The role of the Certified Public Accountant is evolving, and increasingly, CPA firms are offering additional services to their clients, such as financial advisory.
With their expertise at navigating complicated regulations surrounding taxation, and in-depth knowledge of compliance, they are perfectly placed to help businesses of all descriptions, master the art of strategic decision-making. When they also take advantage of offshore bookkeeping, CPAs free up more of their time to focus on the specific financial challenges of their clients.
Ultimately, a good CPA can guide a business through a wide range of financial challenges, and help them work towards achieving long-term growth and success. With all of this in mind, it’s perhaps little wonder that so many more CPAs are offering financial advisory services to their clients. But it’s not only great news for business owners; CPAs themselves can increase their turnover significantly with the addition of extra services to their portfolio.
Here’s how a CPA can benefit a business:
CPAs aren’t only able to uncover tax saving opportunities for businesses, and ensure that they’re tax compliant at all times, but can also provide them with transparent and accurate financial reporting, vital for the making of informed business decisions and forging strong business relationships.
They also analyze financial data, and reveal key insights that can help businesses craft successful strategies for long-term growth, such as investments, mergers, and expansion. As versatile professionals capable of adopting the role of a trusted advisor for business owners, here are the most important ways in which they can help businesses succeed:
- Navigating regulations
With their detailed and up-to-date knowledge of regulatory frameworks, CPAs can help businesses manage all of their complicated compliance requirements.
- Providing insights driven by data
Their analysis of financial data can give organisations valuable insights, which in turn, help them to improve upon their overall operational efficiency and profitability.
- Addressing modern challenges
Forensic accounting is a great way of ensuring that a business doesn’t fall prey to fraudsters, and many CPAs nowadays are taking on this role. They are also helping businesses tackle critical issues such as sustainability, through detailed, analytical reporting.
- Harnessing technology
With their expert use of data analytics and a wide range of other, innovative technologies and solutions, CPAs are helping businesses drive growth.
How can a CPA transition into a strategic advisor?
By adopting technologies designed to support financial forecasting and predictive analysis, CPAs are using advanced tools for accounting, artificial intelligence and machine learning, to offer their clients strategic insights which will guide them towards sounder decision-making.
They are also moving towards roles that involve more client engagement, and more discussions centered around growth, risk management, and business vision. Ultimately, this helps them build stronger client relationships, and affords them a deeper, more detailed understanding of the needs and challenges of their clients.
Additionally, CPAs are offering full risk and crisis management services to their clients, which helps them to spot possible risks, work on strategies to mitigate them, and build frameworks for risk management that will help them effectively manage financial uncertainties.
Many successful CPA firms today are using such services as offshore tax preparation, and outsourced bookkeeping to help them offer their clients strategic business advice. With the basics taken care of by capable teams overseas, CPAs can still provide their clients with all the traditional services they expect from them, while having more time available to offer them financial advice and guidance.