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New tax reduction strategies carefully explained and exhaustively researched every two weeks. Receive breaking news updates on tax law changes. Members only monthly AMA with TOTTB.tax.
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How to Avoid the Top 4 Mistakes in Selling Tax Planning to Current Clients
After two years of “The Tax Season That Never Ends,” tax pros everywhere are looking for ways to leverage their services and improve profit margins in their firms. But many are missing out on their biggest opportunity to dramatically increase profits: selling tax planning to existing clients. As technology has advanced and firms have adopted more automation, tax pros can do much more work in less time. This is a problem when you are in the business of selling billable hours. Additionally, as the Tax Code has grown in complexity, we often find that taxpayers don’t fully understand the value of our expertise and knowledge – they simply see the same prepared form year after year. This makes it difficult to continue increasing prices beyond the market rate for tax prep. As a result, many tax preparers have embraced value pricing for tax planning services. The market demand for strategic planning has increased and as small business owners embrace do-it-yourself accounting software, it is easy to offer this missing expert advice needed to assist the business owner in reducing tax expense. Accountants have found success in breaking through pricing barriers and reducing the risk of scope creep in their experiments with value pricing. Yet most are fearful of bringing this offer to existing clients and start offering higher priced planning only to new customers. Many judge that existing clients will be upset the pros haven’t offered this work in the past, assuming taxpayers will be unhappy missing out on value they could have created long ago. Still others worry merely raising rates will mean losing customers. Despite discovering that new customers really like price certainty and value the strategic work, tax pros are still reluctant to upsell existing relationships, thereby, offering different processes to lists of “new” and “old.” Yet considering it costs five times more to gain a new client than to approach an existing client, many accountants are leaving profits on the table. According to research by Bain and Company, increasing your client retention rate increases profits by 25 percent to 95 percent. And statistics show that keeping and selling more services to a current client is less expensive compared to securing a new client. Still, fear blocks many from making this transition, creating more loyal, profitable, and happy clients. Here are the four biggest mistakes I see tax professionals make by not offering advisory services to clients.
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CURRENT EDITION
The Wild West of Employee Retention Credits (ERC): Outlaws, Deputies, and Cowboys
Gather ’round, pardners! The Employee Retention Credit (ERC) has been the latest gold rush in the tax frontier, drawing business owners, tax deputies, and even a few sly outlaws. But as the dust settles, the IRS—our law keeping sheriff—is on the hunt for any who might’ve bent the rules. In this frontier of finance, knowing who’s who can keep you out of trouble as the IRS rounds up dubious claims.
Selected Techniques to Monetize Tax Attributes
In the prior article “Tax Trends in M&A and What It Means for Your Clients,” we had discussed certain techniques to, e.g., maximize net operating loss (“NOL”) and interest expense deduction utilization in the context of M&A transactions. This article examines certain additional strategies to monetize expiring, latent, or otherwise disallowed tax attributes.
Do Those Tricks Really Work?
On the website for Axium Wealth, Charles Dombek tells us that: “Most CPAs are historians that tell their clients how much they make, how much they owe, when and where to file their taxes, and oftentimes how to write large checks at the last minute when you least expect.” When it comes to Axium, though: “We help clients recover dollars they unnecessarily pay in State and Federal income taxes.” Axium also helps clients diversify capital into off-market passive real estate and alternative investments. Before Axium, there was The Optimal-Financial Group LLC. Of course many of the readers of Think Outside The Tax Box are CPAs, or EAs or others who both help their clients be compliant and advise on ways to minimize their liability. When I was practicing I would call the things I might suggest my “bag of tricks.”
SIMPLIFIED TAX STRATEGIES &
PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION
Think Outside the Tax Box provides tax reduction strategies along with practical
implementation advice in order to reduce your clients’ federal tax bill with ease.
