When you have to be right. Tax & Accounting. Questions & Answers About Firm Management Software in Successful Practices

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1 When you have to be right Tax & Accounting Questions & Answers About Firm Management Software in Successful Practices

2 2 Questions & Answers About Firm Management Software in Successful Practices Managing partner Steve Williams and COO Andrea Ferran of HMWC CPAs & Business Advisors recently sat down with Accounting Today editor Dan Hood and Brian Siet of Wolters Kluwer. HMWC is an eight partner firm with a total of 50 staff members that offers accounting and audit, tax, and small business and healthcare business advisory services. Williams and Ferran discussed their strategy for firm management and development and described how their firm has benefited from using CCH ProSystem fx Practice Management. Q: How has your firm changed in terms of processes since you started using CCH ProSystem fx Practice Management? Ferran: We mold a lot of our business processes around each of the different modules in Practice Management. We look to it as our primary database for client information with the different modules that it includes. We use pretty much all of the modules. The contact management module is where we keep our primary client data and we direct all of our employees to those different modules for that primary information. The firm used to have lots of bits and pieces of information all over, including on personal computers. We ve consolidated all of that information inside this one application, and we find that it creates lots of efficiencies for us. Q: As your firm has changed, has Practice Management kept up in terms of features and functionality that you need to manage your business day-to-day? Ferran: Absolutely. One of the things that I find is that I ll be working on a particular project in the application and I will think wouldn t it be great if it could do this. In most cases, I find that it can. Wolters Kluwer is thinking ahead of us in terms of what accounting firms need. We are really pleased to see that the application has kept up with how we want to work and how we actually are using the information. Q: Time entry is really the starting point for any firm management solution. How do you make sure that time is captured accurately and why is that important to you? Ferran: We require daily time entry into the Practice Management system, so that as we re utilizing the Practice Intelligence system, we have real-time information on a daily basis. We have a categorized list of service codes and other fields of information that employees will record when entering their time. Williams: Over the last few years, we have added monitors onto people s desks so that everyone in our office now has at least two monitors, and the majority work with three monitors. We were getting complaints early on that people couldn t keep their timesheets visible while they were working on projects. Using multiple monitors eliminated the problem for some of our staff, and it has enabled us to get everybody to enter time on a daily basis.

3 Questions & Answers About Firm Management Software in Successful Practices 3 Q: How does HMWC handle billing and invoicing? How does Practice Management help? Ferran: We started out doing our billing on a monthly basis. Using the Practice Management billing module, we have assigned bill managers to all the clients. Our processes here are primarily manager-driven so most of our managers and some of our partners are doing billing. A year or two ago, we switched to twice a month billing in the busy seasons. For March, April, September and October, we re doing billing on the 15th and then the last day of the month. We also have the option in Practice Management to do an invoice on the fly. We use the billing module extensively and our bill managers have a variety of options on how they can view the detail of their billing and how they can format their invoices and describe the information. We also do a lot of fixed-fee billing now and we re starting to use the features in the system for fixed-fee to make that process more efficient. We often use invoice templates that we ve pre-set for particular clients depending on the level of detail they want on their invoices. Practice Management gives us a lot of different features for handling client billing in different ways depending on client needs. Williams: One of the things that we used to do, at the end of the month, we would make sure everyone had their time entered and released so the bills could be done. That worked well when we were only doing monthly billing. However, when we went to daily time entry and releasing of time, it provides a great opportunity for us to produce bills for clients that may be more troublesome from a payment perspective. Many [CPAs] will agree that they have some clients, they might be longtime clients, but they have a way of sometimes paying the bill either just before, or dragging their feet in getting it paid. We ve got some files that have COD written across the file, and that means that we need to produce a bill and collect a check or credit card payment before the tax return goes out. This daily releasing of time in Practice Management allows us to produce those bills when that return is ready to go out. Q: Are there any KPIs you re monitoring in terms of billing? Williams: I m looking at our billing compared this YTD versus last YTD and this month or quarter over the same period last year. In this environment, the last four or five years have been more challenging for firms. For a number of years, revenues were climbing on a regular basis. In our case, over the last four or five years revenues have bumped up or down by a couple of percentage points each year not a significant swing, but I need to monitor it from a practice management perspective. The Practice Management system really allows me to monitor both charge hours and revenue, not only from an overall firm perspective but also drilling down into departments and even further to individual staff members. We can tell who s busy and who s not, whose got low chargeability or high, whose got the best realization. I think it helps us manage the firm in a much better way. Q: How does the firm track projects? How does project tracking benefit the firm and your clients? Ferran: We manage all of our engagements via projects in Practice Management. We have a project for most every type of work that we do. On the backend, Practice Management assists us with understanding particular engagements in terms of how long projects take, the costs involved, and the revenue associated with that, so we can make decisions on new clients or new engagements coming up. It also helps in the billing process where you can group your WIP by projects in order to bill it out appropriately and make sure it is being charged out appropriately.

4 4 Questions & Answers About Firm Management Software in Successful Practices Q: Practice Management uses dashboards for management. How do you think your staff is currently using the dashboard to keep track of projects and tasks? Ferran: Dashboards contain real-time information like Practice Intelligence but geared towards the staff. You can view all of your assignments or your projects. You can filter out the project types you don t want to review. You can sort them by client and view them in a variety of different ways, based on how you want to look at and track this information. You can also update statuses and see who s working on different projects. Dashboards are a great addition to the Practice Management product. Q: In regards to the firm s marketing initiatives, how do you use CCH ProSystem fx Practice Management? Have you gained benefits using Practice Management in business development? Ferran: When we have new clients come in, we collect information about how we got the client and the referral source and the employee that brought the client to the firm. The marketing features within Practice Management allow us to do that and then report on it. We offer practice development awards to our staff, and we have really trained our staff well to make sure that their name goes in that box when we re setting up that client, so at the end of the fiscal year, we can hand out the awards. Practice Management gives us a variety of other marketing reporting opportunities. When working on prospective clients or working with referral sources, it has a different data entry collection point to capture information about what you re doing and who you are talking to. We have a marketing committee that meets once a quarter and we use the information that s been captured in Practice Management in our planning. We have one dedicated database for all of our clients information from contact information to billing to employee time a whole variety of areas and the marketing areas as well. I like that concept about the Practice Management system.

5 Contact information: Wolters Kluwer 2700 Lake Cook Road Riverwoods, IL United States Please visit CCHGroup.com/PracticeManagement for more information. 10/ CCH Incorporated and its affiliates. All rights reserved. When you have to be right