How to Create an Effective Onboarding Checklist for Accounting Clients

You are showing you have done this with clients before and have the steps under control. These simple steps help you instill complete confidence in your clients. For every common issue in the onboarding process, there is an effective solution.

To summarize, the client onboarding process in accounting firms is a dynamic process that lays the foundation for a successful business relationship. It involves several key steps, including gathering client information, setting expectations, accessing previous accounting records, and implementing workflow management tools. This helps ensure a smooth and organized onboarding process for new clients.

In other words, your onboarding experience is generally the first impression a client has working with you. Plus, with a well-organized client portal, you’ll be able to streamline your work, reduce back-and-forth communication, and provide a better overall service to your bookkeeping clients. As accounting professionals, engagement letters should always be used to define the scope of the engagement and to confirm the terms and conditions. It’s a good idea to have an attorney involved in the creation of your original engagement letter, then you can tweak it as necessary. Two clauses to keep in mind when deciding what to include are a governing clause (defining which state’s laws you are governed by) and a contractor clause if your firm uses any contract labor.

In any system for your accounting firm, you should be seeking ways to improve. In Karbon, you can create a work item from your client onboarding template. The proposal or agreement outlines what you will deliver to what are miscellaneous expenses definition and meaning your client. When signed and agreed to, you have the green light to get started with your onboarding process.

1. Financial Cents helps make this easy for you through its accounting workflow templates that you can use straight away or customize to your new client’s needs.
2. Onboarding helps integrate your new client into your firm’s culture, processes and systems.
3. If you allow the transaction to occur, then part ways, you run the risk of distractions coming up and further delaying the first step.
4. Creating a system that automates these common tasks and requirements can lead to huge time-savings.
5. For a new client’s onboarding, accessing previous accounting records is a critical step.

Your Accounting Onboarding Checklist for a Smooth Client Intake

While your team should have a proven process for communication and ongoing work, you need to make sure you’re listening for pains from the client. During the call, you’ll want to pull out any questions or concerns that may be lingering. Most importantly, you want to provide a glimpse into where things are going. Let them know what is going to happen next and remind them of the roadmap you’ve shared before. When the meeting is booked, try to use Zoom or another video conferencing tool to have some face to face time with the client.

What is client onboarding?

Best practices for all aspects of the client lifecycle, including client onboarding, communication, collaboration, training and meetings. The sales conversation is where you will begin extracting key information about the client’s business that will help for a smooth onboarding. It’s useful to list out in bullet points the stages of the onboarding process. Give them a visual, like a checklist, of the steps that need to happen in order for onboarding to complete. Everyone loves a consistent experience, one that meets their expectations each and every time. Finding ways that you can offer the same level of excellence to your clients, with every account, every interaction is the best way to continue to build your brand reputation and client trust.

Communication is critical to efficient onboarding

Plus, with the ability to create your digital assets branded invoices and customize your billing approach, you can tailor your services to meet the unique needs of each client. Once your client is in Copilot, and you’ve sent them a link (or email notification) to create their own personal portal, it’s time to send them a contract. The foundation of a tech-enabled approach to onboarding is with a white-label client portal, like Copilot. With Copilot, you can create a branded client portal that matches your firm’s identity, making a professional first impression on your new clients. You need to define the terms of your engagement, with the scope and deliverables determined by your client’s goals and your firm’s abilities. As you improve the efficiency of your firm with an objective of growing your revenue, there’s one key process you should be looking at above all others—client onboarding.

This list is not comprehensive but can be a starting point to build upon and customized to each new client. The key here is to be transparent about what is included in their service and what isn’t. You also need to develop an accurate estimate or a range for the project so that there are no surprises. It is important to discuss this with the client as well as the process for adding irs form w other services. Maybe they created helpful visual data presentations to help them understand their portfolio value or financial reports. According to an Accountemps survey, two of the most common misconceptions about accountants is that they only do taxes and only focus on crunching numbers.

Linking your client’s bank accounts and credit cards to QuickBooks Online is easy. Simply provide all necessary account information when connecting their bank feeds. This allows you to establish a connection between QuickBooks and the client’s bank account to streamline and automate data entry. Easy-to-use accounting software like Jetpack Workflow can significantly simplify your accounting firm’s operations. Information and documentation on prior year tax returns are another essential checklist item. This way, you can get a better picture of how previous accounting systems handled inventory and how your accounting firm should now go about it.

However, if your employees juggle multiple clients, your lists can get mixed up. Another drawback of this method of maintaining your checklist is that you cannot insert hyperlinks or connect them to other documents. You can keep separate files for each client, which can help when cross-checking the documents you receive with the ones you don’t have yet. You need to gather all this documentation to verify the payment of previous invoices and identify any invoices that need to be cleared in the next accounting cycle.