Intuitive Accountant strives to provide you, our QuickBooks Specialist, Accountant and Business Consultant readers with information about opportunities to serve your clients, build your practice, and bolster your compensation through this series we call ‘Advisor Alliance’. The focus of this series will be product developers and vendors who offer some form of alliance, partnership, or referral program that might be of interest to you and your practice.
Are you looking for a way to begin expanding your practice using the BPO model, well Bill.com maybe just the place to start.
Deliver BPO Services and Maintain Profitability with Bill.com
With the buzz around business process outsourcing (BPO) growing, you may have considered offering or expanding the outsourced bookkeeping and accounting services your firm offers. After all, BPO can drive new, recurring revenue for your practice. But BPO could also mire your staff in manual work that erodes your firm’s profitability.
Bill.com offers a solution that simplifies and eliminates the manual record-keeping activities your staff would have shouldered. As a result, your firm will be able to offer outsourced services without jeopardizing profits. This article discusses how Bill.com works, the benefits to ProAdvisors, and the logistics of getting you and your clients on Bill.com.
How Bill.com Works and Delivers Time and Cost Savings
Bill.com automates the process of paying bills and receiving customer payments. The figures below show the typical tasks in paying bills and receiving customer payments, and how Bill.com simplifies them and deliver time and cost savings for you and your clients.
How Bill.com Benefits ProAdvisors, Accountants and Business Consultants
Bill.com helps you offer pragmatic, outsourced solutions that drive quantifiable efficiencies for you and your clients. Some of the specific benefits include:
- Fulfill a client need without incurring significant overhead: You can replace your clients’ manual works with a solution that automates and streamlines the process.
- Secure recurring revenue and lock in more profitable tax and advisory services: Outsourced services bring consistent revenue and could supplement seasonal tax revenue. Moreover managing client records can make your practice “sticky”; clients will be more likely to come to you for high-value services. And because Bill.com makes you efficient, you will have the time to work on those higher value services.
- Manage your time: Bill.com alerts you to pending and overdue payments and activities. You know what needs attention first, and can prioritize your time.
- Gain insights into your clients’ practices: Bill.com gives you visibility into client payments and receivables practices. You can identify inefficiencies, recommend better practices, and earn a reputation for practical advice.
- Build trust: Clients may worry about losing control over payments. With the full payment audit, you can provide proof that you only pay bills they approve.
- Earn CLE credit: The Bill.com training program will help optimize your and your clients’ use of Bill.com -- and you earn 7 CLE credits.
What It Takes to Use Bill.com and How to On-board Clients and Train Them
Bill.com gives you tools, including sales collateral and a return on investment (ROI) calculator, to help you sell Bill.com to client. Once they agree to use Bill.com, you can on-board them in under an hour. On-boarding consists of you initiating the first sync to bring clients’ chart of accounts from QB/QBO to Bill.com. After that, you and your clients can start using Bill.com.
Since Bill.com operates in the cloud, all that you and your clients need is an internet connection and a browser to use it. Training for customers is minimal since Bill.com is intuitive and you can expose only the features that users will be using, keeping it simple for them. Nevertheless, we offer a library of videos to get users started with Bill.com if they want them.
For you and your staff who serve as administrators for clients’ accounts, or clients users who function as administrators or want more control over the application, Bill.com offers certification and training, and CLE credits for accountants.
Summary
Bill.com is simple to use and can dramatically transform your clients’ back-end processes. It also is an outstanding Advisor Alliance to grow your the profitably of your professional practice.
For more information, or to start a new trial visit Bill.com's advisor alliance website at: http://www.bill.com/for-accountants/
(Editor's note: I want to thank Bill.com for the time they gave me during Cloud Summit 2014 in developing the content for this edition of Advisor Alliance.)