Tax Planning Sin 1: Failing to Offer Tax Planning Services to Every Client

Industry data shows that approximately 10% of practices are currently providing tax planning services to their clients. What is unknown is the actual percentage of clients in those practices that actually receive a tax planning service. A good guestimation would be between 10-15%. Even for practices currently providing tax planning services, there has been a reluctance to offer it to all clients. Instead, there has been the tendency to only offer it to a few selected clients that seem ideal tax planning candidates. 

This second guessing of what clients want, and don’t want, is under servicing clients and costing the practice money. This is equivalent to your local Woolworths supermarket only promoting and selling Indian food products to Indians or German beer to Germans. Clearly, this doesn’t make any sense. So, when accountants do this to their clients, once again it doesn’t make any sense.

This provides an opportunity for those tax planning practices to dramatically increase their revenue. All they need to do is offer the tax planning service to 100% of their clients and inevitably the numbers of tax plans sold must increase. Good intentions are a start, but to be effective practices need a client communication plan to promote their tax planning services to every client.