Are You Using the Right Social Media For Your Business?

There are so many social media platforms out there that it’s hard to keep track of them all, let alone establish a presence on each one. On top of that, new social media is always cropping up — so, how do you know which platform is right for you and your business?

Firstly, you need to understand that you do not need to be on every social media platform. In fact, trying to maintain a presence on multiple platforms may start doing your business more harm than good. Because each platform is so different, and because they serve different purposes to users, the rules and etiquette are different.

For example, Facebook is known for being the place people go to connect with each other. You may see longer text posts on there, along with smatterings of photos and videos — many of which share a personal story, but aren’t necessarily professional quality. It can be a very laid-back platform.

As a business, if you apply Facebook’s etiquettes to Instagram, you will not see the same return. Whereas on Facebook you can get away with highlighting the day-to-day ongoings of your practice with text posts, if you share a low-quality or relaxed image on Instagram with a long text post to accompany it, you won’t see it getting attention. People actually might be turned off by your business if they see you using the platform incorrectly because they want to see professional quality photos on Instagram that have clear directions on how to purchase your product, or how they can connect with your business. Instagram is generally good for businesses that have a pretty product to sell to a younger demographic.

These rules seem like a lot to grasp, especially because there are more social media platforms than just Facebook and Instagram, so we’ve laid out some ideas for what types of businesses we think will fit well on each platform.

 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great outlet for making connections with potential clients, your competition, and even professionals in other fields. There are many benefits for both large and small businesses with large and small clients.

 

Facebook

Local and small businesses who serve in a b2c capacity will thrive on Facebook, especially using the Facebook Ads feature. This would be a great platform for tax preparers.

 

Instagram

Trying to reach a younger demographic? This is the perfect tool for you. But remember, you’ll need plenty of photos and videos for content.

 

Twitter

This app is great for larger companies who need to handle community management. If you want to provide quick and easy customer support to a large client base, replying to tweets would be a great way to do that.

 

Snapchat

Media publications serving a younger demographic do best on Snapchat. It’s one of the most niche social media platforms, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t make your list of platforms to join.

 

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For more information about what you should be thinking about when picking a social media platform for your business, tune into our Facebook Live to hear from Kait LeDonne of LeDonne Branding & Marketing!

Plus, if you want to learn more from Kait about how to become a thought-leader in your industry in just 30 minutes a day, register for her seminar or webinar with MSATP on October 17.

#TechTips: Doing Well While Doing Good: MVLS and Tax Controversy

By Jonathan Rivlin for MSATP

In a recent edition of our Society’s journal, The Free State Accountant, there was a column that talked about volunteering for the Maryland Volunteer Lawyer’s Service’s (MVLS) Low Income Tax Clinic.

Tech Tips will affirm the benefits of serving the public by taking on pro bono cases into your practice. But the focus of this post, being tech oriented, is on a secure portal app called Canopy Tax.

This is the portal service that we use in our practice. Prior to that, we used SecureDrawer. Before that, we used morse code and carrier pigeons.

CanopyTax — Canopy for short — is an app that is native to the cloud. This feature is critical; this isn’t some antiquated desktop device “reskinned” for a webpage (looking at you QBO!) – this portal’s very design is couched in the cloud.

Canopy was created by CPA’s for CPA’s. It functions as a secure portal, a CRM, a workflow app that syncs with your Outlook for email and calendars, and apropos to today’s post, it has features designed to make tax controversy work more efficiently.

Canopy can link into IRS eServices to download taxpayer transcripts. Think about how efficient this can be! Sensitive docs can be accessed without emailing, stored in the correct client profile without scanning, and the notations can be updated on the fly.

Furthermore, there are templates for common notice replies.

The biggest win for us has been the ability for any staff member to track the status of a particular matter.

Canopy also helps with engagement letters and file storage/organization.

When our clients get new documents, receipts for charitable donations, paystubs they want us to analyze for withholdings, etc – they know by now to automatically upload the document to Canopy.

Canopy sends us an email whenever a client makes an upload. We couch this as a service to our clients and encourage them to use the portal and make it their habit.

Canopy restricts deleting and organizing files to us alone. Under our old portal, clients could make multiple folders, move files around, and delete files — that’s a problem. Canopy puts us in control of the docs.

Canopy is user friendly and intuitive; it’s interface is clean and easy on the eyes. Since we’ve adopted this app, it has become indispensable to us and is the first thing we access after turning our computers on (after turning on the coffee machine of course!)

Between Canopy, SurePrep/TaxCaddy, Xero, Expensify, Bill.com, Gusto, and Futrli, the only reason we still have a server is for Lacerte. Though, the way things are going, we anticipate being able to ditch the server at some point in the next 3 years.

So there you have it, a tour through the Cloud! We’ve covered a lot during this cycle of posts. Future posts will include new apps, as well as deeper dives into these previously covered apps (which are always being updated and improved), as well as other tech related issues facing our industry.

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We’d like to hear from you! Please submit your own tech tips to us at techtips@msatp.org! We will award a free subscription to The Tax Book to the person who submits the best tip.

Thanks, and catch you next time!

TT

How to Provide the Best Customer Service

The better service you provide your clients, the more likely they’ll be to remain loyal to you and your business. Not only does this mean you’ll have their business for longer, but it also means they’ll be willing to refer your company to their family, friends, and peers.

A huge part of providing your clients with great customer service is having the desire to make them happy. For this reason, you have to consider their experience with your business as a whole. It isn’t only about the face to face interactions you have, though that’s a big part of their impression of you — rather, it’s about how they are dealt with online, whether it be through email or even how they experience your website, as well as on the phone. Be sure to have measures in place so that your clients never face frustration when dealing with your company, whether that be by making sure your staff is well trained and equipped to handle various problems, or checking that your website is up-to-date and user friendly.

The first thing your client should see when they ask you for help is a smile. That shows them you’re willing to understand and solve their problem — which is why they hired you in the first place. Having a smile on your face during an in-person meeting is essential, but so is smiling when you’re having a similar conversation on the phone. It’s easy to pick up on how a person is feeling when you can’t see them by the tone of their voice, so make sure you’re understanding and ready to tackle the challenge they’ve presented you with.

Another obvious, but easily forgotten courtesy is saying thank you. Of course, you deserve to get paid for your hard work, but your client should know just how much you appreciate their business. Additionally, you should always show your clients respect and guard your emotions, even if you’re upset about the way something has unfolded. There are proper ways you can handle altercations — don’t say something in the heat of the moment that you’ll regret later.

Finally, the easiest way to retain a client is by knowing what your business has to offer. As long as you and your staff know your team’s strengths, and you can give your clients examples of how you can use those strengths to help them, you’ll be able to retain customers and even get new business.

Sales Tax & Use Tax: What’s the Difference?

We’ve covered the recent Sales & Use Tax updates after the South Dakota v. Wayfair case on our blog in the past (check out our three posts: South Dakota v. Wayfair: What Does This Mean for Online Retailers?, New Hampshire’s Take On the Wayfair Decision, and How the Wayfair Decision Affects Maryland Businesses). With our upcoming seminar and webinar, Sales and Use Tax After the Wayfair Case, we thought we would get down to the basics: what’s the difference between sales tax and use tax?

Because we have to pay it on most purchases, it’s pretty easy to understand that sales tax is a percentage of the sale price of goods and certain services that will be used, stored, or consumed in the same place that item or service is purchased. Buyers pay sales tax to retailers who then pay it to the state — and sometimes the county or city too.

The concept of use tax is a little more complicated. Buyers must pay use tax on purchases that are subject to sales tax, but are not charged sales tax. This means that if a buyer purchases goods or certain services by a seller who is located outside of the state that they reside in, they must pay tax on it. Though sales tax is usually paid by a consumer, use tax can be levied against a seller or consumer.

Consumer and seller use tax is also different. When consumers make an out-of-state purchase over the Internet, phone, or even in person, and they are not charged sales tax on the item, they are responsible for reporting and paying use tax on the transaction. Consumers would not be charged sales tax on a purchase if that company doesn’t have nexus in the state they reside in. (A nexus is a presence which is established if the company has a physical location, employees, or if they own delivery vehicles in a particular state.) In this instance, retailers don’t have to collect sales tax on the goods or services they are selling, but buyers have to pay consumer use tax.

Seller use tax applies when sales are made to buyers or businesses located outside of the state that the seller has nexus in. Use tax needs to be paid by retailers on inventory purchased without sales tax if they use that inventory at a later time.

The complexity of sales and use tax comes down to the state where the law originates. For more information about how we deal with sales and use tax in Maryland, don’t forget to sign up for the MSATP Sales and Use Tax After the Wayfair Case seminar and webinar on September 25!

MSATP Past President Bill Feehley, CPA, will be teaching the course in Owings Mills, MD, and will be discussing nexus issues for surrounding states, determining when sales tax should be charged and collected from customers in neighboring states, issues related to non-compliance, the Supreme Court’s decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, and more. Seats will fill up quickly, so sign up now!

#TechTips: Getting Into the Nitty Gritty with Sales Tax Apps

By Jonathan Rivlin for MSATP

This post will focus on the exciting world of sales taxes — we’ll leave their oft-forgotten friend use tax for another post.

NOTE: This post was written before the US Supreme Court’s Wayfair decision; as of now, Quill is still the law of the land. And that land includes some 10,000 taxing jurisdictions!

It’s not that we don’t want to comply, it’s just that with the lack of uniformity in what is taxable, what the rate is, what the frequency of measurement is, whether it’s cash or accrual, what type of registration is required, and how payment is to be made (electronic or paper), AND whatever you think you know today will be obsolete tomorrow, compliance is, in a word, difficult.

When your humble Tech Tips was entering the profession in the 90’s, this was not an issue. Our retail clients didn’t have to worry about nexus with other states. Nexus back then was a hair product. (Yes, I know that product is spelled “Nexxus,” but you get the point.)

So, sales tax: don’t worry, there’s an app for that.

Both QBO and Xero (See prior post on Xero) have sales tax modules built into them, but that’s not enough. These ledger based modules will help you calculate which sales are sales taxable, what rates apply (provided you know what rates to use), and what jurisdictions to remit to, provided that you know this and manually update it yourself.

As limited as this is, it is a mandatory first step.

Now, having gotten that groundwork set out, we can look at some purpose built sales tax apps that can snap into your cloud based ledger.

We’ll look at two: Avalara and TaxJar.

Avalara and Intuit seem to be kindred spirits. Avalara does not publish rates on its website — instead, would-be clients are instructed to contact them for a quote. In this modern age, this is where the decision should stop. This tactic may have worked prior to the Cloud, but in today’s environment it has the veneer of something less than trustworthy.

TaxJar and Xero also seem to be kindred spirits. TaxJar and Xero are native to the Cloud — they were built for the modern way of transacting and computing. Both TaxJar and Xero publish their rates on their website: you know what you’re getting when you pay. You can sign up yourself, on your time, without hassle or the pleasant experience of being upsold.

Both TaxJar and Avalara will calculate your sales tax and assist with filings and registrations. Both sites offer state registration services for varying price levels. Both sites offer a resource library that appears to be available to the public without charge, which is very helpful! There’s a certain commoditization at work here.

Our decision was to use TaxJar, and here’s why:

1) Pricing was transparent (See above and also the previous article on Xero)
2) The “partner agreement” didn’t require us to violate the AICPA’s code of professional ethics. Let’s elaborate on this:

The new way of doing business involves the accounting firm establishing a relationship with a given app provider, be it Xero or Intuit, TaxJar or Avalara, or what have you. These companies offer (often require) some level of training to ensure that each accounting partner knows how to use their system. This is a little patronizing, but it is important.

These apps also have different partner levels (bronze, silver, gold, platinum, etc) based on the number of clients a given firm puts on a specific app. Discounts on per client monthly fees can be had once certain benchmarks are hit. These apps also have agreements that firms need to adhere to.

And then we come to Avalara’s partner agreement.

Avalara’s partner agreement required us to create and submit a marketing plan to Avalara for review, and they would punish us if we failed to meet the benchmarks set out in our plan. Avalara in a sense was inserting themselves into our business and making us responsible for growing their business. No other app does this! When I took issue with this to the sales rep that we contacted, I was told that it wasn’t really enforced and no other accounting firms had ever questioned it; they just sign up, and couldn’t I just sign up already? Why was I bothering her with my questions? (Us CPAs and our questions…)

I realize that not all readers of this column are CPAs, but for those readers that are CPAs, and for any other practitioner that is governed by some regulatory body (attorneys, EA’s, licensed tax preparers, etc), we are governed by a code of professional conduct that requires us to remain in compliance and good stead with any contracts we enter into.

In the 90’s and Aught’s, this meant that we had to be honest about how many user licenses we needed to disclose to Intuit; that we couldn’t use the same copy of Office for all of our work stations. Not that anyone has ever done that — by the way, doing something like this is a felony, and it’s also grounds for being thrown out of the profession.

So, back to Avalara and their partner agreement: If you want to keep your license to practice (and I know that’s a tough call after the new tax law), I would strongly suggest not obligating yourself to an overly invasive, difficult-to-comply-with software license agreement.

I can’t tell you what to do. What I can provide are some alternative perspectives for a given situation, or as Obi Wan Kenobi would say, “…a certain point of view.”

There are surprisingly few absolute right or wrong, yes or no decisions. For us, it comes down to who we want to spend our time with. What do we value as a firm? How would we want to be treated? How do our clients want to be treated? Our firm’s answers to these questions may differ from yours and that’s okay — just be clear about what your answers are and how you arrived at them.

For us, we value transparency, low-pressure sales, well-designed U/X (user interface), passion for their specialty bordering on geekiness, fantastic tech support, and an open attitude where we are treated like partners and not as marks to be milked for add on sales and hidden fees.

That’s why we chose TaxJar over Avalara, Xero over QBO, Gusto over ADP/Paychex, and more apps that we’ll detail in subsequent posts.

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We’d like to hear from you! Please submit your own tech tips to us at techtips@msatp.org! We will award a free subscription to The Tax Book to the person who submits the best tip.

Thanks, and catch you next time!

TT

MSATP’s Favorite Podcasts

A podcast is an audio show that you can listen to online — it’s basically like on-demand radio on the Internet. There are thousands of podcasts out there about various subjects, some of which include business, celebrities, professional development, news and politics, and more. They’re easily accessible both on mobile devices, and on computers (check out those links to see how you can listen to them).

On our Facebook Live last week, MSATP President Ellen Silverstein and Kait LeDonne of LeDonne Branding & Marketing discussed their favorite professional development and accounting podcasts. Check them out below!

 

Professional Development

 

1. Lewis Howes School of Greatness

The School of Greatness podcast has grown rapidly to be one of the top-ranked Business and Self-Development podcasts in iTunes. It regularly appears in the Top 50 of all iTunes podcasts, and gets downloaded over 2 million times per month.

Episodes range from interviews with incredible world-class game changers in entrepreneurship, health, athletics, mindset, and relationships, to solo rounds with the host, Lewis Howes. It’s super fun and he always features awesome guests like Tony Robbins, Alanis Morsette, and more. It’s a great leadership development podcast.

 

2. How I Built This With Guy Raz

This NPR produced podcast features founders of companies like Lyft, Lululemon, Stitch Fix, and other pioneers. There was an episode featuring Kate and Andy Spade just a few weeks before Kate’s death, and it was so incredible hearing how they built the brand together. This podcast gives you access to the top business minds, and it’s the perfect way to inspire you at the beginning of your day.

 

3. Entrepreneur on Fire

Entrepreneur on Fire, or EOFire as its fans affectionately refer to it, is hosted by John Lee Dumas. Like “How I Built This,” John features entrepreneurs and asks them about their journey. EOFire isn’t just about household business names you hear about — it’s the everyday entrepreneur he talks to, and he makes it a point to ask about their setbacks and hardest moments as a business owner. It feels real and relatable, and it reminds entrepreneurs that you aren’t alone in this journey!

 

Accounting

 

1. Bigger Pockets

The Bigger Pockets Podcast, hosted by Joshua Dorkin and Brandon Turner, is about growing wealth with smart investment. Dorkin and Turner take on investing like smarter morning drive-time guys, with wonky humor and in-your-face enthusiasm. Previous topics include negotiating (with an FBI hostage negotiator) and real estate investing. To paraphrase Chief Brody in Jaws, you’re gonna need bigger pockets – for all the money you’ll make!

 

2. Accountants Doing Cool Sh!t

This is about exactly what its title implies – accountants who are using their skills, knowledge, and creativity to do some interesting, innovative, and unusual things. Lifestyle Accountant, a worldwide networking group, provides services to accounting freelancers and entrepreneurs, including the economic podcast, populated by exciting new voices in the field.

 

3. Future of Accounting with Danetha Doe

This is a great podcast for business owners seeking to attract young professionals. Danetha Doe is one of the Millennial generation’s top thought leaders and ambassadors, attracting attention from Huffington Post, Xero, and Wells Fargo for her expertise. Her podcast, Future of Accounting, is targeted at young people heading into accounting, including students and young professionals just starting their careers. Danetha Doe doesn’t just host the Future of Accounting – she is the future of accounting.

 

4. The Abacus Show

The Abacus Show, hosted by Bob the CPA from Abacus U, brings top accounting professionals, influencers, and experts into informative, entertaining financial podcasts. Bob, whose Abacus U offers online courses in topics like resume building and using LinkedIn effectively, covers crucial issues for accountants and accounting students like joining professional organizations and going digital.

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Of course, the cool thing about podcasts is different ones appeal to different people. Do you have a podcast that you love or produce? Let us know in the comments! Plus, don’t forget to tune into our Facebook Live all about podcasts here.