Table of contents
Table of contents
Explaining VAT, NICs and ever changing tax legislation to clients can prove time-consuming, difficult and exhausting. Rather than wasting your accountants’ time on descriptions of IR35, it’s much easier to create resources that can help your clients understand complicated pieces of accountancy.
These will prove useful not just for new clients, but also for junior accountants in training. To create a useful and simple resources, have a look at the steps below.
The first step in creating useful guides is making sure the information you plan to use is relevant and reliable. This should be your first priority in creating resources you plan to send to clients, as other accountancy firms may be quick to comment if there are errors.
Check industry news for latest updates on any changeable figures, such as personal income levels. If possible, you should change these figures in your resources even after they’ve been published to ensure they remain as up-to-date as possible.
As an accountant, you may think you have all the research you need already stored away in your mind. After all, you are the one advising clients, so why not use your own resources to write up a guide?
The main issue with this is the lack of outside perspective. When you’re writing, you may have missed a vital piece of information out that you hadn’t considered or have failed to explain on a complicated point.
You should rely on other sources to help make up your guide – the more you use, the more reliable it’s going to be.
Once you have all the information needed for your resource, you need to decide what format you want to present it in. This will depend on how you intend to distribute it to your clients.
For example, if you simply want to share it on your social channels, you can create a blog post which outlines all the relevant information. This can be as long or as short as you want, however it’s worth noting that the dates on blog posts can they have a time limit on how relevant readers perceive them to be.
For an in depth guide, the best format to put your resource into will be a PDF. With this, there is no time limit and it can be branded more heavily than a blog post so when it’s shared, your brand is at the front of every reader’s mind.
It can be tempting to dish out the stock photos and simply convert a Word document to PDF when you’re ready to publish your new resource.
However, if you want to give it a truly finished edge, hire a freelance graphic designer. This small expense will promise you a clean looking document that you can be proud to put your logo on. Plus. They’ll be able to give you a personal image that people can relate to your brand – making your business instantly recognisable.
Creating a page where you store all your client resources will mean clients can easily access all resources and simply download the ones they need.
It may seem like a lot of work to organise, but once you’ve got resources readily available to clients, it will make the accountants’ life easier as they’ll easily be able to navigate them to a page rather than explain the entire guide contents to them.
Learn more about using Pandle bookkeeping software with your clients.
AAT Level 3 qualified, I’ve worked in the finance sector since 2017. When I'm not in Pandle HQ, you'll find me hiking and playing the drums.
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