What More Can You Do for Your Clients?

Can you provide more to your clients than just accounting?

What a business needs from finance is evolving. There is a key strategic role in business to be played and this requires a different set of skills to the traditional finance back office function. You will be expected to be strategic, focusing on the value of the information you provide, extracting and correlating financial figures to help your client's business make relevant decisions which are closely aligned with their strategic outcomes.

So what skills do you need?

Strategic Analysis and Competitive positioning In order to help your clients perform better than the competition, you need to know how they stack up. You should be able to help your clients build enduring competitive advantage and develop a solid strategic plan. A good strategy enables you to identify where your client's business can create lasting competitive advantage.

Forecasting and Growth After working with your client's business for years, you should an expert in matters relating to their business and marketing position. Coming to terms judgements about their future, which are subject to significant margins of error, requires a particular set of skills. Including an understanding of the principles of forecasting and their application as well as interpretative statistics, short-medium term forecasting and long range forecasting.

Finance Business Partner As a Finance Business Partner, you'll need to have credibility and influence; to be articulate and proactive in your approach and most importantly to have a thorough understanding of where your client's business can create value.

Succession Planning A succession strategy is a necessity for every business as it allows for an orderly exit. It is important that you are able to help your clients select a succession option, value their firm, capitalize future maintainable earnings and capitalize rates.

These skilled combined will make you an irreplaceable accountant for your client's business.