The 5 Best Accounting CRMs for CPA Firms
What is a CRM for accounting?
An accounting Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is software that helps accountants, tax professionals, and bookkeepers manage client data and relationships.
CRM vs. CMS
It's important to understand the difference. A content management system (CMS) is a tool, app, or solution that makes it easy to store and find contact information like names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. A CRM is a comprehensive software solution for managing customer interactions.
As a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) or bookkeeper, taking care of your relationships is very important. Without them, you have no business and no customers. CPAs need a CRM system like Flowlu.com that can do more than one thing to build and keep track of client relationships. There are many other CRMs that are made for businesses that sell products instead of services, so they don't focus on keeping your relationships with clients strong.
It's important to pick a CRM that accountants can understand. Using CRM software, you can easily manage retainers, share information in a more secure way, and do other things.
So, what is the best CRM database for accountants?
Your choice will depend on what CRM tools are available on the platform you choose, and some of it will come down to personal preference. Here are five ways that accountants can take CRM to the next level.
The Top 5 CRMs for accounting
- Flowlu
- Insightly
- Keap
- HubSpot CRM
- Zoho Books
Flowlu
Flowlu helps small and medium-sized professional service companies manage their clients by giving them the tools and resources they need. The integrated platform runs in the cloud and helps manage sales, quotes, projects, tickets, retainers, timesheets, billing, and scheduling all from one place.
Flowlu is more than just a database for keeping track of customers. It is also a web-based financial management tool designed for small and medium-sized businesses to manage their finances and cash flow. It allows you to organize all of your tasks in one location.
Here’s what you can do with the CRM platform:
- Projects: You can manage your projects in real time, see the schedules of your team members, and create and change project clients.
- Sales: Stay on top of deals, make more sales, and keep track of notes, appointments, emails, attachments, and customer fields.
- Retainers: Set up your workflows for clients who stay with you for a long time, such as billing and tasks.
- Services: Find a support ticket system, keep track of activity, and use a centralized team inbox, automated notifications, and a client portal.
With Flowlu, you'll be able to keep in touch with long-term customers and bring in new ones. This will help you stay competitive in your market and give you a better understanding of how your business works, so you can spend less time on the back-end of the business and more time working with your clients, which will help your bottom line.
The best thing about Flowlu is that it helps you run your whole business, from finding new customers to getting paid, more quickly and profitably.
Benefits
- Grows with your company
- A cloud-based system streamlines the work process
- Takes care of boring tasks so you can focus on your customers
- Allows multiple integrations to help you run your business better
Insightly
Many companies around the world use CRM software from Insightly. These companies are in many different fields, such as consulting, professional services, nonprofits, media and advertising, and more. With their CRM platform, Insightly wants to help you connect with your customers better and get your teams on the same page.
Features:
- Change the way you route leads and automate your workflow
- Follow milestones and keep track of processes
- Make dashboards and keep track of key metrics
- Model, capture, and manage any dataset
Insightly automates your CRM tasks so you can focus on the important work. With Insightly's CRM, a single action starts a chain reaction of other actions. Businesses know what to do next because data is updated, tasks are given to the right people, and emails are sent. Each step is automated and kept up to date so that everyone on your team knows what to do. It all comes together in one place.
Benefits
- Software for data management on the go
- You can choose from over 250 integrations and 3 plan levels, or you can bundle your marketing
- Security is taken seriously
Keap
A single CRM, sales automation, and marketing automation software that does it all. Keap, which used to be called Infusionsoft, is a business tool that helps automate CRM, sales, and marketing all in one package. You can choose from three options. You won't forget to follow up with leads and clients, which is one of their main selling points.
Features:
- Set up automated emails and texts
- Make a sales process that your team can use over and over
- Make appointments, keep track of leads, and send quotes with ease
- Automate your marketing tasks that you do often
- 30 integrations to make your processes run smoother
Keap is perfect for growing service-based businesses in the home, professional, and personal services sectors that are actively looking for new leads, want to track and manage them all in one place, and will be billing clients.
Benefits
- A separate line for your business that keeps your work calls and messages apart
- Set up campaigns to automate more complex tasks
- It has smart forms that make it easy to get the information you need.
Hubspot CRM
Hubspot CRM is one of the free CRM services you can use to get started. It makes it easier for your team to help customers and gets rid of friction in business processes. As a tax professional, you'll get all the tools you need to get more leads, speed up sales, and improve customer service.
Features:
- Dashboard for reporting and company insights
- Follow up on prospects and deals
- Pipeline management
- Live chat, email templates, and setting up meetings
- Contacts can be managed and organized in one place
- Ticketing and web forms
- Drag-and-drop editor
Hubspot does offer a lot more services, but some of those services and plans can cost more than $800 a month. You have to pay extra for the all-in-one service, but their CRM is pretty good on its own.
Benefits
- Their free, basic CRM can grow with you.
- Full visibility into your sales pipeline in real time
- The information from their database of more than 20 million businesses is automatically added to the contact records
- Even with the free plan, you get great customer service
Zoho Books
Zoho is an all-in-one, fully customizable CRM platform for growing businesses that handles everything from accounting to customer service. They help more than 150,000 businesses around the world grow their sales by turning leads into customers and keeping customers interested.
Features:
- Set up webinars, turn attendees into leads, and get reports on webinars
- Several dashboards, apps, and tools can be used to keep track of performance and goals.
- Use an internal portal to work with your team
- Find out about customer interactions in real time
- Automate and simplify tasks that you do over and over.
- Use workflows to take action right away
Businesses benefit from being able to stay ahead of the game with their many tools and from being able to keep all of their communication, even internal communication, in one place.
Benefits
- Use the platform to hold sales meetings and give presentations
- Tools that you can use from anywhere to help you work and plan
- There are hundreds of integrations to choose from, and you can even use your own.
What Are the Advantages of CRM for Accountants?
CRM tools are an important part of your marketing plan. Without a CRM, you're probably buried in sticky notes with scribbled customer information, random business card you can't remember who gave you, and a random way of building relationships with customers and moving them through the pipeline.
The ideal solution is CRM software. It gives you a place to keep track of all the information about your customers so you can see where they are on their journey with you and help them at any point. In fact, anyone in your company can do it, which is important if you want to provide the best customer service.
Conclusion
Without a CRM platform, your business can't grow as quickly because you won't be able to keep up. When you have to share information with multiple people on your team, you run the risk of information being lost or missed, and you'll get frustrated with how the information is broken up.
Customers also pay attention. When a business doesn't have a CRM solution in place, it's easy to tell. Customers might get one or more follow-up calls, or they might not get any at all. And if you don't get back to them soon enough, you'll lose them to your competitors. It's not a chance you should take. Sign up for Flowlu's free trial today to see what a CRM can do for your business.
