Trends in Accounting Industry 2022 and Beyond!

Tech disruptions in Accounting Industry

Technology and Innovations in Business models have disrupted so many industries in recent years. Taxi service, travel, banking, and shopping have been radically transformed by technology and innovation. These industries have been turned upside down and reshaped in just a few years.

The same is true for the accounting industry. Accounting is no longer a person at a desk opening mail and processing invoices. A majority of invoices are sent electronically, and many are automatically paid through a processing system.

The merger of technology and accounting is becoming greater and greater every day, and business leaders need to stay ahead of this change. They need to understand that technology is quickly changing the way accounting functions within an organization.

Automated processes can provide the bulk of services with oversight, while accounting professionals will focus on offering expert advice and insight, strengthening customer relationships in the process.

Join in this CPE session to understand such changes in more detail and discuss some best practices we can employ to embrace such changes.

How to Secure Your Firm Without Being A Techie.

The tax law is always changing and seemingly getting more complicated every year.

Each year, a handful of tax issues typically requires special attention by tax practitioners. The reasons vary, from a particularly complicated new provision in the Internal Revenue Code to a planning technique opened up by a new regulation or ruling, or the availability of a significant tax benefit. This creates the need for the tax practitioner to constantly stay on top of the new rules and reassess tax strategies every year.

This CPE session focuses on the latest most important topics for tax practitioners. It examines selected new law provisions, new IRS rules, and regulations.

Tax resolution means providing solutions to businesses and individuals alike who find themselves in trouble with the IRS. To resolve tax matters with the IRS, the IRS' Offer in Compromise (OIC) program encourages delinquent taxpayers to settle their back taxes, often for reduced amounts.

The areas covered are offers in compromise, wage garnishments, bankruptcy, installment, delinquent tax returns, IRS bank levies, freedom of information requests, IRS payment plans, payroll tax problems, IRS audits, penalty abatement, liens, collection appeals, IRS appeals, innocent spouse, and the expiration of statutes.

This CPE session will also help you to make a profit from this tax resolution.

Local Mom & Pop Accountant: How to grow your Practice inside AND out

Are you tired of/ frightened of/ overwhelmed by/ indifferent to/ just clueless about all the build-your-practice and keep-up-with-the-times material put out there by the "business growth gurus?"

As non-accountants or non-practicing accountants themselves, they are all in the business of telling you how to grow and revolutionize your accounting or tax practice.

To be clear: they earn their living, sometimes their prosperity, from telling you what to do and they usually do so in a "glamorous" way, full of pomp and circumstance. It follows, this is not what this CPE session is about.

In this CPE session speaker, Basil Agrocosta is an ordinary, local accountant not in the business of/ do not generating any income from telling you how to grow your business. He is a small business person who generated about $175,000 in revenues this year, from clients who pay him no more than $3,000 annually.

The speaker in this CPE session will talk about what he had done to get to this point; how he had consistently made more income, year-after-year, for these first 10 years of being in business; and about how he is currently on track to gross 1/2 million dollars per year in the next 4-7 years.

How accountants can add value to their clients

Accounting is not for the faint of heart! 

We all know that working in an accounting firm can be a very busy lifestyle choice. We have all felt the pain of deadlines and crunch times. Worse, we have also felt the dread of looming deadlines. The struggle is often that we either don’t know when to eliminate, automate, or delegate tasks. And, if we do know when, the real question is how is our time best spent? 

In this CPE session, we will focus specifically on business development tasks that can add value to the clients.

If we can appropriately eliminate, automate, or delegate them, we can grow our firm faster, cheaper, and more reliably. And, we can usually get significantly better results in the process by adding value to the clients.

Let’s start with eliminating...

We are living in a fast-changing world and there is increasing pressure to keep up. The secret to growth is to slow down and first take stock of where you are at in your business. If you assess the return on investment from EVERY business development activity, you can start to see items that should be eliminated. 

Next, we have automate…

There are a lot of repetitive tasks that can be automated to free up time. The goal of automation should be to free up time to focus on adding value to clients, not to replace client interaction. You can add value by seeking out other products or services that they may need.  Or, you can simply spend more time talking to the client to see what they value.  Either way, automation should give you more time to focus on the client experience.  It should never replace client communication!

Finally, we have to delegate... 

This is probably the hardest for young professionals as they develop their technical skills. Ironically, I think this is the biggest hurdle in large firms when one makes the transition from technician to manager. The skillset that makes you good at getting work done is no longer relevant. Suddenly, you need to learn how to delegate and manage the work.

“Emerging Challenges” - Season burnout

Finance leaders are moving into 2022 with cautious and measured optimism, well aware of the challenges that lie ahead. But with these challenges come opportunities and solutions, so as finance and accounting teams jump into 2022, here’s what to prepare for and how to excel in 2022.

Cash flow, hiring new talent, adapting to new tax and regulatory changes, and continuing to adjust to remote work remain some of the largest hurdles for accounting teams.

Investing in offshore staffing services has proved to be a life-altering experience for numerous professionals around the world, they swear by the cost-effectiveness and peace of mind that comes naturally with offshore staffing. Although hiring and working with an offshore staff is very much similar to that of any local/in-office staff, however, there are a couple of points that every CPA or accounting firm should keep in mind to extract optimum utility from them.

This CPE session will help you with the best practices of working with offshore staff.

In today’s increasingly remote workforce, leading virtual teams is an essential skill in your management arsenal. COVID-19 has caused tremendous social and economic upheaval. Businesses have rapidly re-organized into work-from-home and distributed office environments. Now, the staff is working remotely in different setups and locations. With the best practices and foreknowledge of common challenges, you can achieve more with remote teams!

In this CPE session, we will also focus on the staffing challenges of remote working.

Predictive Accounting- Drive Based Budgeting

This CPE session involves the shift from historical reporting to predictive costing such as capacity-sensitive driver-based rolling financial forecasts, what-if analysis, and marginal cost analysis (e.g., pricing).

The annual budgeting process is being criticized as obsolete soon after it is published, prone to gamesmanship, cumbersome to consolidate cost center spreadsheets, not being volume sensitive, and disconnected from the strategy. The challenge is how to resolve these deficiencies.

It can be done through driver-based expense projections also useful for decision analysis.

The annual budget is often perceived as a fiscal exercise done by the accountants that are disconnected from the executive team’s strategy and does not adequately reflect future volume drivers. The budget exercise is often scorned as being obsolete soon after it is produced, and biased toward politically muscled managers who know how to overstate and “pad” their budget request.

To complicate matters, traditional budgets are typically incremented or decremented by a small percent change from each cost center’s prior year’s spending level. This “use it or lose it” behavior by managers in the last few months of the fiscal year unnecessarily pumps up their prior year’s costs and consequently confuses analysis of who needs how much budget in the coming year.

Today organizations are shifting to rolling financial forecasts, but these projections may include similarly flawed assumptions that produce the same sarcasm about the annual budgeting process.

This CPE session provides a solution to poor budgeting and rolling financial forecast methods.

Changing your focus and The Importance of Having a Plan

We are upgrading to a 21st-century business model and transitioning from the old, 20th century way of doing business. We have to change our focus to look forward by shifting away from a backward-looking, compliance-driven focus toward a proactive and holistic client-need focus.

This CPE session will help you to change the outdated referral model with the new team-based model.

The outdated model reactively sends client referrals for professional services whereas, in practice, referrals rarely happen – and we have little or no quality control. The new team-based model - “Proactive Planning Team” combined with “Virtual Family Office Experience” in which we aim to help you become the Planning Team Lead, working closely together to address clients’ biggest problems and to help them meet their most important goals both personally and professionally.

It takes time to build a marketing plan and it will change anyway, right? 100%.

But creating your marketing plan is worth every minute of your time. If you build a business without a marketing plan, it’s like constructing a house without a blueprint. And you need a really good marketing plan template to get you on the right track.

A well-developed 12-month plan gives you a blueprint to intentionally create scalable growth and get control over your time and energy.

This CPE session will help you in understanding the importance of having a plan and will guide you in creating your unique value proposition.

The Importance of Branding for Accountants

As an accountant, you may be wondering whether or not branding is really that important. After all, individuals and businesses will always need your help, right?

Correct, but just remember that you are not the only accountant in the world.

The accounting market is saturated. Consumers have endless options when it comes to who they want to manage their books, so you need to give them a reason to pick your firm over the rest.

But how do you do this?

Well, this is where your brand comes in. If done correctly, your brand will differentiate you and give consumers a reason to both remember and want to work with you.

Having a serious brand strategy is what sets the most exciting and ambitious accounting practices apart and helps them get ahead. Done right, it will make your firm stand out and help you connect with the clients you want – the people you get a buzz from working with.

This CPE session helps to deliver first-class brand identities and touchpoints for financial consultants, CPAs, and accountants.

Offshoring Challenges! Ask the Expert Panel Discussion!

Investing in offshore staffing services has proved to be a life-altering experience for numerous professionals around the world, they swear by the cost-effectiveness and peace of mind that comes naturally with offshore staffing.

Maintaining a sense of team and managing the team experience is critical.

We want to explain everything in this CPE session that we could about better offshore staffing, including its challenges, how people feel about it, and the best ways to engage and enable integration and smooth working of local and offshore staff together and learning directly from the feedback, suggestions, reviews of our clients (your peers)

In this CPE session, we would be discussing some common concerns and challenges around offshoring and available approaches and solutions.

Major topics covered in this CPE session:

• The benefits of offshore staffing.
• The challenges of offshore staffing.
• Solutions for the challenges of offshore staffing.

This is not a traditional CPE session but a highly interactive meeting. Here we would interact with the audience most of the time and help them with their challenges and situations and we would be taking your questions on the go. Come forward with challenges that either you are facing or anticipate to face or we will possibly try to resolve them.