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Business owner and losing money to one of your big clients?

/ Accounting, Finance, SME

Author: Henry Ejdelbaum

Tags: How we help our clients

Business Owner loosing money title image

An accountant can be a huge financial boost to your business in ways such as balancing your books, finding potential tax savings through allowances or providing you with extra valuable time to run your business. We currently have nearly 30,000 clients across the national network and understand the value we add to their business since we are small business owners ourselves and we all need a bit of help. Read one of our own stories when a business owner was losing money to a bigger client below.

Stuart Flynn, AIMS Accountant in Leicestershire, has recently shared a story about his early AIMS days when he assisted a client who was losing money to one of his larger clients, and he was not sure why or where it was happening. Stuart proposed to go back to basics and do an exercise to see if he could help the client to identify the issue and then help him to work out a favourable solution. Firstly, Stuart went over all of the client’s costs. The issue turned out to be fairly simple, what the client was charging for his services did not cover his costs.

Stuart then went over his clients’ current pricing structure, and found out that he had to increase the costs across the board as he was not breaking even on his accounts. Stuart proposed a solution to his client – to update his contract with that specific client – and update the current pricing structure to match the current operational costs – that would help him to see a profit on his work.

Stuart commented, “I told my client, if you don’t identify those overheads as part of your cost base, and you continue to go ahead, you’ll continue to lose money. So, you must have a hard conversation with your clients and explain to them the situation you are in, and that sometimes for you to be able to continue offering your services your prices must be higher.”

Adding value to our clients is about more than simply doing their tax, we know that having a good accountant means so much more. Maybe having an AIMS accountant could help you too?