Diversifying Accountancy Services

Growing your accounting business can be made easier by expanding the services you provide.

Doing so gives you the chance to reach new markets as well as enhancing the services you provide to current clients. Increasing your opportunities in this way spreads risk and increases profits.

If you are seeking inspiration, look at the potential services below. You can consider taking one or more of them on board for your firm.

Staff payroll services

Businesses that have a workforce have payroll requirements. Many of them do their own payroll work. However, if you increase your offering to include payroll services, your current clients might be persuaded to outsource their payroll requirements to your firm. Making this decision eases pressure for the business and helps your firm to grow. If you do not want to develop your in-house team to work on payroll services, you can find a specialist provider to work with and simply manage the client side work.

Strategic advice

Providing strategic advice is something you can choose to do for certain clients. If you have the knowledge and skills within your firm to include advice at virtual FD level, you can enhance your reputation in addition to making your firm more resilient. Expanding your services in this way also adds interest for people within the firm and enhances motivation.

To add real value to your client services, include advice in the following areas:

• Cash flow forecasting
• Planning scenarios
• Budget advice and planning
• Help with management reports

Advice about R&D tax credits

If you have clients that would qualify for Research and Development (R&D) tax relief, providing an advice service in this area makes sense. This service involves discussing rebates your clients may be entitled to rather than simply calculating the tax they need to pay. Choosing to move into this type of work does not just help your firm to grow, it’s also rewarding in terms of enhancing day to day processes.

Applications for funding

Your firm already has access to the information needed for your clients to apply for funding, so why not help them to do as an additional service? You can package all the knowledge and expertise you have into a comprehensive support package. This package can include areas such as:

• Identifying possible sources of funding
• Creating business plans to support funding applications
• Planning finances for applications
• Meeting potential funders and arranging funding with them
• Facilitating due diligence

Diversifying your services to embrace any of these areas makes commercial sense. This is especially the case given the increased use of AI in accounting which is reducing the need for human intervention in more mundane processes. You can target this spare capacity to creating a more strategic offering. So, you get a more knowledgeable and skilled in house team, reduce risk, and increase profits. If you do not have the resources in your own team, you can still expand your services by partnering with specialist providers allowing you to diversify to grow.

If you are a finance professional looking for your next role, register with us. If you are on looking to hire an accountancy professional, get in touch.