ensure your in-house resources are busy with high-margin services and delivering tremendous value add to your firm’s reputation.

The solution is to work with an outsourcing provider that delivers tax preparation services for CPAs and outsource time-consuming compliance tasks. You will find that you can do more tax work without overwhelming your in-house team. This is because your outsourced tax preparers will work as an extension of your in-house team, and that too without requiring a lot of managerial oversight. 

This is a win-win for you as you save on operational costs, boosting profitability from compliance services like tax preparation, and your in-house team can focus on services that deliver better value in commercial terms. 

When you have more time on your hands and know that time-consuming tasks are being handled effectively by a team that isn’t putting pressure on your CAPEX, you can spend more time retaining existing clients. More importantly, you can also spend resources in acquiring new clients, knowing you can scale your outsourced team as and when required.

The Journey Towards Tax Outsourcing

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. In this case, this journey begins with your being able to identify the right outsourcing provider for your needs. You must outsource tax returns to a provider who has many years of experience in this field and can promise a quick turnaround with zero compromises on quality.

Do not, and we repeat, do not just focus on the cost aspect as a key determinant, although this is important. You need to focus on other elements, such as experience, qualifications, the existing clientele, accreditations, and much more. 

At QX Accounting Services, we partner with growth-focused accounting firms to deliver accounting outsourcing services, including tax preparation. With us, you work with a best-of-breed offshore outsourcing provider with solid accreditation and reputed clients.

Contact us if you want to make the most of Tax Season 2022.