USA accountants have raised the bar of services for SMEs

ESS BIZTOOLS presented a webinar where Christian Wielage, CEO of Plan Guru Inc from the USA, offered some informed opinions on the changes that are occurring in the services being provided by USA accountancy firms and other consulting firms that he jointly referred to as being “Fractional CPAs”.

Christian Wielage referred to Summit CPA accounting firm as being the role model for the American accounting industry on the type of services that can be provided to assist SMEs to achieve their business visions.

Last year, Wielage described the Managing Partner of Summit CPA Adam Hale as the “rock star of American accounting”. In this webinar, he referred to Jodie Grundman, the other partner in the firm, as the “Mick Jagger” of the American accounting industry.

Particular points that were highlighted relative to the type of services being provided by Summit CPA to SME clients were:

• Repetitive tasks that can be automated have been automated and replaced with Fractional CFO Services.

• The firm’s policy for clients is to “Appoint us to undertake the CFO work or we will say NO!”

• Their approach is that you hire them to do everything or they would prefer not to accept the appointment.

• Wielage indicated that Summit CPA receives thousands of resumes each year from accountants that want to come and work for them, because this is exciting, cool work.

• Summit CPA have more prospects than they can on-board. They also do lots of training with small businesses and CPA firms. They are not trying to retain their little secrets, they reveal it to people because, through education, they aim to lift the standard of accounting services being supplied to SMEs in America.

• Wielage indicated that the processes that are now being applied to SMEs, which have been spearheaded by Summit CPA, has raised the bar of accounting departments’ services for many SMEs. This has led to greater scrutiny of what comprises various accounts in a profit and loss account. For example, does the terminology “sales” give sufficient information to the leadership team relating to the performance of individual products?

• For an accounting firm to be able to offer this full spectrum of services, they need to do a better job on the accounting side so that they have accurate, timely, sufficiently detailed financial information to be able to assist in projecting the future for their clients.

Further information from the webinar will be released later in the week.

Visit www.essbiztools.com.au to find out more about the services being provided by ESS BIZTOOLS, to assist your firm to emerge just as Summit CPA has.