5 Ways YOU Benefit from Helping Your Clients with a Monthly Prediction

Mar 25, 2024 by Roger Scherping




I’ve spent most of my career helping my clients or employers see their financial future because I’ve seen what happens when small companies don’t know what their next 12 months look like, or when they don’t understand the financial impact of their business decisions.

So, for all of you trusted financial advisors, the past two weeks I shared 10 reasons why your clients need a monthly prediction. In case you missed them, here are reasons 1-5 and reasons 6-10.

Now, here are the 5 ways that helping your clients do a monthly prediction will benefit YOU, the trusted advisor:


1. Increase client satisfaction
When I review my clients’ monthly backward-looking financial statements with them, they can’t wait to get to their prediction! The easily understand where they’ve been, but they want to look forward and see where they’re headed.

With a monthly prediction, your clients will be more successful and more comfortable with their numbers. They will anticipate and avoid problems, leverage resources more effectively, make more quantitative business decisions, and feel much better about their business’s future – all because of you!


2. Differentiate your practice
Let’s face it. We’re accountants. We are trained to look backwards. We are taught how to categorize transactions. We can accumulate, analyze, report, and slice historical data every possible way to offer insights into what happened, why it happened, and how it can be improved. We can create reports that give insights that make decision making easier. We can set goals and measure and report historical progress.

No business can be successful without what we do: compiling and analyzing historical financial information. A famous economist highlighted the importance of understanding the past when he was asked, “How many months out should we be able to predict the economy?” and he responded, “Negative one month.”
                                     
But we accountants can do more than just look backwards. By adding a monthly prediction to your practice, you’ll be offering something that too few accountants offer their clients. In fact, you may be introducing your clients to the idea of a prediction. I have shown successful, experienced small business owners the power of a predication and been surprised by their wide-eyed response and hearing them say, “I didn’t even know it was possible to do an analysis like this!”

Stand out from your competition by providing your clients with a monthly prediction.


3. Increase referrals
Satisfied clients lead to warm referrals. Doesn’t everyone appreciate a referral from a satisfied client? Small business owners talk to each other, either directly or as a part of a peer group. Expect that a satisfied client will be happy to refer you to a peer who is struggling or who is dissatisfied with their current trusted financial advisor.


4. Increase client retention
Satisfied clients also stay with you longer. Use a monthly prediction to cement your relationship with your clients. They’ll find that they can’t live without you and your invaluable insights!


5. Grow your revenue
The best way to insert a monthly prediction into your practice is to turn your monthly financial review into a financial planning session: Review the prior month’s financial statements with them, and then work together to update their 12-month financial prediction. When you do a prediction with them every month, you might bill them for an additional hour to create their prediction, or maybe you bill them an additional fee for their prediction. It’s up to you.

How much revenue would you have if you were billing every client for an additional hour every month? This is a very sustainable service you are adding to your list of services.


Those are the 5 reasons why helping your clients do a monthly prediction will benefit you! I hope they resonate with you and that you will incorporate a monthly prediction into your regular monthly services.

After all, who doesn’t want happier and more successful clients and more revenue?



Do a Prediction
                   
How do you help your clients see their financial future? I believe there is not a better service a trusted financial advisor can provide to their clients.
                           
If you’ve ever created a spreadsheet financial model to do a prediction, you know what is involved in capturing history, creating a budget, and determining what other plans the company has and then creating a multi-tab spreadsheet that creates an income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement. You worry about whether there is a formula error somewhere or a bad assumption that drives an erroneous result.
                                                         
The good news is that at ProjectionSmart we’ve eliminated the spreadsheet for you and put it in a quick and simple-to-use online tool! Instead of concentrating on cells and formulas, you just concentrate on your inputs and the results. So ditch your spreadsheet!
                                                           
Here’s a video to show you how easy ProjectionSmart is to use.                                                                               
                                                                                                                       
Try out ProjectionSmart here.

 

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