Thursday, May 07, 2015
This time two weeks ago we were well and truly in the thick of it for our ChangeGPS 2015 National conference.
It was a MASSIVE day with some awesome topics covered by top quality speakers not to mention the food and wine.
Paul Dunn from B1G1 was our MC for the day and was brilliant. The day ran smoothly and the crowd was certainly entertained.
The ChangeGPS “Reimagined” Practice! - The seven steps to success using ChangeGPS
Director and CEO of ChangeGPS and Change Accountants & Advisors, Timothy Munro kicked off the main content of the day outlining the seven steps to success using ChangeGPS.
These steps were:
Defining your firm’s purpose and values is a key step in ensuring you’re on the right path and that you attract the right people. Our purpose at Change Accountants is:
“Better Advice for a BEAUTIFUL Future”
2. Team on Board
Once you have your purpose and values defined, make sure that all of your current and future team members embrace this purpose and values. The value that is above all values at Change is to have PASSION for the Change purpose.
Your Offer
Understand what your clients really want and/or need? There are 3 main areas where you can build your offer:
- Compliance “Red Tape”
- Business Advisory
- Wealth Coordination (YES even if you’re not a financial planner!) and Wealth Creation
Using the Freedom Gap report, you can show on one page where your clients are now and where they need to be, but don’t stop there. There are some excellent strategies embedded in the report that you can coordinate with your clients whether you do financial planning or not.
3. Pricing
This is an area that a lot of firms find difficult. One of the most common ways to price is with the use of time sheets. Time sheets effectively means that you are in the business of selling hours which we don’t believe is fair for you or the client. At Change we went naked with NO TIMESHEETS this year and haven’t looked back. See the Q&A below to see how we do it.
4. Engagement
Engagement is the way in which you agree with the client the scope of work and the price.
At Change all our jobs must be quoted up front, this is not negotiable. We use fixed price agreements throughout the firm, however we avoid using monthly or quarterly agreements instead opting for 50% or 100% upfront pricing. This has been working amazingly well using the great tools inside Xero Practice Manager.
A big thing to watch out for with up front pricing is to make sure you avoid “scope creep”. In all our agreements we include a “Service Guarantee” and a provision for “Additional Work Orders”. This lets us and our clients know exactly where they stand and sets expectations appropriately.
5. Delivery
Delivery for us means using great systems and technology so that we get the work done on time, every time. In our practice we use:
- Xero Practice Manager
- Xero Workpapers
- Xero Tax
- Content from the ChangeGPS toolkit
- Spotlight Reporting
- Class Super
- My Prosperity
- Now Infinity
- Plus more
6. On Track
Due to the web based technology available, we are now in a position to give more value than ever before and to help our clients interpret their financial data. Quarterly, half-yearly or annual business review sessions act as a perfect starting point for these value added services. We use Spotlight Reporting to generate reports for our clients and use this as the basis to run these meetings.
The Launch of the NEW ChangeGPS platform
We launched the brand new GPS platform. Describing it as ChangeGPS going ‘3D’ or more to the point ‘3C’.
ChangeGPS started in 2008 as a simple website to download advanced resources. The 2015 re-imagination of the platform has added 3 NEW Dimensions.
Community x Content x Capture = the NEW ChangeGPS.
1. Community – Tap the power of like-minds.
2. Content – Unlock the potential of Best Practice.
3. Capture – Bottle the Magic that makes your firm, ‘you’.
The Launch of the New Financial Simplicity System Powered By “My Prosperity”
My Prosperity is Australia’s most powerful and simple online financial tool. With live bank feeds and data feeds from RP Data and Redbook you can have your customer’s financial lives on one page in minutes.
We’ve started to roll this toll out at Change Accountants & Advisors and it’s amazing. Our clients absolutely love seeing a picture of their house and their car with live valuations.
The guys at My Prosperity have built the freedom gap calculator right into the product so your freedom planning meetings can be more powerful than ever.
Check it out
Our inaugural award winners
This year we presented our very first series of awards. We’re so thrilled to have such a progressive and talented group of accounting firms in our inner circle. We thought long and hard about the recipients of these awards as we really could have given them to many of our amazing members. That being said our award winners are massive action takers – these very deserving winners are:
Member of the Year – Ceebeks Business Solutions, Director: Chris Beks
New Member of the Year – Peterson Group, Director: Nick Kyriopolos
Best Freedom Planning Outcome – IN8 Business Advisory, Director: Colleen Tarrant
Best Innovative Idea – HM Business Partners, Partners: Kym Hocking & Vanessa Mendes
Tech Addict & Innovator – JH Advisory, Partner: John Hood
Next year we’ll be taking nominations and applications through the new platform. So if you want to see your name up in lights start working towards it now.
Speaking of next year…
We are all so pumped up after such an awesome conference that we are ready to do it all over again. This week we all sat down and nutted out our conference for next year.
We’re going to QUEENSTOWN
Our agendas over the last 3 conferences have been so action packed that we’ve listened to your feedback and decided to put on a 2-day retreat style conference in Queenstown, New Zealand. So get out your 2016 calendars and save the date – May12-13, 2016.
You can reserve your early bird seat here - https://changesummitnz.eventbrite.com.au
Key Take Aways
On the day we collected questions and comments on post-it notes which were posted all around the conference room on different topics. From these notes we’ve distilled the biggest take-aways and questions down. So some of the major themes we know that you are interested in are:
- Moving to NO time sheets
- Moving to UP FRONT pricing
- Moving clients to WEALTH CREATION
- Moving your practice to the cloud the SMART way
These themes will form the basis of our future content and webinars. We recently ran a member’s only webinar surrounding the BURNING questions around these themes, as a sneak peak we’ve included A’s to the Q’s below.
Q&A
How does your team measure the billable hours your staff member has charged if there are no timesheets? I need to understand how this is recorded so that the staff member is credited to the project. Quite often you can have three levels of charge out rates e.g. a partner, junior accountant and senior accountant all working on the one job.
We completely understand the hesitation around moving away from timesheets, which is why we believe that although many firms would like to move away from timesheets, very few have. Moving away from timesheets requires you as the firm owner to change the question of ‘how do I track my employees time?’ to ‘are my employees invoicing out a multiple of their salary package?’ And if each fee earner fulfils their contribution, then you’re set. The absolute key to this working is ACCOUNTABILITY. Timothy Munro runs weekly meetings with the fee earners at Change Accountants to ensure that each one meets or exceeds their monthly invoicing targets.
How have Change Accountants & Advisors moved clients to upfront pricing? And how have you communicated this to clients?
The key to this is not trying to get everyone in the firm onto this straight away but instead have a progressive roll out. So when we started this three or four years ago I asked all of our account managers to speak to their clients on the phone. With a really simple script that was along the lines of.
“We’re going to be doing things a bit different this year, we’ve heard that clients all over Australia and in fact all over the world prefer to have absolute clarity on what their accounting work is going to cost rather than to be hit with a bill that they didn’t expect at the end of the year. With this in mind we want to communicate very clearly what we’re going to be doing up front so that you’ll know what the price will be. So if it’s OK with you, what we’d like to do is give you a proposal, we’ll outline what we’re going to do for the year and the prices for those things so that you know in advance and we know in advance which you can sign off on and then we can get to work.”
That’s all you have to say.
Use the pricing calculator, letters of engagement and all the tools inside the GPS toolkit designed to help you implement up front pricing in your firm. If you don’t know where to look, or aren’t signed up yet to using ChangeGPS, contact us and we’ll gladly show you around.
We’re not financial planners, how do you move into wealth creation and give financial advice?
Everyone LOVES the Freedom Gap report inside the ChangeGPS toolkit and now inside My Prosperity when purchased via ChangeGPS. However, not many firms are taking it to the next step.
When you identify a client’s freedom gap there are two things they can do. They can put away (i.e. save) more money (which is often difficult as they are usually spending most of what they earn) OR they need to start making some smart financial decisions to their future financial outcome is much better.
So if you’re an accounting firm that doesn’t do financial planning, our belief is that you as the accountant has the closest relationship with your clients and therefore you should be the one driving these projects to get wealth creation underway and estate planning sorted. Even though you’re not a lawyer, you can get estate planning underway and we discussed the new elawyer software that will become an additional paid service as part of the ChangeGPS toolkit very shortly.
As an accountant there are some really easy strategies that you can do with your clients straight away, that includes tax planning and business value improvement. For any other strategies you can contact us at ChangeGPS and we can advise you on what to look for in a financial planner that can help with these specific strategies.
Does BOX integrate with Microsoft Office?
Yes. Using the filing system that you already know and love (think ‘My Documents’). Check out this video to see the Microsoft Office Integration.
Posted by Joe Winston
on Thursday, May 07, 2015
