This Is How Accounting Firms Onboard Clients in Minutes (Using Automation)

Perfect. Okay, so 6 stages of client onboarding success. I tried to outline the different stages as chronologically as I could, and here we have the initial engagement, the welcome, the data collection, the client profile, the planning of the work, and the feedback. So that's kind of like the— this will be like the meat and potatoes of the presentation. For each stage, I want to talk about why it is important, some tools that you could use potentially, and some automation examples. Just a quick— couple quick disclaimers. I'll name some tools. Not all of them are endorsements. It's kind of for illustration purposes. And we believe in function over brand. So if you know what you want from a software tool and whatever tool gets that done, You know, move forward with it. And also sometimes certain tools might be able to cover several of the needs that we're going to be outlining today.

Perfect.

So let's talk about the initial engagement and why it is important to streamline this particular process. Well, first off, you wanna make sure you can send engagement letters and proposals on the spot or as quickly as possible to ensure that clients, you know, don't move forward with someone else. And depending on your business model, this automating this process could allow you to eliminate AR, accounts receivable, altogether, depending on how you bill. And also from an automation perspective, this step allows you to effectively trigger the rest of the actions that we're going to be talking about. Now, in terms of tools that you can use for this particular step, proposal software is one of the most important ones. Many people have probably heard of Ignition. GoProposal are 2 of the most loved in the accounting community, specifically because actually they started targeting accountants. Ignition now is a little broader. But those are very popular and very good tools. There are also other tools that are a little more generic in that they target the entire market, but that also we've implemented with some success for several firms. I'd be curious to ask the people here, I saw some people nodding when I talked about Ignition and GoProposal. Is that something that you guys are using currently? Not really.

I've heard of like each of those. Um, I use Canopy as my management software and it's got a proposal system built into it too. Um, I come from an older firm and we never did engagement letters. We just don't do them for tax work. We did them for our audit work and we just did them manually. We had about 3 dozen audits a year. We just did them manually. But, um, don't tell my insurance company I don't do engagement letters though.

Fair enough. And are you using like the Canopy's built-in tool at the moment to do that particular work?

To do the what?

To do those engagement letters or those proposals you have to create?

That's the kicker is I don't do proposals or engagement letters right now. Um, proposals are all done in, uh, face-to-face or in meetings with clients, whether it's face-to-face or—

In person.

Yeah. Yep. It's all verbally.

So there's no any contracts signed or anything like that?

Right. Yeah. I don't, I don't do that. I probably should, but I don't. That's fair. That's fair.

I mean, You kind of have a more unique situation that you are more in person, so you can kind of set those expectations, you know, face to face, so to speak. But if you ever want to like look into streamlining that particular process, those are some of the tools that are most popular in that space. And this is what they look like, just to give you a sense of how we believe they streamline the experience for the clients on the other end. You can see here is a very simple 5-step process for the client. They see all the services you outline, they see all the prices broken down. They have the ability to pay not only via credit card, but also via bank transfer and ACH. So Ignition is connected to Plaid, which is one of the largest API aggregators. Effectively, you can connect them to thousands of banks and institutions so your clients can safely authorize those transactions once, you know, as they go through this process. And then there's the engagement letter as well, which they can sign. And there's even a 5th step there where you can start to effectively tell them what's next, setting expectations and, you know, what do you, what do you might require from them moving forward. So just to recap on some of the automation possibilities that this tool gives you, you can create proposal templates. You could potentially use those templates to quickly create a draft and even send the proposal straight away. You can gain visibility into the proposal activity. So you don't have to wonder if the client has seen the proposal yet. You can actually go in and see If they've seen it, how long, how many times, etc. One of the things here that you can do as well, you can connect DashIgnition or a similar tool with your accounting software. So as soon as the client pays, you have those invoices created, marked as paid, linked to that customer, and you have a match between the line items on the proposal and the line items in your invoice. As you saw, you can get paid upfront and you can also have set up follow-up reminder emails that go out to remind the client if they haven't given you a response yet. All right, so let's talk about the second stage, which is the welcoming process. Here, this particular step is important just to give client clear next steps, set expectations, and show them you care in one way or another. And some of the tools we're going to be touching on are email software. There are several options. Most CRMs, which we're going to discuss in a little bit, allow you to send automatic emails and you can have even more, much more simple setups and have those emails go out through your Gmail or Outlook. Another potential tool you could use here is GIFs. And there are ways in which you can automate the process of sending a GIF. I'm a big fan of GIFs. Tony will know. And you can, I'll show it in a bit. Actually, let me go through the third step, the third tool, which is video recording. This is more, I guess, useful in the context of a digital experience for a client where you might not see them face-to-face. Sometimes having a little bit of a video can make their experience a little more personal. So as it relates to gifts, this particular tool is one we've used for other companies. It's called Handwritten. And what it allows you to do, it's essentially you can place— literally, you can make it so that as soon as the client accepts the proposal, you can ship a gift to them. And it could be a quote unquote handwritten card. It's actually machine generated and kind of simulates human writing. That could be like a little bit of a human touchpoint that you could provide to a client. Also on the video side, some of you might be familiar with Loom, which is a video recording software that allows you to relatively quickly just click. It's usually shared to screen share, but you could also use it to record yourself and immediately have that URL available to send. But there are also a couple other tools I want to mention here. There's Bonjoro, which essentially makes it so that as soon as the client accepts, you get a notification and you can record a video on the go, kind of just welcoming the client. And there are even options that allow you to record the video once and then replicate it for every other client moving forward. So you can record the video and say, hey Tony, hey Nick, right? And then you can trigger it to when the client signs up, send the name of the person, and you can have that video be sent over. And this is, I think, a good example of what I was talking about earlier of spectrums, right? You can have it manual, you can have it semi-automated where you get a notification and you can quickly do it in an app, or you can have it fully automated where you literally— there's no human intervention whatsoever. So just quick recap here. You can, in the welcome process, send an email or a series of emails, ship a card or a gift, record a video on the go, or personalize and send a prerecorded video. So that is step number 2. Now let's talk about step number 3, which is data collection. So often a very important step where you need to gather all the information you need to get started as efficiently and as securely as possible. So some of the tools that can be useful for process, there are a lot of generic form, form builders like Cognito Forms, Paperform, Typeform. There are a dozen others that allow you to custom build a data collection form that you can send to clients, and you can even make it so that depending on their previous answers, the following questions might change. So you can make it a customized experience so that you're only asking of the information that is needed and no more. There are also industry-specific collection tools. ContentSnare is one that we've seen a couple of firms use, and Corvi as well. Often some of the benefits of these industry-specific tools is that they have built-in reminders, which I'm going to share in a bit, and they sometimes also have the ability to review the documents the clients have shared with you and accept them or reject them and tell the client to resubmit those particular I also know certain practice management solutions have some data collection tools built in. I believe Canopy has one, if I am correct. I'm curious if Nick has played around with it.

Yeah, for the information gathering, I have a little bit. The biggest problem I have with it is it doesn't roll stuff from year to year. So they have to answer the whole entire questionnaire all over again every year.

Interesting.

Are there—

what would you say they shouldn't have to answer again?

If I was to set it up the same way that we used to do our— that I've done it for 14 years with the paper tax organizers, where essentially they get a notification, it's got all their answers from the prior year, and, hey, review this and let me know changes, please.

Perfect.

That would be— that should be possible with some of these other tools, uh, because you often have the ability to pre-populate certain fields if you have them available.

Yeah.

So there are ways around it where you can potentially send a form, a collection form, and have it pre-populated with anything that you maybe already collected in the past.

Yeah.

And it's a bummer that, um, I, I know LaCerte, because I use LaCerte for my tax. And that's, you know, I don't remember if we said it or not, Tony, mate, there, that's what I do is Taxes, you know, a large amount of my work that I do where I have to gather information and stuff. Monthly clients is not really much of a big deal as far as bookkeeping goes, but, um, on a yearly basis, gathering information from the tax clients. And Lacerte, it has a digital organizer, but it is— I haven't even looked at it in a couple of years. I looked at it years ago and it was just garbage. And, um, and Canopy—

Lacerte is a desktop software, is that correct?

Uh, yes. Yeah, I use a hosting, but it is It's definitely a desktop software.

Yeah. Right. And what about Canopy? Is that— you're going to share?

Canopy has a really good tax organizer. I really like it. It's very much that responsive one where as a client says, I have just W-2s, I have kids, I own my home, it then prompts down the line and changes, you know, okay, well, great. How many kids do you have? What is their daycare expenses? It does those and makes those changes and such. It's just a matter of it feels like it'd be cumbersome for clients to have to answer all questions every single year overall again.

I haven't played with Canopy-specific organizers, but I know that many of these tools have the ability to pre-populate certain fields if you have them, for example, somewhere else in some other system. So that's something that I'll be curious to look into and find out more about. In any case, let me just share what Content Snare looks like. As I mentioned earlier, I'm sharing specific tools, but as long as you have similar functionalities on other tools to run with that. But here you can see, maybe it's a little further away, but you can see in the right side, sorry, in the left side, all of the kind of type of questions like you're asking to tax records, bank statements, investment properties, etc. And one of the things I like is, as you can see here in the top right, the client can submit a document. And what you can do if it's not up to par, maybe it's not legible or it's not the right one or it needs additional information, you can sort of request a change. They would notify and you could have that like collaboration built into the organizer. And you could also have the client comment if there's a particular thing they don't understand quite well. So if they say, hey, what do you mean by task records? And you can have that little bit of a back and forth. Of course, those comments hopefully allow— prompt you to over time improve the system and further specify what it is that you're asking so clients don't even have to ask to begin with. And you also have the ability for reminders. I'm not quite sure if Canopy has this, but you can set up deadlines, which is often very important with taxes. And you can make it so that X days before the due date, they— the clients start to be nudged a little bit to make sure that they complete the information that they need. So just some recap on this particular stage. As we mentioned, you can build the logic to only ask for the needed documents. Ideally, you don't want to ask for the same things again and again. You can remind clients of certain deadlines and missing documents, and also you can upload those documents into whatever file storage or client profile, client relationship management systems you might use, wherever it is that you store client information, which is actually the next step I want to talk a little more on, which is the client profile. The way I define a client profile, it's one that ideally You have all the information, which means documentation, right? All of their specific information, personal information, business information, et cetera. But also ideally all the communication easily accessible in one place. Uh, in our experience, um, there are some practice management that are good at often one or the other, or they might have the ability to have like a little bit of a client database and then maybe email. I believe Carbon has like a good email feature. I don't know if Canopy has. a way to communicate with the client. Sometimes they have like their own built-in messaging platform as well. But one of our favorite ways to go about it is actually, especially for little larger firms, it's, or as they grow, right? It's with the client relationship management software. HubSpot and HighLevel are one of the most popular ones, which I'm going to show you in a bit. And also one of the tools that can be useful here, if you're using a certain project management solution, to host the client information, but you don't quite have a way to manage all the communication coming in. You can add on top of that a unified communications or a shared inbox platform, which I'm also going to share just for you to better understand how that looks like. Are you guys familiar with any of these patients?

How often do you see text messaging built into these programs?

So I'm going to talk about that, but all 4 that I have here, HubSpot, HighLevel, MessageInFront, you have the ability to integrate text message. In fact, with MessageInFront, They're called Unified Communications. Their promise is that you can connect any communication channel. You can literally integrate Instagram, social, text message, calls, etc., into it. So you should be able to have both email and text message if that's what you want. Would you say those are the 2 channels you use primarily to support your clients?

Yeah, definitely via a lot of emails and a lot of text messages. We find just clients respond to text messages so much. It's probably the most responsive way of communication with them is text messaging. Phone calls, emails, they seem to get lost in translation a little bit or lost in just the shuffle of the day. Canopy does have email communications to where each client's client portal, client CRM area has a communication tab that anybody within the office can see all the emails back and forth. between ourselves. Maybe somebody else sent the client an email, or, you know, obviously responses from clients as well. It functions pretty good. The way that they— the way that they present it is a little weird. It's on like the— what is it called— the thread basis, more like Gmail when Gmail first set up Gmail, not like in Outlook where you just see an email, an email, an email, an email. If it's an email—

Interesting.

Another one, it like— I can't really explain Explain it very well. I don't like it at all. And we don't—

Interesting.

As much as we could. And I've complained to Canopy a bunch and there's in the, um, the knowledge base area, there's a bunch of people have put big thumbs up on, you know, hey, Canopy, please change this.

Interesting. Fair enough.

Email feature works really well to be able to send a message, a text message from a client from there within that CRM to a client would be huge. We utilize our phone systems through GoTo, and so that has a text messaging system built into it, and we utilize that.

It's—

okay, its hindrance is not everybody in the office can see the communications full size all the way through to that client. It's whoever sends the message. Nobody else sees that part of it.

Fair enough. Well, in that case, I think, like, see, if I were in your shoes and this becomes painful enough at some point that you might want to explore options, CRMs and unified communication platform might be your best choice. I'm going to walk you through both of them just to get an idea of how they look like. This is what HubSpot— go ahead. You have a question, Kingston?

Yes, real quick. So I actually use HighLevel, which I think is just unique to like the accounting field. Um, cause I don't know any other accountants that use— I mean, maybe there are some out there.

Yes.

Not like the traditional accounting solution. Yeah. So I like HighLevel. I think they keep it up Updated and they listen to the users. They update things frequently. I guess my biggest pain point with HighLevel is I would say if anything would be just the client portal. They don't have like a way that can really integrate like this accounting-specific function that you need out of like an accounting portal, right? You know, intake, billing. I mean, you can piece it together and you know kind of like find ways around things. I think so far. What I've found as far as comprehensive has been TaxDome, but I don't love it from the standpoint— I think it's kind of pricey for a user, to be honest, especially if you have a huge team. So I don't know. I'm just throwing it out there because I do like HighLevel. I just have not figured out how to fully use it for my team yet, and I've had it for like 3 years.

Yeah, I do agree that HighLevel is good at specific things, but with the forms and the billing, it's just not built for that. And, you know, most of these tools sometimes market themselves like as all-in-one. They have a lot of bells and whistles, but some tools are just not good. So you have to kind of like take what's good from one, integrate it with the other more often than not. Yeah.

So, and you might have already touched on it. So you're saying your platform will connect, I guess, automate different existing softwares that the firm has. So let's say if I have HighLevel and Zoho or something like that.

Right. That's our goal. And to be fair, to be transparent, it's not like we have a platform per se. We often leverage existing tools. You might be familiar with Zapier, Make, all these other things that allow you to say, if you have like, if you really need like 3, 4 tools to have all the features you want, you can find a way to integrate them together.

So I have a question for you, and I don't want to get too much off topic because I know we're probably on a schedule. Are you familiar with Zoho One at all?

I'm familiar with Zoho. It's Zoho One. What kind of features is Zoho One?

I think it's, they're all, they're all in one type of thing where they have Zoho Mail, they have Zoho, um, like the whole platform of Zoho products, like the all-suites. Exactly. I, I was going to demo that and figure out how well that kind of works because I'm kind of in the mix right now, probably looking for something to— a platform that I can stick with, you know, moving forward. Um, right. Anyways, anyways, I don't want to get off topic, but yeah, just asking you about that.

I haven't been a big fan of Zoho. I've tested more of their individual products. They have like a Zoho Flow, Zoho Books, their CRM as well. I haven't been a big fan of like the user experience on all of them.

Yeah, I got you.

I can't speak specifically of Zoho One and how that might look like. Gotcha, gotcha.

Because I was really just interested as far as— I mean, I've used Zoho Mail a little bit. Now I have Gmail. I kind of went back to Google, but I was thinking about like their client portal. This, I don't even— customer portal is what they call it. I haven't really demoed it, so I don't know, but it kind of seemed like it brought everything into one and they had like a sales portal as well, like the sales team. I don't know. You know, a lot of promises. I haven't demoed it, but you know, anyway.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, let me keep going here. As I said, this is what Hotspot looks like. This is what HighLevel looks like. And they have very similar layouts, as you can probably tell. Many of them work very similarly in that they have different sections. For example, here in HighLevel, you have all the customer information in one side. You can easily toggle between their person and their company information if you want it. And you can have different categories for each contact to group their information. So you can have contact information, business information, referral information, and group those as you wish. In the center, what you'll have is all of the communications. In particular here, you can integrate email, you can integrate text message, you can integrate phone, and you'll see the history of, say, the recording of all the calls, text messages, the back and forth, etc. And on the other side, you can see things like, for example, documents, any documents they sent, any documents you've received from the client, and any internal documents that maybe you added on your own. So this is the idea of the CRM. It's my preferred way of having like a centralized client platform. Both the information and the communication in one place. But as I said earlier, maybe for Nick, uh, for you would be more useful to maybe stick with Canopy for the client information, but then try something like Front, which is what you're seeing here, for the communication, to manage all the incoming communication. So here, as you can see right, uh, right here, you can see you have— you can have like shared inboxes. Whether it's like support at your firm or team at your firm, like something where you could integrate also different inboxes from different team members so everyone can see it. Social, WhatsApp, Instagram, text message, phone, et cetera. The idea is that no client communication gets missed because you have everything together there in one place.

Which one was this?

This is Front. It's called Front, F-R-O-N-T. And Team. There are a couple others that are similar. Missive is another one that I've also seen a lot of accountants use, though those 2 I would say are like the top players in the space. So just some possibilities here that this allows you to do. As I mentioned, you can integrate all communication channels, you can create custom fields and properties. As I mentioned, as you collect new data, new data, the idea is that you include it in this client profile over time and enrich it. And you can also even personalize communication based on that information. So if you want to email clients that bought a specific service or that live in a specific state or that run a certain type of business, as long as you have that information, you can potentially segment them to email them specifically. All right, so the other step we're going to talk about is the planning of the work. So this is where the work management solutions would come in. There are multiple that are industry-specific. Kingsley mentioned TaxDome. We've worked with that. Nick, you mentioned Canopy. Carbon is also another very popular one. And there are also some more kind of generic project management tools like ClickUp, Asana that a lot of accountants choose to use as well. The whole idea here is Just as we've been talking about, the moment the client pays and the client accepts, hopefully you can transfer all of the tasks that need to get done into one system. So you make sure that no client deliverable falls through the cracks. So I'll just share how we've set up a client's account on ClickUp. We like to structure it in lists of service lines depending on the firm, especially if they offer multiple services. So the whole idea is that the owner and the owners, they are to, in fact, at a glance they can see, hey, we have 11 1040s pending, and they can click and see what are those. We have 5 tax plans. So at a glance you can see how much work you have to get done. And when you click through at a task level, what we like to always try to do is try to include as much information that the team member is going to need. In the task itself. So you can see here the breakdown of the subtasks, the due dates. You could have, as you see in this other slide, different information. For example, this client, we have a link directly to the contact profile so that any communication to the client is just one click away, among other details that you might need to have available for the client. So that's what ClickUp looks like. And again, The whole— the same concept applies to other tools. As long as you can have the information hopefully within a task, being able to assign them to someone and know when it's going to get done, etc., then you're good to go.

I have a question. Go for it. Yeah, and I might be, uh, I might be ahead of you. Um, do you— so I use Monday as well, monday.com, right? Um, same thing there. I like it, I don't love it. Would you be able to duplicate something like that on monday.com, or would you Is this specific to ClickUp? Because I know they're similar, right? Or—

Yeah, they're pretty much like, they almost the same to an extent at this point. So a very similar thing could be accomplished in, you know, a trial of monday.com as well. Uh, cause they have the ability to have assignees, due dates, uh, custom fields. So you can customize it to have all this information as well. Ultimately what you do, what you have to do is to plug it, kind of integrate it with the other tools you have. So that those tasks are created in the first place, if that makes sense.

Gotcha.

Perfect. So just some possibilities, as I said here, you can generate a task for each new client. That's kind of like the first step. Then you can start assigning them if you want. You can bring documents and the information that you already had in the profile of the data you collected into the task so that the team members has everything right there available for them. And you can even start updating clients. As tasks are completed. So you can literally make it so that when, hey, we reviewed the return, emails get sent to the client to book maybe a review. When the monthly books are done, then you email the client to review as well, etc. And sometimes maybe just for reference, even if the client doesn't have to do anything, they sometimes appreciate if you kind of just keep them in the loop because sometimes they might not know what's the status of their particular return or their particular project that you're working on. All right, so last step is the feedback. This is technically optional, but I would recommend that you just ask for feedback for 2 reasons. First is to make the client feel valued and just improve your process. But also, if the client is happy, this is your opportunity to ask for a review. And if they're even happier, ask for a referral as well for them to introduce your business. So some tools, sometimes the The same form builders we talked about earlier, you could use to have a very simple form that asks for that feedback. But there are also specific testimonial collection tools available. 2 of them are NiceJob and testimonial.to. And what they do is essentially centralize all of your reviews in one page and allow the client to review you through it. So an example of what NiceJob looks like, as you can see here, is like you have your Google, Facebook, insert any other review platform. Form just all in one page, and the client can choose to review your company in the one that they prefer. So the idea here is that you, you have to set up the email to go out to request, or text message to request this feedback from them, which you can do either on a time basis, say 30, 90 days in, or you could even do based on key milestones, say when we complete this certain task or when onboarding ends. And you can automate that gathering of reviews and encourage referrals from the clients that are happy. So that's pretty much a wrap on the 6 different stages of client onboarding success. Just as a recap, you start with the initial engagement. You're trying to find ways to welcome the client, make them feel appreciated, different ways to collect the data from them. You also Find ways to centralize all that information in one place and somewhere where you can store the work, and then you ask for feedback when appropriate.