Although the digital revolution has made it possible to connect with clients like never before, most businesses aren’t using the internet to their full advantage. It’s easy to roll out a cookie-cutter website, but that doesn’t mean your page will attract or engage your target audience.

Making your website stand out isn’t as difficult as you may think. Here we will explore eleven common sense tips for accounting website design.

1. Be Entertaining

Most of your readers are coming to you because they don’t understand accounting concepts and can’t do it alone. A boring block of text filled with accounting jargon will not hold their interest. Consider using fun illustrations to help explain the more complex aspects of accounting, or making comparisons to humorous real-world situations. This will demonstrate your expertise in an entertaining way.

2. Test Everything

Test suites and web analytics are a must for ensuring that your marketing efforts are effective. Be aware that strategies that are successful on your main site may not work for mobile sites, so everything must be tested.

3. Be Flexible

Sometimes you’ve got to be willing to throw your original web design concept out the window and try something new. If an aspect of your website isn’t working, you may find that moving things around, removing certain features, or adding new ones could make a big difference in generating web traffic and in user engagement.

4. Customer Service is a Core Value

If you’re not providing good customer service there’s nothing your website can do to pick up the slack. Follow up on web inquires with 24 business hours. Check for messages every day in case a desperate client is trying to reach you over your website. And get your shipping out on time. Don’t leave your clients waiting for tax documents and organizers. It’s bad enough to keep clients waiting if you haven’t gotten around to their account yet, but it’s far worse to have done the work and then not bothered to ship it. I know you’re busy, especially around tax time, and putting off shipping is a seductively simple way of shaving a few minutes off the clock, but don’t do it. Remember… a job isn’t done until it’s shipped!

5. Keep Visitors Engaged

Encourage visitors to participate by using surveys, asking questions, ore even hosting a Q&A session with one of your senior accountants. And don’t be too disappointed if you receive few comments on your blog itself. By posting a shorthand version of your blog on Twitter and using embeddable comments, you can take social media comments and embed them directly into your website.

6. Understand Your Audience

The key to turning your page’s visitors into paying clients is taking the time to get to know your audience, make sure that they have a good experience, and provide them with the information that they need. Web analytics, test suites, and user engagement will all provide clues about your audience.

7. Quality Content

Is your page’s content useful and helpful? Blog posts and articles should be more than the means for keyword stuffing. If it’s not relevant and informative, it shouldn’t be on your page.

8. Maintain Workflow

Don’t let anything on your site detract from a user’s ability to keep browsing. A video clip, for example, should not freeze up the rest of your page as it loads or plays, and any hyperlinks should open in a new tab so that workflow is never interrupted.

9. Prioritize

Don’t let small hiccups get in the way of actually delivering your products and services. Services like Github can help you prioritize which bugs and website to-dos by importance so that you don’t get distracted from taking care of your clients.

10. Be Consistent

Although small changes are good, there’s no need to constantly re-invent your accounting website design to attract consumers. Being true to yourself and your main message will supply a more loyal following.

11. Be Yourself

It’s OK to glean ideas from competitor sites, but don’t become a clone. Making your CPA website about your firm’s unique personality will yield more success.

by Brian O’Connell

I once worked at a newspaper; typesetting and designing the ads. Our daily task as ad setters was simple, complete every ad, proof, publish and then we could go home.

Productivity was EVERYTHING at this job.

The newspaper business is not terribly forgiving about missing press time. This work had to be done; all of it, every day, without exception. If my co-worker was out, I was responsible for completing all the ads for the paper regardless of how long it took.

Needless to say after my first 14 hour day I realized the importance of efficiently navigating my way around my computer and local network.

I researched every shortcut key for every program, increased my word per minute typing skills but something big was still missing.  I attributed a large part of my loss of time to navigating my computer and local network.  In order to remedy this I looked for programs that would allow me to cut corners, eliminate time spent using my mouse, and needless time scrolling through massive client folder databases.

My solution was a mix of learning just about every possible keyboard shortcut known to a windows environment along with installing 3 very useful programs.  The programs are as follows:

WinSplitRevolution: A small utility which allows you to easily organize your open windows by tiling, resizing and positioning them to make the best use of your desktop real estate.

Launchy: indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes. The real power of this program is within personal customization of the built in plugins; calcy, controly, gcalc, runner, verby and weby

Launchy is by far my most used program.  Learn the basics of the program then dive into some advanced features.  For instance if I want to view a site style, I simply press “ALT + SPACE” then type “site” press “tab” type the style # and press “enter.” That’s 11 key presses instead of opening a browser, finding a shortcut to the style viewer, and then typing the style #. This same type of shortcut I have setup for the share drive, clients, styles folder, logos folder, stock images folder, ftp passwords, design team files, team files and the list goes on and on.

Learn to love this program.

DisplayFusion: UltraMon is great too, but this is even better. Unlike the freeware we’ve already talked about DisplayFusion is going to cost you a few bucks, but it’s more than worth paying for. The cost will depend on the number of licenses you need, but the base cost is $25 for a single computer. DisplayFusion is a utility for multi-monitor environments, designed to increase productivity and unlock the full potential of multiple monitors.

Of course I’m assuming here that you have multiple monitors. You DO have multiple monitors… right?

Give these programs a try and let them grow on you.  All three are hardly noticeable at first install, but within a short month or two you’ll be wondering how you ever lived without them.  There’s seemingly endless customization with all of these programs so if you have any questions about them just refer to the help pages for each app.

by Erik Thomsen

by Brian O’Connell

People want the ability to use their computer and remotely get to their data from any location. This is more than possible for contemporary websites for accountants with the use of web-based software applications.

Cloud-based applications are very flexible. Further, software applications that support the field of accounting and auditing are actually well-suited for web-based administration.

Accounting businesses ought to integrate accounting solutions into their accounting websites for many reasons. The main reasons are advertising possibilities, decreased expenses, and increased efficiency, and of course (by extension) client retention.

Improving Efficiency
CPA firms frequently get great opportunities to exploit “remote assistance”, either working from home, at the office, or from the client location. Remote assistance using services like Join Me and GoToAssist make it possible to see or even control a clients computer from your home or office!

Clients that need to provide documents or other types of data can be granted access to accounting websites using file transfer systems. Here, the information can be uploaded quickly and securely and is readily available. If you are a CPA Site Solutions customer you have a system called the File Vault that serves this function, but if you’re not there are services like Drop Box that can easily integrated into any website.

These features offer CPA firms the opportunity to generate more revenue by servicing more customers. Accounting websites can and should be used to significantly improve the productivity of accountants, regardless of whether they are working from their home, their office, or remotely from the nearest Starbucks.

Cost Savings
Web based solutions on accounting websites reduce the need for travel as the majority of the work can be done from a workers home or office. Travel expenses can be reduced if not eliminated. This includes transportation, accommodations, and meal expenses. It also reduces the need for the client to provide work space and other work accommodations, such as copiers, printers, and internet access.

For tax, bookkeeping and payroll jobs, clients that own small businesses can share their documents online. Their financials are then available to be updated and/ or accessed as required. Online applications can reduce and sometimes eliminate the need for an in-house staff.

By the way… these savings can be extended to your clients as well. Helping a client reduce the need for accounting staff and delivering services more cheaply and efficiently can significantly reduce their overhead costs and cement customer loyalty.

Marketing Capability
Accounting firms can also benefit in terms of marketing via the internet. The entire global market is at their fingertips. Using modern websites for accountants, everything can be done via the web. It is no longer necessary to meet with clients face to face. CPA firms can use the increased efficiency and lower cost to show their clients how they can save money. This cost savings can be passed on to clients by allowing firms to underbid the competition for work, while maintaining profit margins.

Audit, accounting, and tax services are often being delivered via the web. This is possible through modern technology. Accounting firms that don’t use modern technology and internet-based applications on their accounting websites will eventually be left behind. They will find themselves substantially less competitive as time goes by.

Do You Know How Much Money
Your Website is Making?

Conversion Tracking is the Key to Making Your
Marketing Dollars Pay Real Dividends

For most businesses tracking website conversions is easy.

Most retail businesses and many services can exploit tracking software like Google Analytics that can count every purchase as it occurs, so when calculating metrics like conversion rates and cost per conversion all you need to do is a little long division. Websites for CPAs, unfortunately, can’t track sales. Traffic tracking calculates sales by counting the number of visits to your “Thank You For Your Payment” page and totaling the online payments. The whole process is pretty much automatic. You can simply divide your total sales by your website expenditures and get instant feedback on your website’s ROI.

This doesn’t work with websites for CPAs. Tracking traffic is useless for calculating ROI unless the sale occurs over the web.

Selling professional services isn’t like selling retail goods. When websites for CPAs lure new clients the lead usually come in over the phone. There’s no way a website can track these types of hits so most high end professional services; doctors, lawyers, architects, etc.; need to find other solutions for calculating ROI.

I’m not saying that there’s no reason to track the traffic on these websites. Analyzing traffic patterns on your website can help you glean a lot of important information about who your visitors are, what they want, and where they’re from, but that’s a post for another day. For purposes of figuring out your conversion costs even the best websites for CPAs can’t provide accurate tracking information in regards to conversions.

The only way accounting firms and other professionals have to calculate their ROI on their websites and other marketing campaigns is to do things the old-fashioned way. Back in the old days we called it “conversion tracking”.

On it’s surface conversion tracking looks easy, but it’s actually very difficult to implement because it usually means breaking bad habits and replacing them with good ones.

I don’t need to tell you that breaking bad habits is hard. Make it clear to your staff that you expect them to to take the new procedures seriously.

Conversion tracking takes place during the sign up phase.

When you first fill out the client’s contact sheet you need to ask, flat out, where the client heard about you and why he decided to call. Add this information directly to the client contact file and record it separately in a notebook specifically for that purpose. Once you have this information determining an websites for CPAs ROI is easy.

Your staff is going to balk. Asking these questions can be awkward and it can be hard to impress on employees the importance of proper conversion tracking. Be patient, but be firm. There can be no mistake that this is now an important part of their jobs.

The vast majority of your clients won’t hesitate to answer these questions, and most of the ones that don’t will have honestly forgotten who or what referred you. A few gentle probes will usually shake something loose.

“Were you referred by a friend? A co-worker? Did you find me on the web?”

This technique has a huge advantage over the automated techniques enjoyed by online retailers. Over time the information you gather is much more useful. By taking advantage of Conversion Tracking you not only determine the effectiveness of websites for CPAs, you can determine the conversion metrics of all your marketing campaigns.

The first point of contact with potential prospects for most firms these days are professionally designed CPA websites. These sites need to establish a lasting impression of your practice.  A website markets for you behind the scenes and around the clock but it calls for persistence to manage your online content so that it’s always fresh.

You also need prospects to come across your business in the search engines. This means your website should be listed high enough that your practice is visible.

Properly managing CPA websites takes a lot of diligence, and not many accounting professionals or their staffs have the kind of spare time it takes to do the job right. One excellent method to compensate for this lack of time is to work with a student to help you with your online marketing. College students and new webmasters are always looking for opportunities to try out their web marketing skills. Some tips are below to help you work with an intern for your CPA website. They can help you with creating and managing effective online marketing strategies.

Intern Experience

It is a good idea to look for potential candidates who have existing online marketing skills. This includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) experience. It isn’t an impossible task to improve your search engine results. However, it takes a lot of effort and you must be patient. You must consistently generate fresh content for your CPA website. Ask your candidates for samples of their writing. The best candidates will have articles written about accounting and the field of financial management. This way you don’t have to spend time teaching them the fundamentals of your business.

Your current clients see you as a dependable professional. It is equally important to project this to your prospects as well. Your intern does not directly work with your clients. However, their work represents you and your practice directly. You should carefully examine their work and make sure that it is of sufficient quality to represent you online.

Your intern needs only a basic set of math skills to be able to create and monitor performance metrics for your website. An understanding of spreadsheets and basic statistics is all that is needed to measure the effectiveness of the marketing programs over time.

Working with Your Team

You should work with your intern as you work with your permanent office staff. This applies even though your intern may only be a temporary employee. You want to think about how compatible they will be with your permanent staff because they will all be working together. You want to be sure there is seamless communication between the intern and your staff, so that the site content they produce can properly reflect your firm’s image.

Online Effectiveness

Because search engine programs can take several months to produce real, visible results, it is a good idea to let the intern make suggestions on SEO and SEM programs. This is especially true once they start to make valuable contributions to your CPA website. Interns can make substantial contributions to your practice’s bottom line, so it is a good idea to keep all options open.

As soon as the first marketing campaigns come to completion, you may decide to continue working with your student beyond the original scope of the project. Business School students and aspiring webmasters can continue to bring value to your practice’s online success, especially in the competitive atmosphere of CPA websites.

Getting organized, bringing in outside help, pledging to relax on a regular basis – will help every CPA get through busy season with less stress and improved productivity.

It’s common for accounting professionals to both yearn for and dread accounting busy season. Everyone enjoys the extra income that’s part of the package, which can fund their company for the rest of the year. However, plenty of CPAs ignore their accounting websites and other key marketing channels from January to April, and they allow their health to deteriorate. Even taking into account the boost in the bottom line that comes with it, all too often, busy season ruins a practice.

To get the most out of busy season and leave the stress behind, successful CPA firms follow these 5 steps:

1. They Don’t Skimp on Accounting Websites

During busy season, time is money. An hour here or there printing out documents or filing paper returns can really add up, preventing firms from reaching revenue goals.

Keeping the office simple is the name of the game, which is why well-prepared accountants use accounting websites to increase efficiency. Consider the following, all of which help firms work smarter:

• Client portal
• Online tax organizer
• Pay by credit card
• E-newsletter
• Frequently asked questions page
• Map and driving directions

2. They Tidy Their Offices and Touch Up Their Accounting Websites

Disorganization in the workplace (and at home for that matter) really adds to people’s stress. Especially in a business like accounting, piles of papers and files quickly get out of control, spilling all over the floor and teetering on the edges of crowded desks. And what happens when a client calls and the CPA can’t find their information easily? Even when they’re confident they can locate any piece of paper quickly, they’re foolish to take a chance with client data.

Accountants who prepare for busy season before the first of the year are more relaxed and more effective in their client work. These CPAs arrange files, update their accounting websites, and clean out inboxes. And they’re careful to “hibernate” any projects that can wait until after April 15th by placing them out of the way where they won’t add to the general chaos.

Once work starts coming in, it helps to spend a couple minutes at the end of every day to tidy up the office. Folks who do this report feeling empowered and well-prepared for the next day.

3. They Don’t Put Up with Trouble Clients

It’s part of the package to have some clients who just make life miserable for the whole staff. These difficult folks might take issue with every single fee, leave nasty comments on firms’ accounting websites, or just come across as highly unpleasant and antisocial.

It may be hard to do, but it’s okay to fire obnoxious clients, and smart CPAs terminate these relationships. The time accountants waste dealing with these troublemakers is better spent working with the clients who are easy and problem free.

4. They Hire Outside Help

Historically, accountants have been the biggest administrators. They answer e-mails, handle returns, manage their accounting websites, field phone and website inquiries, and other tedious tasks. Wouldn’t it save time to hand all this off to someone else?

Busy season is the perfect time to hire interns. Many interns are fresh from schooling and more than happy to get real-life office experience. Both accountants and interns benefit – and busy season can become much more manageable.

5. They Aren’t Married to the Job

During busy season, many accountants work 10, 12, 14 hours a day – or more. But not all of them. The wisest CPAs don’t allow the job to take over their lives, even when workload is at its height.

Take a page from their playbook. Instead of burning the candle at both ends, set a fixed time at the end of the day when you power down your computer and go home – no matter what. A few more hours of sleep will greatly enhance your mood and boost your efficiency.

And remember to tell your clients that you can’t work miracles. They should know that they MUST hand in their materials by a particular date or you’ll be filing for an extension on their behalf. Period.

If you’re an accountant facing busy season, remember to take time for yourself. Once a week, forget about accounting websites, tax organizers, and dissatisfied clients – and relax. Go to a film, take a bubble bath, or make a date with your pals. When you do, you – and your business – will not just survive, but thrive!

As CPAs, we serve the unique needs of governments and non-profits, individuals, and businesses from every corner of the private sector. They all turn to us to help them resolve some of their most complex, vexing, and urgent issues.

Of course, clients retain CPAs because of our experience and expertise in knowing how to save them money and grow their assets, but most CPAs also know that there’s something more that underlies all of this.

Our clients entrust us to provide solutions to some of the biggest problems they face because we offer them peace of mind. CPAs are paid to be flawlessly organized, trustworthy, and responsible in resolving client issues, and equally so in handling sensitive client information.

Why We Need Client Portals

The unique level of responsibility that comes with acting as stewards of our clients’ most sensitive information has made the use of secure, Web-based client portals an absolute necessity for all CPAs. Client portals allow a secure, streamlined, and customizable alternative to email for the transfer and storage of sensitive information, as well as an interactive platform in which to engage and collaborate with clients.

Since their introduction, client portals have been used to:

• quickly and easily transfer large files, including QuickBooks files;
• a way to receive client source documents and make completed tax returns available to clients;
• invoice clients and collect credit card payments; and
• provide a real-time environment in which to update payroll information for payroll clients.

The Question of Security

Using a password-protected client portal is tantamount to having a safety deposit box for each client’s files that only the client and his CPA have a key to. Many client portals include the same impressive 128-bit SSL encryption used by banks and other financial institutions to ensure that only authorized individuals have access.

Portals are also extremely reliable, usually offering the assurance of network uptime in excess of 99.9%.

CDs and Thumb Drives: A Real Advantage?

The transfer of traditional hard copy files to digital media has been in practice for years, and it’s a great way to reduce storage space, save cost, provide an environmentally responsible alternative to paper files, and add redundancy for backup purposes.

However, digital media of this kind has always had the same intrinsic flaws: information on hard drives, CDs, and thumb drives cannot be easily accessed or updated by individuals in different locations.

And because most email won’t allow more than 10 MB of data to be transmitted, larger files stored on CD or thumb drives have had to be sent by courier. This has meant a lot of extra expense and often unacceptable delays, not to mention the inherent security risk.

Due to these limitations, digital media has NOT been a great improvement from the archaic paper filing systems used years ago.

But with client portals, both the client and his CPA have immediate access to files anywhere in the world, as well as the ability to make real-time updates.

Client Portals Get Rave Reviews

Since most clients are familiar with Web-based systems – taking advantage of similar systems that have been in place for years to review bank statements and pay invoices –  they are quick to embrace and adapt to the use of client portals when working with their CPA.

In fact, they are so widely used now that many clients have come to expect client portals and show a strong preference for them over more archaic and less secure methods of payment, data transfer and storage, and real-time collaboration.

Find more accounting information, like details on how to become an accountant and CPA requirements, on AccountingEDU.org.

This month, we’ve added three new features to your Site Manager to make it faster and easier for you to make changes to your site.

Customizable Header Images

It’s now a snap to swap out the stock photography image on the page header to something that reflects you and your firm. Click on a page in your Site Map, and click on the header at the top of the page. A box like the one at the right will open. Select Custom Image from the Header Style drop-down and select or upload the new image.
Page Settings Tab

The new Page Settings tab, found on the far left of each page in the Site Manager, eliminates the need to back out to the Site Map to change page titles or header images.  This allows you to easily alter the page titles that appear in your navigation bar.

Upload Files Button

It’s always been easy to upload image files to include in your website. From any page within the Site Manger, just click on the More Options link at the top of your screen, and select Upload Files. Click on the Files folder on the left, and upload your file. This works with PDFs, .DOCs, and almost any other file type you can cook up.

Looking for a way to make tax season simpler? Our Tax Organizer just got its annual makeover and is ready for the 2011 tax season.

This next-generation Tax Organizer is a dynamic web application that allows your clients to organize their tax information online, saving you time when preparing their taxes. You and your clients can securely access your client’s tax information anytime from anywhere, eliminating the time and expense involved in mailing paper organizers.

As always, the fully customizable Organizer offers you a secure way to catalogue your clients’ documentation and returns from year-to-year. Encouraging your clients to use the Tax Organizer can save you both the hassle of driving around town to deliver paperwork, and saves you the hassle of having to manually enter their information into your tax software.

Interested in learning more about the Tax Organizer? Click here to watch a video.

Most CPA and accounting practices have embraced email as a reliable and safe form of communication. This is unfortunate since email isn’t really all that safe. A lot of accountants are actually using email inappropriately and putting their client’s private data at risk by posting stuff like tax returns and QuickBooks files to emails. Protect your clients. Never assume that email is a protected way to convey sensitive info. When you send an email to someone it doesn’t go straight to it’s destination. It passes through a dozen or more mail servers, and these mail servers are popular targets with hackers and malware. This arrangement makes email vulnerable to interception by what’s called a “man in the middle” attack, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. These third party servers are completely outside of your control and have no accountability even if they are poorly or incompetently maintained. Even well tended mail servers can play host to Trojans that will quietly forward your emails to a hacker, most likely by posting them to a website.

All it takes is one hacked server along the way to intercept your email, and you’ll never know what happened.

Some email providers offer an added layer of security by encrypting messages, but this doesn’t prevent the file from being intercepted. Encrypted files are extremely hard to open if you don’t know the key, but given time a hacker will be able to get it open. Encryption does nothing to prevent a file from being intercepted.

Don’t get me wrong, email is a very valuable tool for an accounting firm. It’s unrivaled in speed, convenience, and expense. Accountants send hundreds of emails every week and most of these these messages don’t include private files. The problem only rears up when these firms email information that’s considered confidential. If the wrong people get hold of them documents like tax returns can seriously harm a client. Because accounting firms prepare taxes they are considered financial institutions. This actually makes emailing private information a crime. The federal law governing the security of financial is called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. This law provides stiff financial penalties for accounting firms and other financial institutions that fail to adequately protect their client’s data.

For the most part we’re talking about security here rather than privacy. Just be aware that in order to be compliant with the law you need to protect both. Privacy is about protecting your clients’ identities. It’s loosely tied to security in that it’s often considered a subset of authorization, but privacy breaches usually involve a business deliberately selling client information to a direct marketing firm or similar third party. Where privacy is about keeping the door locked, security is about the lock itself. Security is the actual online authentication and authorization protocols that networks use to protect information and the audit system used to verify the overall system’s effectiveness.

The best solution for this issue can be found in most commercially available CPA websites. Document portals are now commonplace. All of the best accounting firms make use of these systems and they are available through almost every CPA website provider.

Portals come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they all have one thing in common. These great tools let you exchange files with clients quickly, easily, and safely. Unlike email a portal transfer encrypts the data and transfers directly from your server to the website’s. This eliminates the chance of your file passing through any third party servers and keeps the chain of information accountable and under your immediate oversight.

Don’t mistake this as a crass sales pitch. If you have a website through CPA Site Solutions than you already have access to a first rate portal system. If you don’t… well, I’m definitely not the only designer selling these features. Frankly, all the best CPA websites furnish a secure transfer system.

What I’m trying to do is recommend that you look honestly at your firms policy on emailing confidential information. If you don’t have a formal policy create one and make sure everyone at your firm knows it. If a client realizes these risks before you adapt your procedures there’s a very high probability you’ll lose them.

If you haven’t already done so stop broadcasting your clients private personal information by email right now. Get a secure portal and USE it.