Accounting Site Design- Decrease Your Operating Costs

When reflecting on websites many people think of them as marketing tools. This is all well and good. Marketing is actually the fundamental role of a good accounting website design. Your website is a remarkably powerful tool, though, and a reasonable design will help your practice save a not insignificant amount of money.

It's a simple matter to add a "Track Your Refund" feature to your website. Financial calculators are also easy. Get some interactive calculators to help your clients with their personal and family finances. Make sure your administrative assistants are familiar with these features so they can refer callers to the appropriate web pages. This can save you a lot of unbillable hours on the phone.

Transition your communications to email. Now, most firms have already done this for daily contact messages, but a surprisingly large number of firms are still wasting a lot of money on printing and postage. There are two simple website features that can help your firm cut these costs.

The first feature is your newsletter. You can post your newsletter online for free. Use email to send out links to it once a month. Include a short teaser for your best articles with "read more" links to get them onto your site.

Another real killer comes around every year about this time. It's tax season. Are you still mailing out your annual tax organizers? Try distributing them over the internet instead! There's two very effective methods to accomplish this.

The first and most common method is to post your tax organizer on your website as a downloadable document. Use Adobe Acrobat to convert your tax organizer as a PDF file so Mac users can access them, too. This solution is the quickest, easiest, and cheapest solution. Your clients can just download the form, fill it out, and mail it back to you.

There's another solution and it's much more exciting, but it's also much harder to implement. It's possible to set your website up as an online form. Your clients can actually fill it out and submit it to you right on your website. This is my preferred method, but it requires something of an accounting website design expert to make it work. It improves participation and gets you the results instantly on submission. There is a downside of course. Traditional form pages send the completed form by email, and tax organizers contain a lot of confidential information. Obviously this is a significant security issue. The form needs to be secure, in other words password protected, and it needs to be run right on the web server. This requires some advanced programming.

The last thing I want to talk about is your file exchange. Obviously the best solution is one that's entirely contained and branded to your practice, and most accounting website design providers offer this service. If yours doesn't at least get a dropbox account and put some links on your accounting website to help your clients do the same. No more traveling across town to pick up and deliver your clients Quickbooks discs, and no more expensive express deliveries. Just a few clicks of a mouse can instantly and safely transfer this data right over your website. Many accounting firms, especially ones with multiple offices, have taken this design concept a step further. They are actually running their accounting software right on a web server so they can access any clients data, any time, from any place, and in real time.

Yes, your accounting website is a highly effectual marketing instrument. It will also save your business a great deal of cash, though. Use these techniques. Even if your site doesn't bring in any clients it will still pay for itself. Not only will it cutback your operating costs, you'll see it also improves client satisfaction and retention.