*This episode is best consumed as a video. Click below to watch the video link.

Welcome to this week’s episode of Your Business Unleashed: Standardizing your service offering. In this episode we’ll expand on Episode #6 where I encourage businesses to transition to a subscription model to achieve scale.  

Some of you may know that I’m on a sub-council of practitioners from around north America for a company called Ignition. They’ve asked me to put together a short presentation on Best Practices for Crafting your Service Library.  

For the benefit of those watching this on Ignition’s website, my name is Clayton Achen and I’m the managing partner at Achen Henderson CPAs in Calgary, Alberta Canada. We’re a CPA firm with several divisions from Indirect, US, Cross-border, and Canadian tax, all the way to advisory, bookkeeping and fractional CFO services. 

OK so the 4 steps to preparing your services library are: 

STEP 1: Brainstorming 

STEP 2: Categorizing, naming, and scoping 

STEP 3: Pricing and billing types 

STEP 4: Import, review, test and iterate 

Let’s get into it. 

STEP 1: Brainstorming 

When I help clients craft their service offering it usually starts with a team meeting style brainstorming session, usually with a whiteboard or if you’re more modern a MiroBoard or a MindMeister. The idea in this step is to figure out all the services that you offer.  

Here are 3 of my best practices for STEP 1: 

1. I highly encourage you to include all members of your team who have any interactions at all with your clients. A lot of micro ideas come out of the word work when you bring your entire team to the table.  

1. No service is too small, write everything down. You want to get very ‘micro’ during this step. I’ll give you some examples of this later. A lot of firms wrap a bundle of services into a single category like ‘yearend’, it may be good to think of all the component parts as separate services, at least for this step 

1. Sometimes it’s best to think in terms of the client’s experience with your firm. What is their path from engagement to deliverable – what are all the potential steps in between? Some examples of this to follow. 

The common stuff that always comes up at accounting firms are: 

• Bookkeeping 
• Corporate tax returns 

• Personal tax returns 
• Advisory 
• Payroll 

But we cannot what about smaller the smaller stuff like: 

• Discovery 

• Integration 
• Payroll setup 
• Yearend tax slips 
• Scanning charge 
• Bookkeeping clean-up 

• Responding to pre-assessment reviews 
• Preparing and filling a special tax form 

STEP 2: Categorizing, naming, scoping  

Categorizing 

We find it easiest to categorize our services into popular service lines or service types and bucket them together in our brainstorm. For example: 

Financial statements could be broken down into  

• Notice to Reader 
• Review 

• Audit 

Bookkeeping could be broken down into 

• Monthly 
• Weekly 
• Annually 

At Achen Henderson, we have 4 different service lines, so we find it helpful to categorize services for each of these service lines. Since Ignition integrates with our accounting software, this makes it super simple for us to track each service to a particular GL code and Category in Xero or QBO. 

Naming 

Here’s a best practice that we like to use in our naming: As you can see from our service list, we have various micro types of ‘advisory’ work, but we include the word “Advisory” for two reasons:  

1. It helps the client clearly identify the different services in your proposal. 

1. We have a lot of services in our library and this helps us stay organized and find them faster; 

Come up with a standard naming structure for your services, for anyone watching this on video, here’s ours. If you’re listening to this you can visit our YouTube channel to see our service list. When you sign up with Ignition, they also give you this service list to help get you started. 

Scoping 

With each of our service mapped out, we can now create a custom service description for each service that makes it super easy for the client to understand exactly what they’re getting.  

Here’s a scoping best practice: We like to write out services descriptions as bullet points under two headings: 

1. “We will – being the exact things we will do. For example, for a yearend we will prepare financial statements, corporate tax returns, up to 3 T5s and file your annual GST return. 

1. “You will” – being the things that we expect our client do to. For example, we expect you to respond to our questions in a timely manner and show up for all scheduled meetings on time. 

This serves two wonderful purposes: 

1. The scope is clearly defined, if something pops up that isn’t contemplated in the agreement, we simply, and quickly, send out a new proposal to cover that service. 

1. It sets the expectations with your client about what you expect their involvement to be. 

Remember, you’re trying to capture the most generic wording for each service here, you can customize the service descriptions when you draft a particular proposal. Don’t get to fixated on deep diving every variation of a service here. 

Excel is a great place to organize all this, and I highly recommend using Ignition’s excel template that they give you at the start of your relationship with them. 

Another scoping best practice that we like: We used to have 3 different bookkeeping sub-services, but it got too difficult to make updates to them because you had to update all three every time. Now we’ve simply landed on a single ‘bookkeeping’ service and in the description, we include Weekly/ Monthly/ Quarterly as a placeholder in the service description and then we edit that service description to only include the relevant placeholder in each individual proposal. See which way works best for you. 

A quick note on terms of service: Some services require custom ‘terms of service’ that are not covered in your company’s ‘general terms of service’. Check out Ignition’s training video on the difference between these two types of terms of service for more details on that. 

STEP 3: Pricing and billing types 

This is the point when you should start thinking about how and when you will bill your services. Ignition has a load of great billing types; they’ll pretty much suit any situation you could think of for billing.  

You can choose from a lot of options like: 

• Automatic up-front billing 
• Manual on-completion billing 
• Automatic weekly, monthly, quarterly, or future billing 

• % of total up-front deposits.  

For example, we charge a flat rate for basic corporate yearends, so we can attach that to the service.  

You can also choose what your price type will be. You can choose to bill: 

• By the unit (hour, day, or even by the chicken – if that’s how you get paid) 
• Fixed price 

• Pricing Range 
• Or ‘included’. We use included for things like ‘Client Discovery’. We do this so that the service will trigger a workflow in our workflow management tool like Xero Practice Manager (or Karbon). 

In our GURU proposals, we setup various projects and billing types. For example a new proposal may include: 

• Discovery – no charge. 
• Integration of the accounting system – at a fixed, up-front fee. 

• Integration o the payroll system – at a fixed, up-front fee. 
• Catch-up bookkeeping at our hourly rates bill on completion. 
• Yearend financial statements and taxes at our fixed rates billed 50% up front and 50% on completion. 
• Ongoing bookkeeping, payroll support, and software, billed on the first of every month automatically. 
• Fractional controllership or CFO, which is usually a fixed scope and fixed monthly fee. 

• An indirect tax consultation with our indirect tax leader at a fixed rate paid up front to see if they have been handling their GST/HST/PST properly. 

Your pricing and billing-type decisions can also be put directly into the excel template for import into Ignition. 

STEP 4: Import, review, test, iterate. 

Now you’re ready to import. I recommend using your Ignition rep to help you with this, although it is fairly intuitive. Once your services have been imported, review them in detail to make sure they match your expectations. Things to review are: 

• Service naming. 

• Service description. 
• Service level terms of service. 
• Price and billing type. 
• GL code for your integrated accounting software. 

A best practice here is to have members of your team participate in the review, ask them to review it from the client’s perspective and not an accountant or other service provider’s perspective. This is your chance to put your best foot forward with your clients, so make it easy to read, and have others review your service library before you use it to win work. Again, the more people that look at your services the better. 

Once you’re done testing, set a few members of your team up as clients and send them some proposals. Let them experience what your client experiences. This is a great way to get out of the weeds of your services library.  

Take the feedback you get from your clients and your team and update your services all the time. For the first while that we were using Ignition, we would have regularly scheduled meetings to make changes to our services library based on our ongoing experiences with our clients and potential clients, and after seeing how the whole thing integrates with our accounting software and workflow management tool. Iteration will be the name of the game for the first few months; don’t be afraid of it. In the end, everything will smooth out and become as easy as you hoped it would be. 

Show Notes:
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