Accountants face delays from clients who procrastinate or fail to provide necessary information for tax returns and bookkeeping. This leads to potential fines and errors. Although deadlines are stated in an engagement letter, many clients overlook them. The solution is to send reminder communications via email, ensuring clients don't miss deadlines. Clients are willing to pay $10 monthly for this service.
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Accountant
The biggest pain point is clients who procrastinate on giving us information we need and/or not giving us everything that we need in order to help them with preparing their tax return or with bookkeeping.
Kelly
Value Reasoning
The reminder will be short and concise, and will be much harder to ignore or miss.
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Current process
We ask the clients to provide us all documents by a deadline, so that we have plenty of time to look them over and ask for any additional info we might need. We ask them in our engagement letter which we send out at the beginning of each year.
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Flaw in current process
People might not read the engagement letter to see the deadline
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Impact
If I don't have every piece of info that I need then I am unable to prepare a tax return accurately or prepare the client's books, and this may lead to fine and penalties, errors, and improper reporting.
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Attempts at solving
We have tried emphasizing the deadline in the letter by bolding the text so that people will be able to see it more easily, but people who don't read the letter still won't see it
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Ideal solution
The ideal solution is to send a reminder to clients through another letter as well as through some other form of communication, like an email, so that even if they didn't see the deadline the first time, they will see it with the reminder.
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Value reasoning
The reminder will be short and concise, and will be much harder to ignore or miss.
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Challenge: Clients often lack motivation to provide necessary information, leading to delays and incomplete submissions.
Challenge: Ineffective communication can result in clients misunderstanding what information is needed and by when.
Challenge: Clients may hesitate to share sensitive financial information due to concerns about privacy and data security.
Challenge: Clients may be resistant to using new technology or platforms designed to streamline information sharing.
