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How bookkeepers, tax firms, tax professionals, and CPA’s use appointment scheduling software for the tax season and their businesses

Published on 12-25-2020

How bookkeepers, tax firms, tax professionals, and CPA’s use appointment scheduling software for the tax season and their businesses

Bookkeepers, tax firms, tax professionals, and CPA’s, the 2024 tax returns season is here and it’s time to onboard Appointment Reminder for more efficiency and business success. Businesses and individuals are seeking your services in preparing and filing their taxes in time. Are you ready?

Has the 2024 tax season changed?

As per IRS 2024 tax calendar, the deadline for 2024 tax season is back to the standard day – April 15. This affirms the busy period at hand for tax professionals – peak season for you to serve more clients and grow your revenues.

Is an appointment reminder worth it?

A National Society of Accountants (NSA) 2018-2019 survey report, reveals a $158 average hourly fee for tax professional services for both Federal and State Government.

The fee reflects a 5% increase from 2016-2017 when the average hourly fee was $150. A lot has changed and 2024 could be more lucrative.

So, an appointment reminder is undoubtedly worth it. It will pay for itself. As it automates your business process, you’ll have more time in your hands to generate more revenue as you serve your clients. Don’t miss out!

Industry report on losses and the main reasons clients miss appointments

Some industries are losing over $150 billion annually because of missed appointments. Clients may forget an appointment, run into a schedule conflict, family emergencies, travel issues, or even illness. Under such circumstances, make it easier for them to reschedule and minimize the no-shows.

What every tax professional should do in tax season 2024

Be on your game this tax season by automating appointments with your clients, sending them reminders, and increasing the prospects of them showing up. Appointment Reminder is one of the tools designed to help you achieve all these ensuring your tax business thrives.

Discover more on how Accountants (CA, CCA, CPA’s), tax professionals, and tax firms are using Appointment Reminder during tax season.

What is Appointment Reminder?

Appointment Reminder is an online appointment software used by professionals and businesses like tax firms and accountants to automatically schedule and send reminders to clients to confirm bookings. It also allows clients to reschedule their appointment incase they run into a hurdle.

Its user-centered interface is easy to use, automatic, reliable, and you can customize it to suit your business.

Getting started is equally easy. You sign up for Appointment Reminder (you even have a 14 Day Free Trial that you can cancel anytime), use the intuitive calendar or integrate with yours, customize your message scripts, preset the timing, and Appointment Reminder will handle the rest.

How CPAs are using Appointment Reminder during 2024 tax season

“There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.” – Archibald MacLeish

Here are tips for CPAs and other tax professionals using Appointment Reminder. If you’re a starter in the tax business, this is a perfect start. Tax gurus – it is also your moment to heighten your business.

1. Integrating Appointment Reminder with calendars of choice

CPAs are enjoying the convenience of integrating Appointment Reminder with their calendars of choice. You’re not confined to the in-built Appointment Reminder calendar.

Whether you use Outlook Calendar, Office 365 Calendar, Google Calendar, Apple iCloud, or any other calendar from this full list of integrations, you’re sorted.

If your calendar missing, you’re welcome to contact Appointment Reminder for assistance.

Calendar integration syncs your data affording you the luxury to maintain your calendar without frequently logging in to separate tools.

2. Automating appointment booking process

As the tax season rocks, tax professionals are automating appointment booking process. No tax business is small. Even if you’re starting up, automating your online booking from the onset will help you create a reliable and sustainable culture.

How it is done: CPAs identify blocks of time depending on their availability. They feed the hours into the appointment scheduling app and these are the hours that display to the client’s side.

Automatic booking allows you to allocate transitions times in between your appointments to allow you take a break, rest or get ready to meet the next client.

3. Reducing no-shows or cancellations

No-shows are the greatest enemy of online appointment booking process. CPAs are using appointment booking app to minimize cancellations and no-shows. No-shows happen when clients neither cancel or use their appointment.

When appointments fail to show up, they become a missed opportunity for you and affects clients who would have shown up given the opportunity. You may not tell the reason for the failure but you can join other CPAs this tax season effectively managing no-shows by:

Taking online bookings: Online appointment booking gives customers the flexibility to schedule and manage their appointments (within your available time as indicated in the booking schedule). By choosing the time that is most convenient to them, customers also feel the obligation the show up.

Sending personalized reminders: CPAs are automating sending reminders via email, text message (SMS), or voice messages. You can customize your reminder messages from the templates in the system or create your messages from scratch. For voice messages, you can use the app’s automated voice message reader or upload your audio file.

Why are CPAs sending automated personalized reminders?

  • Save time and resources: Automated personalized reminders save you and your team invaluable time that you could otherwise spend to manually send reminders to you clients. The old manual way of doing things is time consuming and prone to errors. Moreover, if reminders come with the urgency to reschedule then finding another slot can result in inconsistencies. Your will not only hurt your business, but also your clients.
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  • Better customer service: Customers may not be always in a position to receive call reminders, but they frequently check text messages. For your information, texts have a 98% open rate. Push those text reminders and be confident your customers will read them in time.
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  • Remind a client to get ready for an appointment: Let the clients know they have date booked on their calendar. It’ll allow you an adequate notice window to assign another client another slot in case they cancel or reschedule.
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  • Help clients plan in-time: Reminders with details of the requisites required for an appointment help clients have everything in place before they show up. Sometimes they can even send you some documents to check whether they are correct to avoid clients paying extra for another appointment for mistakes that could be avoided.

During this tax season, accountants are using Appointment Reminder to optimize text appointment reminders by:

  • Keeping their customized messages precise: A long story is not a measure of excellent communication. Keep your text to the point ideally between 140 to 175 characters.
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  • Sending follow up reminder: Send more than one reminder to your customers but be sure to distribute them evenly. Ideally, three reminders are a good pick.
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  • Sending reminders at the right time of the day: Sending SMS reminders after working hours can yield a higher open rate as people are relaxing from the day’s business.
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  • Ensuring they contain the right information: It should contain confirmation instructions, type of appointment, time zone with the due date and time, and other detail that may seem necessary.

Manage replies: Tax professionals are touching base with customers by managing replies. Appointment Reminder provides a 2-way communication meaning clients can respond to your appointment reminders.

Get notifications via SMS, email or both as soon as customers respond. You can even view the unique response from the customer via your existing calendar. Depending on their reply, you can count it done or follow up.

“One of the great things about messaging is that it’s so immediate, and consumers generally open their messages very quickly.” – Harvard Business Review (2019).

Manage follow ups: If you don’t receive a reply from the client, take another step by reaching out to them another time. Following up tells your clients, you’re a committed professional or businesses and that you take appointments seriously. Offer to reschedule an appointment if clients are not available for some reason – it is far much better than no-shows.

“68% of companies expect advanced mobile messaging apps to play a highly important role in online consumer marketing within five years.” – Harvard Business Review (2019).

Managing follow ups can empower your business to:

  • Build customer loyalty: Making follow ups on your clients sets the stage loyalty and they are likely to seek your services again. They can even recommend other leads even if they cancel their cancel their appointment.
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  • Solve problems before they amplify: If a problem arises in the cause of following up customer engagement can provide a chance to fix it.
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  • Compete favorably: Not every competitor might be running same business strategy as yours. Beat them with a better customer reach out experience.

No-shows are a blow to your tax business. Avoid them at all costs! They interfere with your time and productivity resulting in time wastage. They reduce client engagement with both new and existing customers, reduce revenues, and slow your business growth.

4. Enhance business efficiency

CPAs, accountants, and tax firms are using Appointment Reminder to improve the management of their businesses. The application is enhancing automation processes increasing their efficiency by:

Minimizing errors and improving communication: Online booking and confirmation managements takes away the headache of manual management. Since the process is involved using artificial intelligence it can handle the steps involved in onboarding a booking client up-to confirmation of attendance, cancellations, or rescheduling.

Reduced paper work: Online appointment booking and reminders significantly cut down paper work. They consequently help save on time which can be used in other human-demanding pursuits like one-on-one client service. It also makes the process of managing customers easier.

Precise time and appointment management: The margin for time wasted and failed appointments significantly reduces with Appointment Reminder. No more inaccuracies in trying to get your appointments right. Simply set you availability and let the appointments come. Send reminders and let clients confirm. If they can’t show up, they’ll tell you and reschedule their appointment then you can allocate their time to another client.

Running business smoothly: As Appointment Reminder automates your tasks, it places power in your hands to control the business processes with clicks at your convenience. Invest the time you save from the basic operations to offer outstanding services to your booked clients.

What next?

Make 2024 tax season count.

Decided your availability and fit in your time into Appointment Reminder online appointment booking and reminder app.

Send reminders via email, call, or text customizing your message for each client and ensuring the messages have the right items.

Manage replies for confirmed appointments. Remind clients to reschedule if they can’t show up. Use the confirmation window to onboard other clients to minimize no-shows.

Provide excellent services to your customers and watch your tax business grow with increasing revenues.

Get started with a 14-day day free trial – cancel anytime. You can also contact us and or call us on (844) 333-3702 and we’ll gladly assist you.

Are you ready to save time and money?

Appointment Reminder is designed with one goal in mind – to allow you to
make more money off of your clients, while wasting less time contacting them.