Currently Browsing: The Advisor’s Blog
10 Ways CPAs Can Gain More Local Exposure
As a CPA, you often spend your days buried in tax forms and computer programs. It’s the work that best suits you, but it isn’t often conducive to networking and building your clientele. Assuming you have already joined the local chamber of…
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CPAs: The Retirement Horizon is Changing for Your Clients
As your clients enjoy longer, healthier lives, they can also anticipate a longer retirement. People are still retiring around the same age that they always have, but most retirees today can expect to live twenty or even thirty years after they stop…
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CPAs: Don’t Let Your Clients Put Their Lives on Hold
A recent study by the AICPA uncovered the depth to which our finances tend to influence other aspects of our lives. Alarmingly, 51 percent of survey respondents said that in the past year, they have put off major life decisions for financial reasons….
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CPAs Should Evaluate Clients’ Life Insurance Policies
As your clients’ most trusted advisor, they may turn to you for advice on all of their financial dealings. When it comes to your their life insurance portfolios, you should be aware of some important changes in the industry that may impact…
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CPAs: Marketing in a Digital Age
It’s fairly obvious that the internet has changed the way we interact with the world, access new information, and make important decisions. Many CPA firms today struggle with integrating current digital marketing trends into their practice. While potential clients are moving forward…
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When Should CPAs Partner with a Financial Planner?
As a CPA, you are your clients’ most trusted advisor. They trust your expertise and ask for your input on complicated tax decisions, retirement plan contributions, real estate, and all other important financial matters. Your clients regularly put their financial lives in…
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Going Beyond Tax Preparation: The Forward Thinking CPA
As a CPA, it may be easy to sometimes lose yourself in balance sheets and tax returns. But at the end of the day, what you’re really doing is providing a service that helps people. And the best way to stay in…
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Do You Know Your Clients’ Biggest Fear?
As a CPA, you are intimately familiar with your clients’ financial situations. You’re also familiar with their fears about money. And if you’re like 57 percent of CPAs polled in a recent AICPA survey, your clients’ biggest fear is running out of…
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When to Suggest a Cash Balance Retirement Plan
As a CPA, your clients rely on you for financial counsel. With clients who own high net worth professional practices, such as a law firm or medical practice, the retirement plans should be a topic of conversation. Sometimes cash balance plans are…
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CPAs Should Provide Estate Planning Services
As a CPA, you are more familiar with your clients’ financial lives than anyone else they know. You possess the knowledge and skills to help them make important decisions about their assets and futures. And yet, many CPAs aren’t providing estate planning…
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CPAs: Help Your Clients Choose the Right Beneficiaries
This time of year you will have direct contact with most of your clients, which gives you the perfect opportunity to remind them to review the beneficiaries on their accounts and policies. As a CPA, you play an important role in your…
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Add Financial Planning To Increase Revenue and Retain Clients
If there was one change you could make to your practice that would help you attract and retain clients, while also increasing your revenue, would you do it? It’s a classic two-birds-with-one-stone proposition. In most business situations, the opportunity to create widespread…
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4 Ways for CPAs to Keep Their Clients Happy
You probably envision yourself as dedicated, thorough, and meticulous; these are the ideal qualities of an accountant. But no matter how much of a perfectionist you may be, you know that keeping clients happy boils down to more than just balance sheets…
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How CPAs Can Leverage Social Media
Is your CPA firm using social media? Contrary to what you may believe, the answer may not be as simple as just “yes” or “no”. In fact, better question might be, Is your firm using social media effectively? According to a recent…
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6 Last-Minute Tax Tips for Your Clients
As a CPA, your practice is about to be in full swing as tax season gets underway. As you know, there are still some strategies your clients can utilize to lower their overall tax bill, or at least ease the pain of…
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Attention CPAs: Retain Clients and Increase Revenue
Aging Baby Boomers are driving a greater demand for financial planning services, as they seek out resources to help them plan for retirement and manage their tax burden. As this generation ages into retirement, the need to integrate retirement, tax, estate, and…
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IRS Adopts New Rollover Rule
If any of your clients are counting on performing an IRA rollover in the coming year – or if they completed a rollover already this year – it may help to clarify the new one-per-year rule recently released by the IRS. Knowing…
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IRS Raises Retirement Plan Contribution Limits for 2015
Each year, the IRS adjusts pension plan contribution limits based on increases in the cost of living. These adjustments help savers offset the effects of inflation upon their retirement savings. In 2015, workers will be able to contribute more to their retirement…
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Social Security Gets a Cost of Living Increase
Beginning January 1, Social Security benefits recipients will receive a slightly larger check, due to the annual Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). This year checks will increase by 1.7 percent, making this the third year in a row that COLA has been…
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Protecting Your Clients from Market Volatility
We all want our clients to make money, avoid loss, and never have to worry about a thing during retirement. Unfortunately, as this past month’s market volatility has demonstrated, it’s easy to gain and lose very quickly. We’ve all felt a bit…
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Encourage Your Clients to Do Beneficiary Reviews
Part of your role as a CPA is helping clients stay on top of all their financial matters. Taxes, life insurance policies, estate planning, retirement accounts, investments… It can all add up to a confusing maze for some of your clients. As…
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CPAs Should Protect Themselves with a Practice Continuation Agreement
Every small business or sole practitioner needs a back-up plan in case of an emergency such as illness, disability, or death. This is especially true for CPAs, whose clients are financially dependent upon your services. All CPAs should protect themselves and their…
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CPAs: Ten Core Values Which Will Direct Your Future
In 2011, the AICPA released an in-depth report on the CPA profession. The CPA Horizons 2025 Report compiled input from over 75,000 CPAs, regulators, and thought leaders to create a detailed road map for the future. The report concluded that CPAs should…
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Should CPAs Dump the Billable Hour?
As a CPA, one of your top priorities is your relationship with clients. Yet, bills and dollar signs can interfere with that relationship, because the focus shifts away from the work you do and onto your bottom line. As an answer to…
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Make the Most of Social Security Benefits
The solvency of Social Security is a common concern these days, both in the political arena and in our personal lives. Fearing the money won’t be there later, many retirees are claiming their benefits at the first age of eligibility rather than…
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6 Things CPAs Should Know About the ACA
Due to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, we’ve seen the biggest changes in the health insurance and health care industries since the 1960s. Since CPAs play a vital role in helping businesses make the best possible insurance decisions under…
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Whoops! CPA Tax Mistakes Caught by Financial Advisor
Partnerships between CPAs and financial advisors can be mutually beneficial in many ways, including the fact that each can double-check the other for costly and embarrassing mistakes. In fact, a recent Wall Street Journal article details exactly how a financial advisor caught…
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6 Ways for CPAs to Expand Their Practice
When it comes to expanding your practice as a CPA, referrals are likely to be your number one source of growth. A 2013 study* by Hinge Marketing demonstrated that 87 percent of clients who are choosing an accountant use referrals as their…
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How Technology Will Change Your Business This Year
In recent years, we’ve seen a massive transformation in the CPA world due to emerging technologies. That trend is set to continue through 2014. The advancement of technology offers CPAs new ways to work efficiently, productively, and sometimes remotely. But the ease…
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Use Networking to Grow Your Practice
For years, your training as a CPA may have centered upon the intricacies of the tax code or mathematical calculations. Not the most socially engaging of topics! So when the time comes to grow your practice through networking, it’s normal to feel…
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Take Mobile Productivity to the Next Level
Mobile technology has given us all better ways to live and work productively. For CPAs, using the right phone or tablet applications can make work easier, faster, and more convenient than ever. The following five apps are some of the favorites…
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Recent Tax Court Decision Changes the IRA Game
For the approximately 50 million American households who hold one or more individual retirement accounts (IRA), a recent court decision is being called a major game-changer. The Tax Court’s decision in Bobrow vs Commissioner states that taxpayers are allowed only one tax-free,…
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Michael S. Winslow, CPA, on Trust and Influence
In a recent blog, Michael S. Winslow (CPA/PFS) shares a story about a long-time client who comes to him seeking advice on his daughter’s college enrollment. Surprisingly, the client is not asking financial questions, but rather questions about college choice and possible…
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As Times Change, It’s Important to Change with Them
In today’s blog post, I’d like to refer to information recently published by Richard Muscio *. As a consultant to the CPA industry, Richard Muscio specializes in helping CPAs update their practices in order to best keep up with changing times. His…
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Ordinary CPA vs Trusted Advisor: What’s the Difference?
In his original article published in the Rochester Business Journal (January, 2008), Thomas Bonadio recalls his early days in his career as a CPA. Describing his limited duties, Bonadio says, “We conducted audits and other types of financial reviews. We prepared taxes….
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