News from Your Accounting Association
CPAmerica Advantage Client
June 2018 First Research renewal time P. 2
Expansion and development of profitable service lines such as Client Accounting Services (CAS) are increasingly attractive to accounting firms as more processes become automated. We recently spoke to John Pace, CPA, CVA, and Outsourced Accounting and Advisory Services partner of member firm (GRF), and Ray Barlow, senior vice president of XCM Solutions (who will be speaking at the CPAmerica Client Accounting Services/Outsourced Accounting Meeting in New Orleans this November), about CAS. We started by asking Pace about some of the more popular CAS that GRF offers to clients. He talked about the trend of outsourcing the entire accounting needs of a perspective client. Pace said, “We call that being their virtual accounting department. That means they have elected to not have any real accounting staff on board and they have made a decision (much like with outsourcing payroll or IT services) that with accounting, they can do the same thing. That’s one popular service that we provide.” He went on to say that another version of CAS that his firm provides is a sort of hybrid model where clients have some accounting staff performing basic services. Pace said that in this case, “They like to use our services to act as their controller on a regular basis. In this way, they are keeping their day-to-day costs down in regards to internal accounting and picking their spots to use a CPA firm, such as GRF, that has experience in their industry in order to provide
specialized, targeted services. Member News P. 3 Typically, the client may be the one doing the bulk of the transacA&A Remarks with Art Winstead P. 4 tion processing. In this situation, we are not cutting checks or processing payroll, but someone on the client side has done that. We step in and spend some time either reconciling or reviewing major accounts and potentially generate reports for the client or have discussions with their management team. The nature of all this is fairly customizable. Some [clients] are more self-sufficient than others.” Regarding trends and growth in the type of CAS services offered, Pace said, “We still get a lot of requests for both types of services. Whether it is a partial outsourcing or a full outsourcing, we still see a lot of both. I think the industry trends are leaning towards an emergence of more virtual total outsourcing of the accounting department. We think that is one of the trends and we are trying to position ourselves to be in a good place to handle that.”
CPAmerica's newsletter: This month we go back to June 2005. This issue of the Brainstorming newsletter shows the old CPAmerica logo and talks about the upcoming CPAmerica public "web site."
There are various reasons why clients are outsourcing their accounting services. Pace said, “The client makes the decision that they don’t have See Client Accounting Services continued on page 2
An article on rainmakers in your firm: Rain comes in many forms One of the common misconceptions we encounter in our work in the CPA profession is the idea that all partners must be real rainmakers. Many managing partners, directors of marketing and line partners lament the lack of true business development they see from their partners, lumping them all together and expecting something more than they are getting. Further, up-and-comers are often told that they have to be rainmakers to make it to partner. Unfortunately, the upand-comers look at the current partner ranks and see a disconnect between this stated
expectation and the business development acumen of the incumbent partners. In this article, we explore realistic expectations for rainmaking and identify different forms of rainmaking roles we see within firms. We believe that job expectations should be “one-size-fits-one,” which means that any expectation that is applied universally to an entire group will usually go unfulfilled. The sooner we can accept that each of our partners and team members have unique talents and abilities (as well as their own special
See Rainmaker, continued on page 2