A licensing solution is only one of the things that accounting firms have to think about when deciding the best way to deal with the end of the accountants’ exemption in July 2016.
Scott Charlton, a chartered accountant and business coach, who is also who heads a new licensee established by Fortnum Financial Advisers, and is also head of strategic development at Fortnum Private Wealth, says there is an opportunity for accounting firms to significantly enhance their value proposition and extend the range of services and advice provided to clients – but only if they go about it the right way.
“We’ve set up a separate AFSL [Fortnum Professional Strategies] to provide this limited licence for accountants,” Charlton says.
“But very quickly I realised that that if all I have is a certificate that people can stick on their wall and carry on just as they have done in the past, then a) there will always be someone who will provide a cheaper piece of paper, and b) accountants will be missing an opportunity to take stock and refresh their overall value proposition.”
Charlton, says the aim of the new business is to attract accountants to the fold and enable them to run better businesses.
“If accountants are only looking at [the licencing] part and saying they just want to keep doing what they have always done, then it’s a grudge purchase; it’s a commoditised purchase,” Charlton says.
“The thing that fuels me – this is my ‘why’ – is that from a personal experience I know if you get a client, an accountant and a financial planner in the same room with a whiteboard, good things happen.
“I want more of these conversations happening around the country, because collectively we can improve the wealth of the nation. It’s that powerful.”
Striking a balance
Fortnum has developed the acronym BALANCE to describe the issues that accountants should think about when they are weighing up the options.It stands for:
Business model and vision;
AFSL solution;
Leverage;
A hundred-day challenge;
New knowledge;
Coaching; and
Evolution.
“A lot of the decisions that accountants need to make become a lot easier if they have clarity around what their business model looks like in future,” Charlton says.
“Leverage” means accounting firms aligning themselves with other firms of professionals “who can actually help them”, Charlton says.
“The overall message is: You are not alone – you can join up with like-minded people and enhance the capability of your firm,” he says.
The idea of a hundred-day challenge, Charlton says, is to be “a catalyst to take off the blinkers”.
“How might we – accountant, planner – work to dramatically improve the client’s circumstances in the next 100 days?” he says.
“When accountants get in to the swing of it, they find it quite invigorating, too.”
Professional development
Charlton says the existing Fortnum Academy will provide the ongoing professional development needed by both financial planners and accountants.
“Part of that is that we have financial planners and accountants in the same professional development sessions,” Charlton says.,
“We do things like case studies that require the skills of both professionals to come up with effective solutions,” he says.
And professional development and ongoing education has to constantly evolve, Charlton says, to “make sure it’s in keeping with changing needs”.
“Increasingly, the future for accountants who are only offering traditional tax and compliance services is bleak,” he says.
“If getting a tax return were voluntary, how much tax return work would accountants be getting?”
Charlton says the success of an accounting firm’s move into the licensing regime will depend heavily on who in the firm champions the cause.
He says it works best when it’s the founder of the firm or “a senior practitioner, who says, ‘guys, we really need to move on this’, and determinedly sees it through”.
