Stephanie Leon of Results Accountants' Systems presented a free, interactive workshop on AccountingWEB in which she explained several useful measures that you can take to ensure that your clients are well-served and content.Among her suggestions are:Step 1: Commit yourself to the projectStep 2: Assess where the business is at in terms of the present service levelStep 3: Determine your customers' needsStep 4: Set performance standardsStep 5: Identify the moments

So you’ve decided it is time to add a marketing director to your staff. Before you bring your new marketing director on board there are a few things to take into consideration. Currently, the shelf life for an accounting firm marketing director is about 13 months. The following might help you keep your marketing director beyond the current attrition rate.Make sure that the consensus among your partner group is one of a positive nature when it comes to bringing this individual into your firm. While not everyone will agree, it’s important that the majority do.

Rex Gatto, Ph.D., psychologist, business lecturer, and counselor, provided us with insights into the world of Pay for Performance.

Reprinted with permission by the Financial Management Network.by Leonard W. Vona, CFE, CPA Director of Internal Audit for the Research Foundation, State University of New YorkThe potential for fraud during any phase of the purchasing cycle is enormous. To detect fraud warning signs and save your organization untold dollars, add these steps to your next procurement audit: Focus your sample on the 3-5 year history of a particular purchase. What trends do you see and - more importantly - don't see?

Corporate America has always welcomed the experienced decision-maker who can take a new task, assess the situation quickly, find the problems and weaknesses, and make lemonade out of what appears to be a lemon.Today's climate of Internet and technology start-up companies is providing a ripe field for the savvy executive to harvest. New companies spring up every day, able to "open the doors" of business by simply creating a web presence.

Ask any practitioner where the vast majority of new clients come from and they say “Word of Mouth” or “Referrals.”We all know that referrals cost you next to nothing to get and usually (if a good existing client has referred them) the new client is of relative good quality. The $64,000 question is “what systems do you have in place to make sure the referral happens?”Before we look at the systems let’s look at the importance of referrals to your practice. To quantify how you can grow your practice through referrals, consider your existing client base.

More than half of US corporations are ill-equipped to protect their trade secrets, and do not have an established protocol to ensure their protection, according to a just-released survey of 200 top trial lawyers by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the American Bar Association.Survey respondents estimated that 40-70% of company records are kept in electronic form, but the security and accessability to that information is questionable.

Does this sound familiar? You’ve tried it all – classroom training, internal training, books, videos – and still your staff are fumbling with their new software. They KNOW there are easier ways to complete their tasks, yet they say they’re so busy there’s no time to learn how to do things more efficiently. Why is this happening? It’s not because you’ve been unwilling to provide training, it’s not because your staff doesn’t want to learn.As a consultant, I have the opportunity to observe computer users at many different organizations.

This is the fourth in a series of editorials by Results Accountants' Systems.MAKING YOUR PRACTICE MORE PROFITABLEAccounting businesses are mature industry. There is intense competition for clients which is typical when the principal services offered in the industry have a very generic look and feel about them. Clients are able to drive prices down because switching costs are relatively low.Accounting firms have very similar cost structures to their intra-industry competitors.