Although I’m an enthusiastic tweeter I accept that twitter is not for everyone. I’ve shared my views more widely here.

This blog post is for the majority of professional advisers who are not using twitter. I’ve noted below a selection of the tweets I have posted this week as they are intended to be helpful – in line with the ethos of this blog. I’ve added a word or two of explanation where appropriate.

Will be recommending @NikkiPilkington and her 7 Deadly Sins of SEO in a forthcoming talk on Websites for accountants (The objective view)

I was speaking at Mercia partners’ conference on ‘Making your firm’s website work for you – the objective view’. Rather than reinvent the wheel I included Nikki’s notes – with due credit. Like me she offers an independent perspective.

“The problem with quotes on the internet is you can never be sure of the original source” – Mark Twain

A satirical comment!

Good advice and tips re using LinkedIn from @RobWilmot at Mercia conf. Connect rather than Collect. Personalise the stnd invite to connect

Rob was another of the speakers at the Mercia conference and he encouraged everyone to personalise the standard invitation that LinkedIn offers as a starting point when you ask to connect with someone you know. He also rightly stressed that LinkedIn is about Connecting with people – not simply collecting a load of ‘connections’.

David Oliver of Insight Marketing has just shared some ASTONISHING new tips on referral marketing for accountants – At #Mercia conf

Like many of us in the profession I thought I’d heard it all before. But David Oliver impressed me with a range of new, innovative and, most importantly, COMMERCIAL ideas for securing valuable referrals.

During Q&A at end of #Mercia conf I was pleased to take the opp’ty to recommend #4networking and #NRGNetworks.

This followed reference to BNI as if it were the only available business networking group. I tend to encourage accountants to explore 4networking and NRG which are both very different from BNI and from each other. Horses for courses.

I’ve been asked why I have a number of different blogs and websites. It’s not something I would encourage many people to do so perhaps it’s worth explaining my thinking. I accept it could be flawed, but bear with me.

Firstly let me stress that in all of my writings for professional advisers (eg: on AccountingWeb, AccountancyAge, New Model Adviser and this blog) I focus on encouraging best practice. I typically share what I have researched and can see or believe will be commercially viable advice for working professional advisers. I do the same in my talks. I offer an objective and independent view. I have no agenda re practice management or consultancy services. In this context I think, I write and I speak. That’s it.

I frequently stress that what works for me is not automatically going to be right for accountants in practice for example. The most obvious case in point concerns the way I use twitter.

Enough background. Here’s my thinking about my websites and blogs.

There are two key points to keep in mind:

• The first is that I want the visitors to each site or blog to know they are in the right place;
• The second is that I want to have clear analytics that reveal the relative interest from different types of audience.

My personal website www.BookMarkLee.co.uk started life as a consultancy business but it’s now simply a home for my profile and to promote my availability and expertise as a speaker. Also on this site is my blog. This blog.

More people are interested in my blog posts than in my availability as a speaker so I frequently link to the blog directly rather than expect people to find it via my home page.

I have a sense of humour and have long collected humorous stuff related to accountancy and tax. I maintain a separate blog (now called www.Accountant-jokes.com) on which I post all such items – it now has over 500. Much of the traffic for this fun blog comes from overseas. And the audience reaches far beyond the worlds of accountancy and tax. Many people are looking for the sort of material featured on the blog to include in speeches and talks. Keeping the fun blog separate means I don’t fall into the trap of thinking that anything else I do has a big overseas audience – unless and until it really does!  It also means that I don’t risk alienating those members of our profession who might not share my interest in the humorous side of things.

The Tax Advice Network has a wholly different focus again. That website has a home page for people seeking specialist tax advice. Those people are neither interested in Mark Lee, my blog posts nor my joke collection. It’s a sophisticated business website and has to be separate from my personal sites.  I also have specific landing pages on the website for Accountants, for Tax Advisers, for IFAs and, shortly, for solicitors too.

As a plug for the Tax Advice Network and to encourage relevant writing and speaking engagements I write the Tax-Buzz blog. This matches the Tax Advice Network branding but is hosted separately on Google’s blogger platform. This makes it more Googlicious than if it were integrated into the website.

Each of the blogs contains links to the others and to the websites.

So that’s what I do and why. To summarise:

• Where the fundamental offering is the same (ie Tax Advice Network) but I have different audiences I have separate landing pages for each audience.
• Where the subject matter of what the target audience is seeking is very different I have separate blogs and a personal website.

It makes sense to me. The only change I could realistically make would be to bring the accountant-jokes blog inside the BookMarkLee website/blog – whilst keeping the domain name and pointing it at the relevant section. I’d have to believe it would be worthwhile. At the moment I don’t.

Feel free to share your views below as to whether this makes sense to you or if you have some constructive suggestions/ideas.

Regular readers will know that Incorporation has long been one of my pet subjects. I’ve written two tax digests on the subject and numerous articles. It’s also one of the seminars I am frequently engaged to provide to audiences of accountants.

I was chatting with a business associate (‘Steve’) recently who told me that he had changed his accountants last year – 3 or 4 years after they persuaded him to incorporate. Whenever I hear that someone has changed accountants I always ask ‘why?’

Steve had been with the old firm for ten years. He’d never been especially impressed by them but he stuck with them until they messed up.  In fact at one stage he’d been almost impressed. They persuaded him to incorporate his longstanding partnership business. He wasn’t convinced this was the best thing to do but he remembered the accountants were quite insistent. They said that they would be at risk of a complaint to their professional body if they didn’t incorporate the business due to the tax that could be saved. (This is rubbish of course. Clients can choose whether or not to take advice. It’s their decision. All the accountant has to do is to give the advice AND to ensure that the client only proceeds if they are aware of all the related issues – not just any potential tax saving. But I digress…)

Expecting tax savings Steve was shocked to get a demand for £36,000 ADDITIONAL tax from HMRC some two years after filing the first year’s accounts for the new company.  How did this happen? Steve explained:

His bookkeeper used to work for the accountancy firm who knew they could rely on her work.  After incorporation he had asked the accountants what to do when money came in re invoices issued by the old partnership. They told him to bank it as usual (there had been no change of bank account). The bookkeeper annotated all such receipts in the cashbook as being ‘re partnership’. For reasons I cannot fathom it seems that the accountants ignored the green ink annotation and reflected these receipts as being company income.  The additional tax bill was for the income tax due on the income excluded from the final partnership tax return. (Hopefully the accountants secured a refund for the additional corporation tax paid in error).

This is a shocking story.  It’s no surprise Steve changed his accountants. What steps would you have taken to avoid such a situation arising?

This is a bit of a rant, which is not my preferred style of blogging. I have just returned from a local group of tax advisers evening training session. It was supposed to be ‘Tax planning with LLPs”. That was the title in the promotional note, on the website and on the cover of the notes. (Actually they weren’t notes, just copy slides).

The title slide though didn’t mention tax. It was ‘Partnership structures’ and the lawyer who largely read her talk verbatim even started by admitting she wasn’t going to talk about tax. And she didn’t. Barely a mention, other than on the odd occasion when she noted that the audience probably knew more about tax than she did.

I felt short changed. As a regular speaker for groups of professional advisers I wouldn’t dare do what this lawyer did. She ignored the subject she had been asked to speak about and chose a subject of her own. Of course she could afford to do this. She is a partner in a large firm and almost certainly wasn’t being paid for giving the talk on a cold winter evening. No wonder she spoke on her preferred subject rather than the one she had been asked to present.

Maybe she thought she knew better than the committee who had booked her to speak as to what would be relevant and topical. How arrogant. How insulting and how unprofessional. There were almost 200 local tax advisers and accountants in the room. Some may well have found elements of her talk interesting. But it wasn’t on the subject they made time to go and learn about.  I’m sure many will feel they should have stayed at home (or the office!)

Maybe it serves me right. I had only booked to attend the session as I have a series of talks on partnership tax to present over the next few months. The first is next week and the slides AND NOTES are  already done. But I thought I’d see if there were any new ideas I should mention. Well I didn’t pick up any tonight that’s for sure!

I get paid to present my talks. If I didn’t keep to the subject I was booked to present I would be concerned that my fee might be withheld. And I would never be so arrogant as to insist on presenting a different subject to the one I was booked to address. I think tonight’s speaker was disrespectful, rude and unprofessional in her approach. But to an extent, you get what you pay for. As noted above I’m sure no fee was due to be paid to her. I charge a decent professional fee and present and operate in a professional manner (if you don’t mind the odd magic trick to liven things up a bit!)

If you were in the audience tonight do let me know if you’d like to attend my forthcoming half day talk on Partnership tax planning, tips, traps and news. Full details here. Anyone can come but I’ll extend a discount to those who also felt short changed tonight.

My business development manager has reminded me I should blog about this extended version of my recent talk at Softworld. We’re doing this next Thursday from 5.30-7.30pm in London.

Subtitled: How accountants can use and abuse online media this session will introduce you to a number of the key online media platforms – including Linkedin and twitter. I’ll be sharing tips and advice about what you can do, what you shouldn’t do, what works and what doesn’t. And when your time is limited what’s worth doing and what isn’t?

If you’ve been wondering what all the fuss is about, if you’re thinking of experimenting or about paying someone for help with an online media strategy, this session is for you. You’ll leave with a very clear understanding of the subject and what it means for you and your practice.

Full details of this low cost early evening seminar are here.

There are essentially just five basic approaches to making more profits as an accountant in practice:

1. Increase your charges – for doing the same work you have always done. This requires you to increase the perceived value of what you do
2. Speed up collection of your fees and so reduce your capital requirements and interest costs
3. Reduce the time you spend providing your services whilst keeping your fees the same as before. This allows you to take on more (profitable) work.
4. Provide more value and charge more than you did before NB: this is not the same as simply ‘doing more work’ for existing clients
5. Provide additional services and charge for these. Avoid preconceptions about what clients will pay.

There are also 2 supplementary things you can do:

• Get existing (good) clients to introduce new prospects just like them

• Sack the duff D-list clients who get in the way

You will appreciate that my focus here is on generating more profits rather than on increasing your top line, for example through adding new clients secured through advertising, marketing and networking.

In my talks on this subject I tend to focus on the first 5 points above although I also cover the 2 supplementary issues and some of the less costly methods of securing new clients and turnover. In so doing I share dozens of practical, commercial and easy to implement ideas that I know are being applied by other smaller practitioners.

“How to make more profits from your smaller clients – without fancy tax schemes” will next be presented in Birmingham on the morning of Friday 21 May 2010. Full details here.

I’m reminded of the old sex education message: Just say ‘no’!

As professional advisers we are all used to prospective clients seeking free advice. As I’m no longer in practice and as a frequent blogger I have very different perspective now. So here is some free advice from me.  When a stranger/prospect calls you need to set clear parameters. Why give any free advice?

I think the most common reason accountants give themselves is that it helps evidence their credibility, style, approach, knowledge and willingness to help clients.  In reality it is only the accountant themselves who doubts their ability and knowledge. The prospect generally takes all that for granted – after all our adverts or website makes clear we’re an accountant. All accountants know everything don’t they? We know this isn’t the case but prospects assume it is so.  Even more so if theye have been recommended or referred by a third party.

So accountants are generally proving nothing by giving free advice. They can evidence the other key qualities they want to exhibit without giving free technical advice.

I also tend to think that a side benefit of the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) legislation is that it gives accountants a statutory justification for any apparent reluctance to provide answers to technical questions before engaging a new client.  “I’m really sorry Mr Prospect but as a professional adviser I’m precluded by law from giving any advice before we’ve been through the anti-money laundering checks. I know it’s a pain but it’s the law.” The consequence of this will often be that you have engaged the client and secured their agreement to your preferred billing procedures before you give them any valuable advice. So the AML laws do have an upside after all!

Finally I would suggest you establish a process to qualify a prospect or to let them go elsewhere before you waste too much time on them. Initially you may want to qualify out time wasters on the phone. You will also want to determine what you need to cover in an initial meeting.

In many of my seminars I ask accountants if they offer a free initial meeting to prospective clients. Typically the answer is ‘yes’. “How long do you allow for such meetings?” Some put a cap on it. Others say ‘as long as it takes’. I ask the question – “As long as WHAT takes?” It’s not just about getting the prospect to want to appoint you. You need to find out quite early on if they can afford to pay the fees you would want to earn. You also need to determine if this is the sort of person you want to have a client.

Bottom line, I’d suggest you establish a process/checklist (that you will in time commit to memory) to use when you receive such calls in future and indeed when you have an initial meeting with a prospect.

Separate to this blog I also write the TaxBuzz blog and a blog containing Accountant jokes and fun. The latter contains over 400 jokes, videos, anecdotes, links and quotes relating to accountants, accountancy and tax related topics.

Additions during December included:

• 7 new taxes for 2010
• Ron Howard plans a tv comedy set in a local IRS office
• Beware your comments on taxman’s youtube videos
• Take more care when charging for ‘time spent’ on clients’ affairs (This one contains an important lesson!)
• The 12 days of Taxmas – a reworked Christmas Carol
• An Accountant dies and goes to heaven
• Ten arguments used to justify NOT filing tax returns
• 2049 – A vision of the tax side of the accountancy profession
• Ten famous people who were nearly accountants
• Unleash your inner accountant
• The wages of sin…

Over the last few years I have posted over 400 jokes, videos, anecdotes, links and quotes relating to accountants, accountancy and tax related topics on the Accountant jokes and fun blog.

Every now and then I post  a summary of recent posts here. So, from November:

• Bob Newhart’s theory of accounting
• So it’s not just Monty Python – Seinfeld on accountants
• More accountant fun courtesy of twitter<
• How to do tax advice naked
• HMRC award for tax transparency
• Dave Hartnett breaks a personal promise
• Marketing Strategy of the Year. And the winner is……..
• Sir Humphrey’s new charter?
• Is this how accounting works and how we can get debt free?
• David Frost on the creed of the Inland Revenue

A driver who drove his car to the edge of a 100ft drop after he “slavishly” followed its SatNav instructions has become one of the first motorists to be convicted for placing too much trust in his SatNav.

When I noted this news story today I was reminded of a comment I make during my talks about how to avoid professional negligence claims. It’s in the context of evidencing ‘good practice’. One way of doing this is to comply with your professional body’s Membership Handbook. In normal circumstances you might expect that if you can show that your actions were in accordance with the guidelines contained in the Handbook you would have a strong defence against allegations of professional negligence. But this is not the whole picture.

During my talks I focus more on the practical and commercial issues  than on the legal ones as I have an accountancy and tax background rather than a legal one. In this context I make the point that, whilst the position is not free from doubt, slavishly following guidance that is patently wrong may not be a good enough excuse. There is some precedent for this in the world of medical negligence.

We need to recognise that some of the guidelines in membership handbooks may be out of date – and that the Courts will expect professional advisers to apply common sense. The test will be what would a reasonably competent accountant have done in the circumstances. If this would differ from the membership guidelines then you should have done so too. It seems the same is true for drivers – is it reasonable to follow your SatNav instructions if they are clearly wrong? The report today suggests the answer is ‘no’ – and you can’t get off by blaming your SatNav.

I don’t imagine that the recent ‘SatNav’ case will figure in future courses about professional negligence but it is a useful reminder that we are all expected to apply common sense rather than slavishly following generic guidance that may be out of date, irrelevant or dangerous.