Service, compliance or convenience
Service, compliance or convenience – which, if compromised, would have the least impact for your clients?
For accountants providing high levels of service, compliance and convenience are a sure-fire way to reach and remain at the top of their field. But if they had to compromise on one area in order to meet a client’s request, which do you think they feel would have less of an impact for their clients?
But firstly, what do we mean by service, compliance and convenience?
Service– the quality of communication between an accountant and their client. For example, service can be how easy queries are for the accountant to resolve and how positive these interactions are for the client.
Compliance– the accountant’s ability to adhere to regulations set by the FRC, IASA, FCA, or in some situations, regulations set by partner solutions such as Xero. Non-compliance will lead to accountants not being able to supply the services required by their clients.
Convenience– The ease with which accountancy processes such as invoicing, payments and foreign exchange activities are to complete from beginning to end.
To get some insight into the accounting world we put the above question to several accountants and you might be surprised by our findings.
Results
Our survey showed that the accountants we asked felt that compromising on compliance would have the least impact to their clients. This initially rang alarm bells– accountants who aren’t compliant?! If accountants are penalised surely that would have a huge effect on their clients. However, as one client explained “it’s not that it [compliance] is not important but more that compliance is expected”. The idea being that there would never be an instance in which an accountant’s compliance is so compromised that it’d impact their clients.
In addition to this our results also showed that service and convenience would have an equally great impact on the accountant’s clients. “In order to offer the quality my clients expect I need to make accounting tasks easy and pleasant for them” – no one will continue to work with an accountant if all they bring is hassle to their day.” Therefore, it’s clear that to remain competitive accountants need to be able to consistently offer superior foreign exchange services via a convenient and ‘easy to use’ method.
We at SATFX took this to heart and designed SATFX Online as a Xero plug-in to support accountants in delivering superior foreign exchange services without compromising on convenience or compliance. To find out more on how you can provide superior service to your clients visit SATFX Online or book a demo. You can also call us on: 01491 577 550.