Advisory is not just about the apps but they do help...

In this article, Andrew Coulson FCA talks about how to select apps for advisory and how to use them to support delivering business advice.

Advisory is such a wide topic for discussion that in this article I will just focus on delivering advisory and the apps/process that enables it.

How to select apps for advisory

When we need to find a new “advisory” app we have a process and checklist based on:

• Identify - we have a problem that needs solving
• Discovery - Identify potential apps that solve the problem
• Evaluate (Test)
• Assessment - deploy or reject

We use a checklist to take us through each stage and ultimately grade an app as to its fit.

Identity

This is where we identify the problem we are trying to solve.

In the context of advisory this could be: need to systemise processes to free up partner time and scale.

Discovery

During this stage:

• we source potential apps that may resolve our problem,
• we do some initial due diligence and,
• we weed out those that don’t fit by asking questions such as: does it solve the problem? can it integrate with our systems?

Evaluate

We specify features that are crucial to the solution e.g. must be scalable and secure

We test against our criteria with dummy data to make sure “it just works”

Most importantly if clients are destined to be using it, would they understand what to do and would they use it?

Assessment

Here, we weigh up the pros and cons and then decide whether it will fit or not. If it does we go ahead and implement.

Wiki

It may be that the solution we are looking to solve for advisory delivery is already within our tech stack. We use a Wiki to help us with this such as below:

App Category	App	Use Case	Pros	Cons
Reporting	XXX	Needing a clean report with summary, action plans and a few graphs	Integrates with Xero. Easy to configure and cleanly presented report formats. Graphs and forecasting.	Unable to show MTD and YTD in same table. Doesn't sync daily to Xero.

Delivering Business Advisory

Having the right “advisory stack” and workflow for your accountancy business helps to not only make you more efficient but also deliver an improved customer experience.

In our workflow we have this broken down into a number of themes:

Meeting Scheduling: Calendly / Acuity

Make it easy for clients to book a meeting with you by using apps connected to your calendar. It avoids countless emails agreeing a time.

Internal Communications: Slack / Teams

Chat apps are great for internal communications but also a great opportunity to use them with clients. You can use channels with a client for quick responses or a community channel to foster discussion and push updates.

Advisory: Clarity / The Gap

There are business advisory apps that provide structure to the conversation and there are some terrific apps around. 

Clarity and its 7 Key Numbers model, with action plans and agendas gives one structural model for discussion. You can see in-call the effect of that 1% margin change!

The Gap is an alternative that follows a similar workflow but is based more on pre-work > discuss > record without have a numbers engine attached.

Client Communications: Zoom / Hangouts / Teams / Connect 4

The “new normal” right now is online meetings and these are very efficient. These tools give you the ability to show the client are range of information whether that be metrics from the reporting app or other data from an advisory app (e.g. Clarity, The Gap).

January 2021