Delivering Quality Client Service for your Bookkeeping Clients
Welcome to the fourth and final in our Quality Automation for Bookkeepers series, where we discuss what it looks like– and how to ensure you’re providing – the highest level of quality service for your clients.
If you missed the first three in the series, you can check them out below:
Which brings us to the fourth pillar of Quality Automation for any high-performing bookkeeping practice: quality client service.
Do you have clients that ‘help’ with the books? Or are you finding it hard to gain timely information from your clients? Communication seem manual-heavy and broken?
Rest assured, while quality client service is all about providing excellent service to make the life of your clients easier – it’s also about ensuring you’re maintaining that work/life balance you started your business for.
A bookkeeper’s service
The relationship between a bookkeeper and their client is an incredibly important one. You’re handling their most precious information and data – their finances. It can make or break a business. Yes, you’ll ensure a business’s accounts are accurate and up-to-date. And report on those accounts regularly, so the owners and managers know where they stand financially. Plus well-maintained books make it easy for accountants to step in and do their thing at financial year end.
There are a few key things you can do to ensure quality in your client service:
- Providing clients with timely responses
- Accurate advice built on accurate data
- Simple and effective communication
But what do you need from your clients?It’s a two-way street, after all. So the above applies to your clients, too(especially if they’re ‘helping’ with the books). Finding a way to have thattwo way street running smoothly, with no road blocks on speed humps, is thereal win.
We’re sure it’s no surprise when we say that modern apps and technology are key to ensuring effective and efficient client service, communication and building a strong relationship. But let’s take a look at how you can ensure the best for your clients, while having ease on your own mental load.
Providing clients with timely responses
When you’re chasing clients for important information – how are you supposed to give them the correct or helpful information in the same manner? You can’t.
Having a simple, easy-to-use communication system with your clients is a next level game-changer. Take XBert’s Client Portal, for example.
You can invite your clients into this white-labelled portal where they have easy access to assign tasks, ask questions, make comments and even share documents and other relevant information you require. You can create tasks they are alerts to via email, for your regular information requests. And you can collaborate on insights and reports, all within the neat little portal. Not only does this streamline all the phone calls, texts and emails – it holds everything in a neat little audit trail for you…all in one spot!
Accurate advice built on accurate data
For bookkeepers and businesses, bad data quality can wreak havoc on providing accurate advice in a timely manner. Imagine putting on more staff, because your workload and cashflow permitted –only to discover many of your incoming invoices were duplicated, resulting in inflated cashflow numbers? Or, incur fines because your Superannuation Liability is outstanding? Or, realising you overpaid GST to a supplier who de-registered halfway through the tax year?
Erroneous or incomplete customer records, and fines for improper financial or regulatory compliance reporting – these are all very real issues when the data quality isn’t up to scratch.
What if the reason you have poor data is from fraudulent activity? Is the source from within your team? Your client’s team? External sources?
If you read the first blog in the series, you know that accurate data is what we do at XBert. Starting with the transactional data itself, we help bookkeepers and business owners reduce the time manually checking for errors – and alert you to them as they arise. With more than 70 algorithms checking your Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks data multiple times a day, with quick-links to solve directly within your accounting files you will all-but-eliminate the time you spend on manual checks and rework.
And if you read the third blog in the series, you know that quality analytics and reports, based on that clean data, is the next logical step.
XBert’s integrated reports have been built at both the Practice and Client level (with more being developed all the time)allowing users to have deep insights into the client data at any given time. Even better – you know XBert’s AI Audit has run across the files, ensuring any issues or inconsistencies have been flagged for your analysis. Data cleansing is no longer a step in the reporting process – it’s done for you, multiple times a day.
But what about accessibility for your clients? That’s taken care of, too. Invite your clients in to your White-Labelled Client Portal to share the reports, make comments, ask questions and store documents – or simply share the reports via a link.
Simple and effective communication
All of this leads into having simple, open, honest and easy-to-access communication strategies with your clients. When you make it simple for them, it becomes simple for you.
Find out how XBert can help you not just provide the best quality client service, but also quality data, quality workflows and quality reports and analytics.
Start a free trial today, and discover how simple the white-labelled Client Portal is to use.
