More Than Just Taxes: Text Messaging for Accountants and Bookkeepers
Text Messaging for Accountants, Bookkeepers, and Business Professionals: have you sent tax time messages to your clients this End of Financial Year Season?
In what is the busiest time of year for accounting and taxation businesses, you can use SMS to reduce time-consuming and repetitive communication with your clients. The benefit is two-fold; you have more time to focus on what matters during this incredibly busy time and your customers are still kept informed, which is always a good thing, and means they’re contacting you less, which is never a bad thing.
If you’ve never considered SMS before here are a couple of stats that should get you considering:
- SMS has open rates as high as 98% (email averages around 18%)
- Most text messages are read within 3 minutes of receipt
Whether you’re a public accountant, company accountant, tax agent/specialist, auditor, superannuation specialist, financial advisor, bookkeeper, accounts assistant or business services professional. You can use text messaging to send quick, concise messages at scale. Using SMS you can see returns on investment like never before 🚀
Some of the ways our customers in accounting, bookkeeping, and taxation use text messaging include:
- Drive business a simple text message reminding people it’s tax time works a treat
- Nurturing client and partner relationships
- Managing debtors and creditors
- Chasing ledgers, reports, and information
- Staff notifications (for payment summaries and more)
- Schedule meetings and appointments — then follow up with reminders
And like our accounting clients, you can send these text messages either:
- through our user-friendly web-based dashboard a few clicks and any amount of messages will be on their way
- by enabling email to SMS to fire off text messages straight from your email inbox
- via a no-code integration through your favourite accounting package so using Zapier to integrate SMS functionality into Xero for instance
- have SMS functionality built directly into your software via our SMS API
Read on for your guide to messaging for accountants, bookkeepers, and people working in the business services industry.
Use SMS to Maximise Business at EOFY
Marketing Tax Returns via Text
Use text messaging to maximise your business opportunities at the most profitable time of year 🚀🚀
If you’re offering your existing clients a promotion in order to retain them for this financial year, now is the time to send it. Or if you’re in the business of attracting new leads, get the most out of your advertising by including your dedicated number for prospective clients to text in.
Some of the popular messages sent on the ClickSend SMS Gateway include:
Friendly, not pushy:
Hi (First. Name),
Happy New Financial Year! 🎉 If you need help completing your tax return, give me a call on (Phone) or reply YES for your free no-obligation consultation.
(Staff Name), (Company).
Opt out reply stop.
Offering discount:
(Company): It’s that time of year again! Get (discount) off your tax return when you file with us this tax season. Hurry — offer ends (date). Go to: (website).
Opt out reply stop.
Benefit-oriented:
Maximise your tax return this year with (Company). Let us file your taxes and you could have your tax refund in less than 3 weeks! Reply YES to get started.
Opt out reply stop.
Don’t forget: when sending these promotional messages, you must include an option for recipients to opt out.
Utilising Text Messaging for Accountants and Tax Agents to Save Time Completing Tax Returns
Tax returns are an information-intensive exercise, especially for clients with many investments or deductions. Ever feel like you’re always chasing down additional information? Maybe your client forgot to include fringe benefits information or investment growth. Or you require receipts for deductions. Whatever you’re after, catch your client on the most effective channel: text message.
Use SMS to quickly and efficiently communicate through all aspects of your client’s tax return:
- scheduling meetings and reminders
- requests for further documentation or information
- lodgement confirmation
Text messaging is a powerful tool, which elicits responses quickly — so why not use them outside of the tax time madness to help streamline your business?
Nurturing Client and Partner Relationship Via Text Message
Contacting clients goes further than just annual tax return reminders and notifications. Nurture your client relationships to ensure that you are top of mind when they need business services. You may find that they require more than just tax returns — think about cross-selling opportunities. Your clients might be in the market for an accountant to balance their business books, or need help with forecasting and budgets.
Add value for your customers all year round, giving insights from your years of expertise. For example: what you can and cannot claim for tax deductions, little-known rules for small businesses, tips for budgeting, or anything that your clients and/or friends ask you about your profession. For example:
Hi Richo, have you been working from home lately? Find out which work from home expenses can be claimed as tax deductions to maximise your tax return. We’ve written a blog at www.taxreturnblog.com. Let me know what you think! Caroline, Zim Accountants.
Likewise, if you have preferred business service providers that you refer clients to and vice versa (eg. accountants, financial planners, insurance brokers, business lenders), maintain your strong relationship with your partner provider using text messaging.
Managing Debtors and Creditors with SMS
No one likes chasing debtors and it’s amazing what a simple text message nudge can do — and with our SMS integrations you can easily automate these nudges to be sent whenever an invoice is generated or a chosen number of days after it is generated.
SMS nudges work. Westpac and the federal government did a study on them and found email reminders had no effect but text messages increased credit card repayments by about 28 percent or $134 on average.
How to Automate Text Message Billing Notifications and Reminders
We love integration partners like Zapier, where you can easily connect your favourite accounting software to your communications provider to create set-and-forget reminders.
In this example, we’re using Xero. On Zapier you can connect Xero with ClickSend, select ‘New Sales Invoice’ as the trigger and ‘Send SMS’ as the action (or you know, you could opt for a letter, postcard, fax, MMS, voice call…). You’re already minutes away from your new no-code invoice automation.
You could even add a time delay. For example, if payment is due 14 days from the invoice being generated:
- Send an SMS notification when the invoice is generated
“…an invoice has been raised for services rendered…” - Send an SMS reminder 12 days after the invoice is generated
“…just a reminder that payment is due in 2 days…” - Send an SMS reminder 14 days after the invoice is generated
“…just a reminder that payment is due today, please ensure payment is made promptly to avoid late fees…” - Send overdue notices via text message
“…payment is now overdue and a late fee has been applied to your account…”
In the same way, you can automate notifications and reminders when quotes are created, bank transactions are made, purchase orders raised or expense claims are received.
As for creditors — send automated messages when payments are made to reduce the number of times you hear from their billing department 😎
For more information about automated messaging, check out our SMS automation explainer here.
Chasing Ledgers, Reports, and Information
Ever get a client where they provide you with every file, document, and piece of information that you require to complete the job without having to follow up?
It’s rare, right?
Luckily you no longer have to pick up the phone every single time you need more information to get a job done.
Whether you’re an auditor chasing company journals and reports, a tax agent who needs extra documentation or further information, or a company accountant chasing old ledgers — fire off text messages quickly to elicit a fast response. With 90% of text messages being opened within minutes, your message will be unmissable.
Keep these templates in your back pocket:
Hi (First. Name), in order to complete (Job), I will need (File/Information). Please upload it to our secure (Preferred File Sharing System) and reply YES when it is complete.
Cheers,
(Name), (Company).
For example:
Hi Louis, in order to complete your FY21 Company Audit, I will need P&L Statements from the last 5 years. Please upload it to our secure Dropbox Folder and reply YES when it is complete.
Cheers,
Sudhan, Biebz Business Services.
Hi (First. Name), your (job) is almost complete. I just need you to email through (data in question). Please reply YES when it is complete and I will continue to process your request. Thanks! (Name), (Company).
Or tweak the messaging in the templates above to tailor them perfectly to your business processes and tone of voice.
Payroll and Staff Notification Text Messages
There’s always an employee (or former employee) who starts messaging about payment summaries as soon as the new financial year begins. Anticipate this by sending a message to all staff employed within the financial year, letting them know when they can expect their payment summaries and any relevant information that they might be likely to ask for.
Likewise, for new starters, have the HR team send a message letting them know when payday is and how frequently, or any other typical questions that get asked.
SMS For Company Audits
Both auditors and accountants can use SMS for:
- Setting Up Appointments
Initial meeting for quotes, pricing and setting up of the contract, handover of journals, files, and relevant documentation. - Sending Reminders
Whether it’s deadlines for work to be done, chasing payments, locating information, or appointment reminders, text messaging is the perfect medium.
Getting your company audit done quickly will help you to keep shareholders and the board happy, and allow you to get year turnaround reporting done sooner.
Schedule Meetings and Appointments
Whether for auditing purposes or any meetings that are required for your business, be it client meetings, business services contracts, quarterly reporting, board meetings — cut out the time-consuming back and forth to schedule appointments by sending a link to your calendar via text message.
And the best bit is that you can create no-code, set and forget notifications via text message when the meeting is created and just before the appointment (so that board member who only comes to meetings when they know there’ll be free coffee cannot claim they “forgot” anymore 😉).
In this example, we’re using Google Calendar. There are templates within Zapier to send text message reminders when an appointment is coming up in Google Calendar — too easy!
Send notifications and reminders when appointments are created, when they are upcoming, and follow up after meetings if need be. You can also use these reminders to direct participants to relevant reports ahead of time, or cascade updates or requests as needed.
Accountants and Business Services Professionals Love ClickSend
…because we understand that you’re in the business of making your money (and your client/employer’s money) work harder. We’re here to support you in maximising revenue — and ultimately profit — through working smarter, not harder.
Partner with ClickSend to transform how you do business and realise returns on investment like never before.
