How is your accountancy firm recording client interactions?

Every job an accountancy firm completes for their clients creates documents of various types. Now I’m not just talking about the standard Word, Excel and PDF types, but more about the less obvious ones that sometimes get forgotten. Forgetting them can be costly.

Documents come in many forms. We have our traditional staple diet of documents created from:

·???????Word processing

·???????Spreadsheets

·???????Presentations

·???????PDF’s

These are the bread and butter for the dedicated suite of office productivity tools from paid-for solutions like MS Office 365 and the Google Suite of products. You also have a selection of free options too.

I’ve kept a special section here for Emails because this deserves a whole article. Why have I kept it separate? Mainly due to the massive amount of emails. There are … wait for it… approximately 333 Billion emails are sent Every.Single.Day! If you don’t track these emails and centralise them in a tool like www.fyidocs.com/uk you could miss some precious pieces of information.

We’ve now covered the many types of documents and several of the companies behind them. But what I’m interested in having you think about is how you track other types of documents.

But what other types of documents are there?

Think broader, and you start seeing more items that need treating in the same way you treat traditional documents. Ones that, if missed, lead to a lack of visibility across your client interactions.

Notes from phone calls:

Sometimes calls are expected. Other times, they’re not. Based on my conversations, I find that phone call notes aren’t always treated with the same care and attention they deserve.

The main ways of recording phone calls range from using a post-it note, scribbling on a bit of paper or tapping into an email to send to someone. Each of these sends a shiver down my back about the transparency of sharing some potential essential information.

Imagine you’re in June, and someone tells you something essential you need to know to complete their tax return. It’s June; you won’t be doing their return until everything comes in, perhaps November, December or sadly too often the case, January. How will you have tracked this phone call and linked it to the Tax Return job?

Imagine your relief if you’ve created an electronic copy of the phone call and attached it to the Tax Return job.

Meeting notes:

Meetings are often the best way to get to the bottom of a problem. People open up more in face-to-face interaction than in any other form of communication. They find it easier to share their concerns. Valuable insights are unearthed for the accountant, insights that provide an opportunity to add value to their client’s businesses.

Often, valuable nuggets of information are lost. Effective note-taking during these conversations helps firms build stronger bonds through continuity and a better understanding of their problems.

These notes are also gold dust when meeting the client again and being able to quickly gem up before the meeting in terms of commitments either the client or you have made. Did they meet their goals, stick to their strategy, hit their growth % number, or employ extra team members?

File notes: ?

For those of us who remember passing a folder of work around the office, the folders with little boxes to mark our initials on these files, these notes in the file were essential for completing the job. Valuable information was easily missed unless you were the one with the file on your desk.

Fortunately, those days for most of us have gone. For firms using a folder-based file server, the file note will often be manually copied over to a new file at the start of a new job. This happens at the same time several new folders are created—one for the year, one for the service and one for the job. This is inefficient and prone to risk.

With FYI you can eliminate many of the manual steps and processes for kicking of a new year, new job or new engagement with a client.

Actions:

Here are a few handy tips on ways to audit your current processes.

·???????Review how you record your less obvious client interactions

·???????Is there a documented process so your team know how to save these interactions?

·???????Create an easily recognised template for saving these interactions

·???????Make the interactions easily visible from the client or job record

Conclusion:

It could be some of the points above have rung alarm bells. If they have, fear not, there are several solutions available. Take FYI for example, we provide a dedicated platform that incorporates all document management and job management in a platform that's dedicated to accountants. There are dedicated sections for File Notes, Calls, Meeting notes etc, which are visible from a client or job view.