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Is your customer service sensational?

If it isn't, there's no excuse now!

We had a brilliant day at the AVN customer service conference on 7th October and the conference page now has lots of downloads and resources to help you take action straightaway.

You can read all the entries to the AVN awards and see a video made by Wilds, the AVN Firm of the Year 2008/09, plus get extra goodies from our fantastic speakers, Michael Heppell and Derek Williams. The conference slides are now online too as well as one of the key new tools, the anti-recession toolkit. 

To find out more go the conference page

(Resources from the April 2008 conference are still available here)

Latest News

AVN MEMBER WINS AWARD
29 October 2008 

AVN member Woods Squared have won the 2020 Most Innovative Small Practiioner 2008 Award. The 2020 awards look for success and achievements across the accounting profession with particular emphasis on innovation and creativity. So this is really something to celebrate for Alan, Lisa and Tracy.

Woods Squared receive their award from Jack Charlton

The Woods Squared team receive their award from Jack Charlton

 

 

 
THE PROFESSIONAL WAY TO RESPOND TO THE RECESSION
15 October 2008 

Steve Pipe's latest article for www.accountingweb.co.uk offers clear and simple advice to any accountant - get on the phone to your clients and ask how you can help them. Acting proactively now to strengthen their cashflow will help both them and you, now and in the future. And the first 100 partners to contact Steve will get a full day of training completely free of charge.

Read Steve's article here
NEW GUIDANCE ON BENCHMARK NOW ONLINE
17 September 2008 

3 new guides to using BenchMark are now available. They show you screen-by-screen how to enter client data into BenchMark, how to add your own logo to a report and how to complete an Accountants Report. All in the Free training and guidance section of BenchMark.

Go to the BenchMark page 
THE LATEST SURVEY OF HOW ACCOUNTANTS PRICE
23 July 2008 

A few weeks ago Accountingweb.co.uk published their Fee Survey 2008. The survey makes interesting reading and here are some of the really fascinating findings.
 
As with AVN’s own benchmarking survey of how accountants charge there is a huge variation in prices. For example, for a simple tax return for an employed individual who has some income and dividends the average price is £149, and yet 2% of respondents charge over £400. And whilst 27% of respondents would not do an audit for less than £2,000, 14% are prepared to charge less than £600.
 
How accountants calculate those prices is also varied. Hourly billing still dominates; but only just. 44% of respondents use hourly billing versus 36% that use value pricing. The rest use even more weird and wonderful methods; “what the client paid last time”, the “going rate” or, even worse, being “haggled down by the client.”
 
An interesting finding was that on average firms using value pricing charge 10.5% more than the firms using hourly billing. Although we suspect some respondents may confuse value billing with fixed pricing; value billing is much more than simply giving a fixed price up front and if done well can result in significantly higher prices compared with the old time-based billing.
 

And given that clients hate surprise bills so much, perhaps the most astonishing finding is when it comes to quoting up front. The survey found that 77% of respondents quote up front, but almost half of those firms (49%) end up charging a different amount!

Read the Fee Survey 2008
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
09 July 2008 

The cover story in the July 2008 edition of Accountancy magazine was none other than Steve Pipe's analysis of benchmarking data for 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' report on the UK's accountants.

The report has some surprising findings, not least the huge discrepancy between 'super-successful practices' and those at the other end of the scale. It demonstrates that the key to being successful is to be more proactive ... and shows you how to go about doing just that.

Read Steve's article

This 11 min video was recorded in March 2008. Please excuse the 15 seconds of noise from an aeroplane passing overhead.
How to be proactive - an introduction.

download the next step resources.
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