CPA Trendlines Podcasts

COVID-19 is putting new pressure on CPA firms to close merger deals, even if it means taking a haircut in the selling price, says Robert Fligel, the legendary New York-based CPA firm mergers-and-acquisitions dealmaker, in a new CPA Trendlines Flash Briefing.In this replay of the live web event, a fast-paced 30-minute webinar update, Fligel covers:The Current State of the M&A Market,Best Practices for Sellers, andPitfalls for Buyers and Sellers

Steven Sacks, author of The NEW Fundamentals, interviews David Bergstein, who says a perfect storm of emerging technologies, a competitive shakeout in accounting, and COVID-fueled change is creating a new range of challenges for accounting firms.The good news is: There are more opportunities than challenges. But You need to move fast. The window of opportunity won't last forever."The world is changing," says Bergstein, now chief innovation officer of Brookstone CPA, based in Margate, Fla. Before launching Brookstone, Bergstein was most recently as "cloud evangelist" for Intuit."CPAs are leaning more and more into technology to do what I'll call the back-office work. So advisory services are coming to the forefront."Pointedly, Bergstein notes that non-CPA firms are challenging the CPA business by taking advantage of the newest technologies and offering advisory services."People are calling themselves business coaches, business managers, strategic advisors. There's no licensure required to do that. What those people are doing is utilizing the technology to put the books together. They're not offering audited financial statements."

Creating Customized Client Experiences in the Covid Age, with Eileen Kennedy [in only 30-minutes]Eileen J. Kennedy, CEO of The Kennedy Factor, demonstrates how to create a consistent, exceptional, customized, and memorable client experience in the Age of the Coronavirus.You can thrive for years to come – if you take the Covid Crisis as a call to reinvent your practice.You already have two essential factors in your favor:1) PPP loans showed your clients you play a critical role in their business, and2) Clients need help to achieve a full recovery for future survival and long-term growth.But, you may need to change your mindset and the way you run your practice.In this fast-paced session, you'll learn how to:√ Wow! Your clients and gain more referrals.√ Leverage client feedback to fuel growth.√ Analyze each client for their needs and potential.√ Ask the three questions that reveal hidden needs and desires.√ Implement client retention best practices.√ Build a plan and set it on auto-pilot.√ Reveal the "family trees" of new opportunities.√ Run a client meeting for maximum effect.√ Grade clients into Silver, Gold, and Platinum categories.

And you only have one chance to get it right.  Rick Telberg: Hi, I'm here today with Steve Nelson, CPA of Nelson CPA, managing member. You probably know him best because he's sold five million or more copies of QuickBooks For Dummies. Steve, thanks for joining us today. Steve Nelson: Thanks, Rick. Rick Telberg: The first question is, let's talk about PPP loan forgiveness. What are the surprises? Steve Nelson: One of the big surprises is that as compared to the way we help our clients do the tax accounting for a return, PPP is going to be much more working and require much more precision. A lot of the things that we, and our clients, have gotten used to, and some of the imprecision, that's just not going to be there for the PPP loan application. There's a single accounting period, not multiple accounting periods. It's going to be one application, not something you can amend. 100% of any mistakes you make are going to impact forgiveness, so that's a very, very different type of accounting that we're going to need to do. Rick Telberg: You said people should stop worrying about the forgiveness. Why is that? Steve Nelson: Yes, that's been a real surprise in this program, I think. With the PPP Flexibility Act, Congress created some safe harbors that let people probably wriggle out of losing forgiveness. The other thing is, is that this program was, originally, set up and suited to deal with eight weeks of payroll and a little bit extra for some other things like rent and utilities. When they changed the rules and allow a 24-week window, it means that you might not need to worry about forgiveness due to something like a reduction in headcount. It would be not uncommon to cut half of your employees and yet still have more than enough payroll cost to receive almost total forgiveness. That's going to be a surprise, but it's an important thing for businesses is to stay alert to, and our clients to stay alert to, so that people make it through this pandemic. Boy, I think this is going to be much more like applying for a mortgage application when you're a self-employed person, and the bank maybe doesn't trust you, in terms of the substantiation, or it's going to be dealing with an IRS correspondence audit where you don't just give them a number, but you give them a number and then you back it up with lots and lots of documentation. That's going to be something that is going to surprise many small business PPP borrowers. And it's going to overwhelm a number of those folks, I'm afraid. Rick Telberg: Are we looking at a year-around busy season for the next two years? Steve Nelson: That's an interesting thought. This year we've had the first half of the year the tax season. We're going to have a PPP loan forgiveness application season this year, I think we're going to have an extension season this year. Definitely, this year feels that way. I think our revenues and billing have looked that way. We stalled briefly, when that first nursing home had all the infection, but other than that, we've been very, very solid. Gosh, it's easy to believe that if we have a lot of activity next year, it could look the same way. I hadn't thought of that, but that's a real possibility, I suppose.

With Steven Sacks The NEW Fundamentals Armed with the latest technologies, accountants can do more than ever – faster, better, and cheaper. But too many accountants are missing the biggest opportunity that technology creates, according to Judy Trepeck, long a leading figure in the profession. In her conversation with Steven Sacks, Trepeck, currently senior vice president for customized training at the Michigan state CPA society, outlines how CPAs can go beyond basic accounting to provide more value-added services. It requires experience, talent, ambition, and, maybe most of all, intuition. Trepeck provides a framework for any accountant to ad advisory services to their menu of offerings.

CPA firms are ill-prepared for the new era of virtual, work-from-home partners and staff, according to Bill Reeb, a leading CPA firm practice consultant, in this conversation with CPA Trendlines contributor Steven Sacks.Management at all levels will need to adapt, Reeb says, requiring new processes and procedures.  But more than anything, it requires new metrics of productivity. And, most of all, new habits.After a painful, wrenching re-positioning, Reeb says, firms will emerge stronger, more agile, and more profitable than they were before.Sacks covers a lot of ground with Reeb, including:We have a lot of fictitious mechanisms we use as tools to manage.You can’t get away with what you’ve been doing to manage people in a remote-work environment.We really don’t know how to manage output from our staff in normal times.And it will be more difficult in this era of remote working.Management at all levels will need to adapt.It requires new processes and procedures.But more than anything, it requires new metrics of productivity.And, most of all, new habits.To build the right habits, we'll need the right systems.Systems to create single accountability, with one partner designated as responsible for each staffer.Firms are trying to move toward a more corporate model.Leadership is not clear when it communicates expectations.Firms need to cut the marginal workers and focus on the clients that really matter.Firms and staff need to address the fundamentals of blocking and tackling and listen to what the different generations in the firm have to say.If you want to run a good organization, you have to do the basic stuff.This is an opportunity for firms to take the hard decisions they may have been putting offThey’ll be jettisoning marginal clients.And they should be looking at picking up some good talent.The influx of new talent will allow firms the running room to eliminate some lagging personnel.The result will be a marked shift from the matrix-management model.To a more corporate, top-down, command-and-control management.With more accountability at every level.And firms will emerge stronger, more agile, and more profitable than they were before.

Tax season turns into 'advisory season,' and a whole new niche is born. By CPA Trendlines ResearchGabrielle Luoma, long one of the profession's leading innovators, says the future under COVID-19 belongs to the quick and the smart, in this exclusive video interview with CPA Trendlines.Firms will need to deploy new services to attract new clients who may have not realized that they needed a firm like yours but now do.In this conversation, Luoma talks about what's going on in the business, what's going on with tax season, and what the future holds for CPA firms and the clients of CPA firms.Speaking from her base in Tucson, Ariz., the CEO of MOD Ventures is bringing some of her DNA to regional powerhouse Beach Fleischman through a joint venture. We start by asking abut "when it got real?"She responds, "We truly are affected by the whole world. We have clients in New York.  Things changed for them rather quickly. And when they started changing, we started realizing, 'Oh, my goodness, we're going to have to really buckle down.' In Arizona, we started seeing shutdowns mid-March. That's when things really got real for us because then we started seeing that the businesses that we work with on a regular basis – we're outsourced accounting, so we work with clients weekly, – we knew that we could be in trouble. We started working really hard on transitioning, and seeing what we needed to do to help our clients quickly."

Katye Maxson-Landis: “I have my ethics attorney on speed dial.”With Liz Goldcannabizcpa.pro

By Liz Gold CannaBizCPA.PROA strong network in cannabis, staying up-to-date on all the moving parts of legislation and reading constantly keeps Zach Gordon, CPA well-informed as co-practice leader of Janover LLC’s Cannabis Industry Practice Group. He’s also the chair of the New York State Society of CPAs’ Cannabis Industry Committee and planning the upcoming NYSSCPA’s 2019 Cannabis Conference in conjunction with the Foundation for Accounting Education. He’s taken on these leadership roles as a senior manager in a firm that he’s been at for less than a year.

Green Bits: Helping Cannabis Retailers Stay CompliantWith Liz Goldcannabizcpa.pro at cpatrendlines.comAfter selling his former company, Outright, to GoDaddy in 2012, Ben Curren stayed at the company for a year and then started considering what he would do next. After listening to cannabis-related news and realizing the inventory problems that were emerging due to compliance, Curren got excited to tackle some of the issues plaguing many cannabis dispensaries. As a result, he jumped into the cannabis industry, leveraging his skills and background as an engineer at QuickBooks to create a new technology to help legal cannabis retailers stay compliant.Founded in 2014, headquartered in San Jose, Calif., with another office in Portland, Ore., Green Bits serves more than 1,000 cannabis retailers across 13 states and processes more than $2.7 billion in sales annually through its point-of-sale platform.