Six Ways to Identify Your Clients' CAS Needs and Wants

"How is CAS different than what I am doing now?"

This was one of the most common questions I received from accountants (from firms of nearly all sizes) in a brief survey that I conducted. Once you figure out the CAS difference, it is much easier for you to identify your clients' CAS needs and wants. To know what CAS?is,?you need to know what it is?not.?

In the?previous edition of The CAS Newsletter , we discovered why your clients need and want CAS. This edition will discuss?how to?identify your clients' CAS needs and wants.

• Are you planning to start/ already offering CAS? You can find a proven roadmap, many strategies, and actionable insights to enhance your CAS practice in the best-selling book?Client Accounting Services: The Definitive Success Guide .

CAS: What it is NOT

In the pre-cloud era, you mostly worked in and on the past. It mainly was recordkeeping for compliance purposes and some advice to the business owners, for example, answering a typical question, "how did I do in the last month/quarter/year?". You could rarely guide your clients' business decisions in real-time. You invariably fixed the errors in client books (because clients were not professional accountants to record transactions correctly). You prepared financial statements mostly from bank statements, credit card statements, check stubs, and some information from clients.

You infrequently received any questions from clients about the financial statements you delivered. Clients mostly wanted accountants' help to get their books "tax ready." "Accounting" mainly was compliant record keeping. Clients sometimes used the accounting information to "learn some lessons (mostly from their business mistakes)," not so much to make better business choices and decisions. Accountants were, generally, not a must-have part of clients' business decision-making. Such services are not CAS. At best, they could form a small part of CAS.

Your clients' CAS needs and wants are defined by how?you?define CAS

CAS is a wide-spectrum business. You can, and should, define your CAS based on your goals, expertise, experience, core competencies, preferred niches/industries, services, tech-stack, and resources. Once you have done that, it is easier to identify your (CAS-fit) clients' needs and wants.

In the previous edition of this newsletter, we discovered that clients themselves do not have the expertise (including compliance with the ever-increasing complexity of the regulatory environment) accountants have - to produce actionable insights from the accounting information relevant to their businesses that lead to better business decisions. This leads to some base factors that define your clients' CAS needs and wants. Here's how to identify such CAS needs and wants:

1. Information:

CAS is more real-time. It means clients need information more frequently and timely (so that they can make critical business decisions based on insights and advice you provide).

• Find out which accounting-related questions your clients and prospects ask more commonly.
• Figure out what they do after you provide the information/insights/advice to answer such questions.
• Clients take such actions and/or use the knowledge you provide them most likely for making business decisions. Figure out which types of business decisions they make based on the information and insights you provide.

2. Customer interviews/interactions:

This is the most direct way of identifying CAS needs. But remember, your clients are not professional accountants, and hence they may?not?ask good/essential questions they should ask.

• Share important questions other clients frequently ask so that each of your clients/prospects starts thinking about such critical business aspects you can help with.

3. Financial statements/tax returns:

These are great to identify the CAS needs of your?prospects.

• Before you sign up new CAS clients, make sure to do a deeper review of their financial statements and tax returns -?not?from the numbers accuracy, revenue, growth, profitability, etc., point of view but to identify which business decisions made or not made led to those numbers.
• The review will also tell you the possibilities of helping clients with tax planning and tax advisory services (these services are part of the top 10 services CAS firms offer).
• It will help you identify the top key areas to impact your new clients' businesses positively. That will lead you to ask and confirm the CAS needs of such new clients.

4. Discovery process:

In my?CAS book , I revealed 13 questions that help identify CAS-fit clients. Most of those questions are designed to identify prospects' (or non-CAS clients') CAS needs and wants. The book also details five easy ways to identify CAS-fit clients and five not-so-easy ways. The foundation of all these insights is to give you proven methods to perform your initial client needs and wants discovery. Two key factors that can tell if your discovery process is good are:

• After the discovery discussion, are you able to identify and articulate the difference between the non-CAS experience of the client and that after CAS?
• Is your prospect/client willing to pay more for your CAS offering (compared to what was being paid till now)? If not, you may not have identified the CAS needs and wants or not clearly articulated the value of fulfilling those needs and wants.

5. Reviews and testimonials of your competitors:

Reviews and testimonials posted online for your competitors are goldmines of business intelligence about your clients'/prospects' CAS needs and wants. Some such posts may not be in the form of reviews but could be posted in social media groups. Here are some places where you can find such insights:

• Google reviews
• Trustpilot reviews
• Facebook/LinkedIn groups (where your clients/prospects participate in and post, e.g., industry-specific groups)

6. Surveys:

Surveys help you systematically analyze your client base, or even the market, to understand the CAS needs and wants of your clients/target market.

• The simplest trick to know if your survey can give you actionable intelligence is to think about the measurable actions you can take based on the collective insights from the survey answers/data.
• Design your survey questions in such a way that their answers lead to uncovering trends, patterns, and insights, not just some measured information.

These are just some of the ways to get you started for laying down a defined process for you to identify your clients' and prospects' CAS needs and wants. You can deploy more methods based on your firm's specific needs, clients mix, niches, competencies, etc.

What next:

After you have figured out your CAS practice foundations and processes, you are still a few steps away from making CAS a success for you. And one of the topmost challenges you will face is how to communicate the true value of your CAS offering.

In the next edition (May 2022) of The CAS Newsletter, I will share some new insights on why is CAS, first, a communication challenge. Stay tuned......

CAS has enhanced the practice performance of many firms. CAS does turn into more CA$H for accounting firms. Others have done it, so can you.

• In the subsequent editions of The CAS Newsletter, I will share many more new, practical insights to make it easier for you to achieve greater success in CAS.
• If you have not yet subscribed to this newsletter, please subscribe now, so the new, fresh editions with new, fresh insights get delivered to your email inbox, and you also get notified of it here on LinkedIn.
• If you want to get a head-start in your CAS journey, please see?Client Accounting Services: The Definitive Success Guide .
• ?If you were to ask just one all-important CAS question, what would it be? I will answer that question - just?send me your CAS question by clicking here .?
• If you are a professional accountant interested in developing/enhancing your CAS practice, please connect with me on LinkedIn.

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About The CAS Newsletter:

The CAS Newsletter will uncover insights for success in Client Accounting Services (CAS) - the new revenue & growth segment for accounting firms.?

This CAS Newsletter is a monthly publication by Hitendra R. Patil, the author of the best-selling, accounting profession's first-ever book on CAS:?Client Accounting Services: The Definitive Success Guide . Hitendra has been one of Accounting Today's Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting for five consecutive years, from 2017 to 2021.