As accounting professionals, your work days are dictated by deadlines and client expectations. End of year meant scrambling to close the books and hit the 12/31 deadline, then you got a little break to catch your breath over the holidays, and now the craziness of tax season. After that you’ll be catching up on everything that piled on while taxes took your attention, you’ll get another little break to catch your breath, and then rinse and repeat.
This time of year, taxes are probably the only thing on your mind, and if that's what's keeping you up at night, you’re definitely not alone. Your clients’ books are closed out, there’s another big deadline approaching, and with all the questions and forms flying around, there’s not much room to think about anything else.
But as you know, taxes aren’t the only thing your clients need help with. In fact, I’m willing to bet they couldn’t care less about their taxes, just as long as they’re done right and the tax man doesn’t come knocking.
Your clients are busy running their own businesses, and while your head is down working on taxes, they’re knee deep in their own challenges. They’re planning for the weeks, months, and years ahead, wondering whether they should grow headcount, or cut expenses, and how much cash they’ll have on hand along the way. You know their numbers better than anyone else, and they rely on you year-round, even when you’re drowning in tax work, to provide solid advice.
Nearly all of our Clockwork Champion partners tell me they wish they had more hours in the day, especially this time of year. They all want to do more than just taxes for their clients, but they know that great advisory requires a great financial model, and building and updating a quality forecast is no small feat. Doing that for hundreds, maybe thousands of clients across a firm requires a great tech stack.
The reality is that we’ve entered an age where taxes and bookkeeping services are becoming a commodity, and accountants are doing more for their clients. It’s the next level advisory services that clients actively seek, and what sets leading firms apart. Through all this, technology is becoming a massive factor in the growth and differentiation of accounting services.
That’s why we’re partnering with Top 100 Regional CPA firms to empower them to offer the next level advisory services in a scalable way. With Clockwork, clients get custom-built financial models and cash flow forecasts in an instant, which update every hour without lifting a finger. On top of that, they get a collaborative platform to play as many of those “what if” scenarios as their hearts desire. It’s really that easy. The whole process literally takes minutes, and our Xero integration makes it easier than ever.
Our partners are saving an average of 5 hours per client every month by leveraging Clockwork. That doesn’t just mean more time to worry about taxes - it means more time to help clients with their other business challenges, to serve as a trusted advisor, and free up capacity to bring on new clients (yes, even during tax season).
When you connect a Xero client to Clockwork, the AI-powered model automatically creates 5-year financial projections and a 65-week cash flow forecast by learning from the company’s transaction-level historical trends and other client-specific characteristics. You can build custom assumptions and run a variance analysis on as many scenarios as you want, to offer even more personalized solutions. Best of all, Clockwork will handle everything else automatically, so the numbers are always real-time.
Don’t get stuck in old habits, thinking there isn’t time to go above and beyond for your clients. If you're using Xero as your cloud accounting solution, you're already ahead of the curve, and now you can take it to the next level with Clockwork as your forecasting and advisory solution. The days of fumbling around in spreadsheets, building and updating a financial model that your client doesn’t understand, are long gone. When you connect your clients’ Xero accounts to Clockwork, you’ll immediately empower your clients, and open a world of possibilities to grow your firm.