Challenges of Accounting firms on-boarding clients to the cloud....

Now we are starting to see firms get to grips with their client lists (even if just at a basic level) the next step is 'Onboarding' and I have been reviewing several firms processes for converting clients (new or potential) to cloud accounting.

Here are 6 of the key challenges I am seeing on a regular basis:

1. Lack of process - in the first instance this is the most worrying and far too often it goes something like this: “Someone mentioned cloud? Send them to <insert cloud champion name here> and they will deal with it.”
2. Lack of resilience - firms need to consider the ‘Noah’s Ark way here.’ By lack of resilience, the whole firm has a single point of failure in the one cloud champion and this becomes an issue with bottlenecking work. “Noah’s Ark went in 2 by 2” and this means that firms should always have at least 2 in the cloud space so that if one resource isn't available there is always other resource. Ideally it should be firm-wide and a fully distributed process
3. Lack of information - when the client is sent across to the cloud person/team there is minimal or no information that the little time that person/team has is spent finding out about the client even before converting the client.
4. Lack of client or conversion quality understanding- no methods in place to understand firstly if the client is a good candidate for moving to cloud and then secondly whether the conversion is a standard or complex conversion for the firm. This makes a difference to how the conversion is approached and expectations are set.
5. Lack of pricing structure - firms don’t know what they are pricing for and price every conversion differently. Worst case scenario is they don’t charge for conversions at all! Second worst case is they do open hourly rate conversions which is hard to plan for!
6. Lack of post-conversion planning - i.e. how will the firm support the ‘software’ element of this engagement post conversion. We are seeing real-time PIA's (Pain In Ass) come into the new cloud world and that is causing problems with taking up capacity.

If you’ve got these elements nailed and in place you are a firm that has a chance to scale their offering. If not, these areas will slow down if not stagnate your process and the on-boarding of clients.

I have a handful of strategy meetings available for firms to get clarity on where they need to concentrate their efforts based on the above - book a call here - https://calendly.com/matt-flanagan/stratcall-10/