523 Text Messaging Best Practices in Accounting Firms

Text messaging, believe it or not, it's an opportunity for your accounting firm. But the way that most of us wade into this is so problematic. It looks like giving your personal number away to umpteen different people and before you know it, you are like changed to your phone because you're the only one that can triage the stuff that's coming into your personal phone, right? But here's the thing. These days we've got like way better platforms for managing texts like across an organization. Whether this is like SMS in the US or just messaging more generally. Messaging, honestly in many ways is now better than email because your clients, most of them, may prefer messaging to email, but also because the tools here have gotten much better. So we're going to run through some best practices for how to manage this in an accounting firm and how letting your clients text you honestly could actually make you a bunch of money. In fact, let's start with that. Let's get into it. Let's start with like what the opportunity is here because why should we inconvenience ourselves to add yet another communication channel unless there is ultimately some upside in it for us, the accounting firm. By the way, if you're new here, welcome to Jason on firms where we talk all things running small accounting firms. And by small I mean like 200 people and under. So first, what is the opportunity? The opportunity is that there's a lot of people out there who would happily text you over having to send emails back and forth. That's actually a, a more convenient communication platform for in the US in all likelihood that's SMS. Elsewhere that might look like WhatsApp might look like Instagram messenger could be a whole bunch of different things. And I feel like the last couple of years there's been this effort and a lot of it's like sort of accounting thought leaders that are like, no, we got to restrict, we got to squeeze all this back to your client portal or a smaller number of channels so that you don't drive yourself insane. And it's true. This is the risk here is when we open ourselves up to any and every channel imaginable that becomes a bare triangle if we don't do it intentionally. But here's my take on this. Tech has made this easier. There are tools to better manage this. Spoiler alert. They are not Microsoft Outlook. They are not that like caud old phone system that some IT group randomly set up 20 years ago and it hasn't changed since then. But also, and this is like kind of, kind of a shifting trend, we Gotta always be thinking about what is our position in the general marketplace where we have productized solutions. It'll do turnkey stuff, a high volume of it at night, not a very high level for very, very cheap. And then you have us like the professional shops and I think the long term place where we are set up, setting up camp is to be a more tailored solution to a more specific type of entrepreneur which means there is risk and inherent in forcing them to work with us on our terms. And there's a level of this that we have to do. Like ultimately we set the boundaries of what we will and will not do. But people will super appreciate if you can meet them where they're at in their preferred way of working. And oftentimes that is not email. And email is actually a very, very noisy channel. Like we've probably all seen the statistics of the percentage of people that respond to a text within 90, like 90 seconds compared to the number of emails that are responded to in 90 seconds. We want to use that to our advantage, but we also have to uphold a certain expectation. The expectation of clients reaching out to us via text has to be the same as whatever the communication strategy is across all channels and similar to how we manage email triage. This is just a communication thing. What's the expected turnaround time? What is it for you, the big boss? What is it for the staff? What is it for the admins on your team? We can have a plan for this for any type of messaging, just like we do for email. And as we're coming up on year end and doing annual renewals with our clients, specifically three tier proposals, I know a lot of folks are doing that for the first time this year, which is really exciting as we're considering what Bronze Silver Gold looks like. What we're really looking for is what can I pack into Silver and Gold that will make service delivery feel more premium, more tailored to them. Because again, on all three of those packages, Bronze, Silver, Gold, we want to sell the same destination. The difference across packages is the delivery, how premium is the delivery. And text messaging, or messaging in general is a great example where folks oftentimes will pay more if you will meet them where they're at and interact via their preferred way of working. Maybe they love working in Slack or Discord or team teams, but you've been down that route before and you know just what a monster that was getting sucked into their every minute of their business. There's, there's a better way to do this, that, and this is important. I think we can get paid top dollar for it. I don't think. I know. But it all comes back to how we manage that stuff on our side of the fence and are we doing so effectively. So let me give you four best practices here. Number one is where more people find themselves than anyone else. One, do not use your personal number, bro. And you probably went down this path at some point in your life, and maybe you've recovered from it. Maybe you're totally stuck and you don't know how to get out from under your cell phone number. That is now the personal hotline of your entire client list. If a man. If you never did this at any point in your career, you win, because most of us did at some point. And it happened at a time when that. That was necessary of you, when your clients had that expectation of you. In fact, I remember the first time I was sitting down this a big dog client, and I was young, sat down, had a great meeting with the big boss, and at the end, he just says, what's your cell phone number? And there was like this, like, heft and momentum and sort of, I don't know, unyielding way about how it felt like he was saying that. And that was probably just me in my 20s sitting across from someone who was vastly more successful than. Than I was and feeling like I had just successfully faked my way through a meeting and kind of dazzled them. And then he says that, and then he's. And I'm like, yeah, no, I'm. I'm going to give this guy my cell phone number. There. There was never. There was a. Never a moment when that. That was in doubt. And in a situation like that, like, the balance of power is so off that you don't feel like you can say no. But that's where everybody starts, right? And just because it's where you started doesn't mean that's where you're going to set up camp for decades. And this is where we can get stuck is in this mindset that the things that we had to do, the level of service we had to provide in the beginning just to get work in the door is something that we have to do forever. But you should know that not realistic. If you go out and want to become a personal trainer and you're training people one on one, and then you decide, oh, actually I want to start a gym and I got to do xyz just to get people in the door in the beginning. Like, every stage of that journey, the way you support the business changes and that's okay. That's the way it should be. That's just growth. And for most people in the early days, they were doing a lot of hustling on that cell phone. So if you're still under that real quick, I'll just run you through the, like, the best way to get out from under this, first and foremost, have a good voiceover. IP VoIP provider. This is a phone on the Internet. And honestly these days there is no reason to have a traditional phone system like that, just especially in the age of distributed work. It is unnecessarily complicated. RingCentral these days, pretty long in the teeth unless you have some very, very specific need that, that they will support. Right now, in my opinion, the best solutions are either Open Phone, which recently rebranded to Quo Q U O or air. These are online services that handle your calling. They also handle text messages. And they handle them in like a team sort of setup where you can manage any number of different phone numbers. They'll also do stuff like have like a phone tree and it sounds just like any old other regular phone. It's what I use. Send me a text, leave me a voicemail at 516-980-4968. Do it right now. Skip, jump back 10 seconds, save Jason Stats to your contacts. Send me a text, leave me a voicemail, add it to your parent, teacher, circular, whatever, whatever makes sense, works just like a real phone. But you got a modern interface for managing stuff online. So anything that I get, my team can help me triage. And so if you're at a spot right now where your personal phone number is the thing that all of your clients are using, we got to do one of two things. That number either needs to be ported to a service that your team can help you manage, and then you tell all of your personal contacts that also have that number, hey, switching to this number now. So you've got a clean phone line that only personal folks know about, or you do the opposite, you tell all the business people, hey, I got a new phone number. Contact me over here. And then all your personal contacts continue using the same number. Right answer. Probably depends on relative number of people that have that number. Do you have a thousand clients that have that number and like 30 personal care and tax personal contacts you care about, or is it the opposite? Whatever group is the smaller number of people to move? I'd start there. If you've got a number that's just been out in the wild forever, I would probably recommend just getting a new number for personal stuff. Because I mean it's in a million hands at that point and you probably don't know how to ever get that back under control. So in a situation like that, we're talking about porting your current number to a new service, a service where it isn't just you that has to triage all that stuff. We're going to talk about what that looks like. So best practice number one, don't use your personal number. Always use a business number. The great thing about like apps like Quo is you have control over notifications. Like even if you want to continue using it. The same way that you use your current number on your cell phone, you can if you want, you let it ring through anytime, send you messages anytime. But you can also set notification settings so like doesn't ring you outside at certain hours. Put that on do not disturb while your actual phone phone is on disturb, do disturb so that when little Mikey takes a header off the merry go round, they can still get in touch with you. But having those two separate things so you can control whether your personal number is allowed to bother you and whether your work number is allowed to bother you. Really handy things to have separate could you air a grievance with you? Right now we are in peak tech selection season and your most important tool in your firm, it is your practice management system. But when you go to these providers and you ask them what firms are you great for? You know what pretty much all of them say accounting firms, everyone. Our tool is the best for everyone. Buddy, that just ain't true. And one platform that is being built for a very specific type of firm, it is Client Hub. They know who they're great for and it is cast and outsourced bookkeeping practices like accounting department in a box. Is that what you're doing for your clients? If so, buddy, look at Client Hub. They're building for that very specific type of firm. Good example. They have like a arguably a deeper integration into the ledger than maybe any other practice management system because they give you like an entire way to manage the month end close inside of Client Hub. It's the sort of functionality that with most of our other practice management platforms you would have to pull in a separate month end close automation tool to get that functionality. But it's all happening inside of Client Hub because they know exactly what the firms who are a great fit for them need. Buddy, it is no different than what we talk about in accounting firms where it's way easier to serve a specific type of client at a very high level. That's what Client Hub's doing, man. They're building a platform for a very specific type of accounting firm. And if that is you, they really ought to be on your short list of practice management systems that you're considering rolling into 2026. To learn more about Client Hub and actually some really cool new AI workflow stuff they've got going as well. Check out the link down in the show notes. Can I let you in on a secret about offshore hiring? This was, this was actually my experience, and now that I've talked to more folks that have done it, a lot of people go through this progression. So in my account community, realize about 40% of those firms, almost 600 firms, almost 40% of them are doing offshore hiring. And that is, that is way higher than that was like three years ago. World's just gotten smaller. I think Covid had a bit of play in that. Distributed work is kind of the norm, right? So it doesn't matter where your team is. American accounting, it's not that much different than elsewhere. Even US Tax, you find experts around the world for that sort of stuff. But the team behind this video sponsor, Team up, they noticed the same thing that I did, and that's that. And most firms go through a progression where they first hire a middle person to employ the staff and all that because they trust that service a little more. And that service handles a lot of the logistics with the employee. But then you end up paying as much to that service as you do to the employee themselves. This is where most firms start with staffing. But once you get past like higher four or five, what I commonly see is they then just start hiring people direct. They're like, I actually just want to employ this person directly because half of what I pay, I don't want to go to this other group. This is what Team up was born on. What Team up does differently is they will help you directly hire accountants in the Philippines. No middle people. All you actually pay to team up is a recruiting fee, and that's it. So whether you're just getting started or whether you're maybe further along and you got now talented people that are trapped inside of these other organizations, by the way, virtually impossible to get those people out of those contracts. Team Up's a great way to find folks to come work for you directly. Learn more about Team up, check out the link down in the show notes. Second, have a team first triage approach to this and without getting like too into the weeds here, because it's something that if you've been around the podcast long you've heard me rail about before. The biggest mistake we make in our communication strategy with clients is the big boss will say to a client who asks about expected turnaround time, like, ah, usually we get back to you like within a day, maybe two days. And as soon as the rest of the team hears that, they will now parrot that. They'll say the same thing that you do. Oh yeah, usually a day, maybe two days. But if everybody in your firm is equally available, who will the clients go to every single time they go to the big boss? Right, they'll go straight to the top if you are as available as everyone else in the team. But that's, that's not how we want to design our systems. Like, think of your client like a mouse in a maze that's trying to get to the cheese. If you design the expected turnaround time to make yourself equally available to everyone else, don't get mad when everybody comes to you. Like that's, that's ultimately our fault. So in my case we had like a cascading level sort of system of availability where admins, you could pick up the phone and call them anytime. Accounting managers, it was like 24 hours. Big bosses was like 72 hour turnaround time. This was the approach for the phone, this was the approach for email. And if you open the floodgates to texting, the rule needs to be the same there. Because as soon as one client finds a way to jump the line, they invite you to their slack, they call you on your cell and you pick it up. As soon as they find the way to jump the line, they will never get in the queue again. Why would they, right? They found the way to get ahead. And I, you've probably worked with these people before who are like, man, I can never get anything done, never make as much progress as I think I can. I think I will. And they've got like emails stacking up and people annoyed they haven't gotten back to them in the last week. But then when the next client calls their phone, they answer it. Why, why are we taking that call when there's the email that is now stinking? Because it's been sitting there for a week, right? Whatever the channel is, phone, email, messaging, it's all got to play by the same set of rules. And this, this is very business firm dependent. There will be situations where very fast response time is necessary and really valuable. And it depends on the ways that you support your team, like your clients. Like if you're just a tax firm, there are really not situations where like instant same day responses are that big of a deal. If you are running somebody's back office and you're doing their payroll, you're doing their bill pay and all that stuff, there's a much greater level of availability that's necessary to really feel like an embedded part of their team. That is the goal after all, is it's like you're an accounting department in a box. So you want to be as available really as anybody else that is under the client's employee. Those are two very different support systems to design in terms of how long do they need to wait for a response and that impacts how you staff the team and all that. But the system itself, the structure is the same e way. It's just a question of do we need to get back to them within 60 minutes or within three days. So voiceover IP systems a very big help here. Also, if you're thinking about your meeting transcript tools, the way that you're capturing virtual meetings, a lot of these tools also have integrations with voiceover IP systems. So you can also record calls potentially watch out for rules specific to recording calls wherever you live. But the big, biggest, most common issue I see here is generally business owner that has used their personal cell phone and then the firm doesn't have anything beyond a traditional like phone headset setup. And that's just not designed in any way to like help you triage things as a team. Most of these systems have a CRM component where they will recognize who's calling and calls can be routed accordingly. For example, if you got somebody that's on like the kind of premium president's club package that could ring through to like a VIP group, maybe your VIP support people. But rule number one is like you got to have an agreed upon expectation of turnaround time with your clients and that ought to be in your firm, that ought to be hierarchy specific. So each level up the hierarchy you go, the less available that person is. And gang, it is okay for this to change year over year. It should change year over year. If you're thinking about how you're designing your renewal packages this year and you're like, oh man, this feels premium right now, but I don't know that I want to commit to it forever. That's the beauty of a one year contract. All you're doing is committing to what you're going to do for the next 12 months. And after that, frankly it should be different. But we need to define that expected turnaround time and then we need to actually Execute like deliver on it and make sure the team understands what is the expectation of everyone. That system ought to filter tasks down the skill tree because you, goodness sakes, don't need to be sending prior year tax returns to people or old month end closes. Only other thing I'd add here is there are like sort of joint inbox tools, like multi channel. Inbox was like Missive. You may have seen we did a video, a sponsored video for Missive recently. Missive's an example of a tool that you can connect to Your email, to SMS, to WhatsApp, to Instagram messenger, all these different places and then you have a single place where that all comes in and the team can manage it. You can organize those inboxes into teams. Like if you have a pod that manages a collection of clients, then all of the emails, the texts, the, the Instagram messages, whatever it is, they all funnel into that team and the team manages the inbox. So just kind of depersonalizes email addresses and phone numbers and all that. Which if you've been around, you know, I'm a big advocate of. The more you personalize the communication channels, the more siloed they get. And then you end up with a stupid situation like a staff person going on vacation and they're like, don't worry though, I'm going to be gone 10 days, but I've got my email app on my phone. I'll keep an eye on it. It's like you got 20, you got 20 colleagues, 20 people work with you. None of those people can keep an eye on your inbox when you're gone. Like, if we can eliminate the sort of siloed thinking about how we manage that stuff, that is just. That will make it so much easier to manage like communications across a bunch of clients without you or anybody else on your team feeling like that's a hill they got to die on themselves. I would start with like your VoiceOver IP system, get an understanding of how that works and then decide, do we need a tool across all of our communication platforms to help us manage that in a centralized way? I mean, I will say like without a doubt, if you're using Microsoft Outlook or just or Raw Dog and Gmail Buddy. That is not an optimized approach to like managing email as a team. Some practice management systems are now getting better at this. Most of them are not. This is where tools like, you know, Missive and Front and Superhuman offer just a vastly better email experience than run of the mill Microsoft Outlook. And it's why we honestly, we don't even think about a team first approach because the apps that we use for communications oftentimes it isn't really possible to get any help. So first, best practice, don't use your personal number. Second, find a team first approach to triage. Third, reserve alternate communication channels to your premium support tiers. So this in all likelihood isn't something that you just give away unless maybe you work with, you know, tradies or something like that where all they do is text. Like they're just always on the road and so that's really the only way they can actually interact with people. We did a lot, a lot of work with dentists and the reality of dentists were they were chairside like they weren't sat up in front of a computer sending emails all day long. And so if we had to interact with them during the day, the only option was messaging. And so depending on who you're serving that, that may be the case for you. But carefully plan what channels you're going to allow for in different levels of support. Because text messaging or messaging in general is often something that is best reserved for your more premium service delivery tiers where the underlying work that you're doing isn't actually any different, but that's a more tailored to them more premium version of delivering the service that you will make available to unlimited number of people. Like anytime you're, you know, holding up a gold plan in front of clients during renewal time, always communicate how many of those slots do you have available? Because it, it should be limited. We can't do that for, for an infinite number of people, right? And too often we end up actually being apologetic about our own capacity constraints rather than just being real about them and being like, here's how many we can do. And that scarcity will actually cause more people to upgrade to that package because they're like, oh geez, this is, there's some exclusivity to this. And for whatever reason, our fear of missing out on that thing and not having the opportunity to opt into that again will actually make more people than opt into it. It's, it's, frankly, it's like dumb how much of a premium some people will put on a more tailored premium service delivery, but that's just how it is. People think they're entitled to that. They think they're the type of person that should have that. Like they will spend for it. So third, best practice, use these alternate communication channels in your sort of premium tiers. Last one. Fourth, use these alternative channels selectively for outbound for reaching out to people. Because email, man, it is like the noisiest channel of all, right? Very, very hard to get people's attention. In fact, the first time that firms start like sending out a newsletter or something like that, they're surprised almost always at just what a struggle it is to get people to engage with those and actually read them. And like, the fact remains, messaging, it is an easier way to reach people than email us. So for example, like we now have this phone number that we use in my business and we can use it in social media and be like, yeah, no, send me this or that via text. And it's just kind of this fun way to interact with folks. And behind the scenes it's my team doing triage. It's me doing a bit of the triage. But you know what makes that really good for me, for my business is if everybody that consumed my content had me and my number in their phone and texted me at some point, then when we rock up and host an event in their town, we push out a text message and be like, hey, we're going to be there November 10th, want to see you there. And the likelihood that they will see that versus yet another email is much higher. Now you may not have a version of that, although if you don't do any sort of events, even if you just started with like a dinner, say that you're going to a trade show, the types of people that you work with and if you've got any clients going to that trade show, man, getting those people out to a dinner, telling them to invite a friend, like even very, very small scale stuff, really, really valuable. And I can totally understand the fear of like, I don't host events and this isn't really like my personality to do this sort of thing, man, been there, bought the T shirt. I can totally relate to that. But I can also tell you there's absolutely nothing like getting people together in person. And so if you need a communication channel that will raise above email from time to time, messaging does that like in, in a way that email does not. Right. So biggest traps I see here, using your personal phone number, don't do that using a legacy phone system. Go out and find something better. I would steer you towards quo Q U O formerly open phone or air call and then have a clear system to triage all those communications. Like what would it look like to think of support in the way we interact with clients more through the lens of like what a support department would that's handling customer returns or warranty claims or feedback for software or something like that. Oftentimes we, we don't, like, put the level of effort and planning into what it looks like to support the client and commute, communicate with the client. Because what we want to do is just do the work. And we really want the clients to communicate with us as little as possible because we want to just focus on being able to do the work rather than acknowledging the reality that the way the client perceives us doing the work will be all the ways that we do or do not communicate with them. And so we need a plan for how they will feel heard and understood and how we can be responsible and courteous even when we are up against a deadline. And the very last thing in the world we want is one more person bothering us. And what we're talking about today really is more about, like, how do support teams support large numbers of users? How do the admins handle as many of those things as they can before it touches anybody else? And then it falls down to, you know, the account manager, the person that is in charge of that client. Surely they can handle it if the admin can't. And only after that does it fall to the big boss, rather than it defaulting to the big boss because the clients just had to send somebody a text and the only person at the firm whose number they had was the big boss. That sort of stuff's what we got to avoid. Just to have like a more practical, intentional strategy to approach this stuff. If you do text messaging or messaging in general in your firm, got any insights on this stuff or apps that you love to use for it? Put that down in the comments. That would actually be really useful if you have an app that you feel like has nailed this. This could be a voiceover IP system. It could be a system that rolls up your texts and your, your email and your social media, maybe all that stuff into a single place. Got something you really like for that? Put it down in the comments and like I said, send me a text, give me a call. 516-980-4968. Pop it in your phone. New contact, Jason Firms. All right, I'll catch you in the next one.