How to Kick-start a More Efficient Tax Season with CRM
Posted by Sarah Templeton on Mon, Jan 16, 2012
Tired of working out of that infamous box in your tax partner’s office? Think there must be a better way to stay organized during busy season?
There is – and it all begins with a customer relationship management system.
For Isabella Lunsford, CPA and tax partner at Templeton & Company, using the CRM system within TCPM has changed the way the firm manages its tax engagements forever.
Gone are the days of digging through the bottom of a pile of tax returns to answer a client’s call. Gone are the days of having a staff member confused about their priorities. And gone are the days of not knowing the status of a certain client’s return.
“Where in the past we’ve had to get with our staff members and find out what they were working on, what they had, how much they had to work on, now the system will tell us all this,” Lunsford said. “We are more organized and more accurate in terms of what is here and not here.”
Lunsford said the system serves as a “live to-do list,” which for her, is the best part of being automated.
“You know what’s here, what needs to be worked on and what order it needs to be prioritized, compared to the old method of seeing the box and the returns stacked on the desk not knowing what’s there, what needs to be done and what needs to be done first,” she said.
Once an active engagement is created, everybody on staff goes through a prescribed series of steps that includes an analysis of proper review and approval – but the system has been designed to handle exceptions as well. For instance if a staff member is sick or leaves the firm, the CRM function of TCPM will help remind you to efficiently re-assign that work. It will also address a delay on the client side.
CRM works not only as a scheduling and dispatching system, but it sets alerts that provide automated insight on due dates and workload so upper level management can make a proactive decision before work gets backed up. Timing triggers events that will respond to set values that in turn respond to predicted bottlenecks.
For firms who have multiple offices, using a CRM system provides integration between locations.
“We are able to assign work to other offices and because everything is electronic with a seamless one firm outlook from the cross practice perspective, it was all right there,” Lunsford explained. “They could go through the process and know what was going on without even picking up the phone.”
Lunsford has been using CRM since 2007 and once she learned the system and worked with the firm’s IT staff to make some changes, the rest of the tax team was trained all at once. While it has taken a good year to understand and take advantage of all the powerful functionalities the system offers, the benefits have been substantial.
“It has taken about half the amount of time for searching and follow up,” she said.