More than two years ago, Diane Yetter, CPA and president of Chicago-based Yetter Consulting Services Inc., had disparate software systems for keeping track of her clients' needs, projects, history, contact information and billing. Then she hired an IT consultant to custom-build her practice an online customer relationship management system so she could find all the information she needed in one location.
"We used to do all our billing out of QuickBooks, tracking and proposals in Excel, and all these other programs for everything else," said Yetter. "It performs real-time tracking, so you can see where things are at when you're on a client project. It cut payroll down from four hours to one hour and billing from eight to two hours. It really meets our needs."
CRM solutions are considered "front-office" applications because they not only manage client data, but also allow customers to interact directly with their data - changing their address, entering in their credit card information, or expressing their purchase preferences.
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As a result, there has been an upswing in CPA firms, as well as small to midsized businesses, investing in CRM packages.
CRM technology is becoming more mobile and feature-rich, making it a core software product, said Anne Stanton, CPA and president of the Norwich Group, a national business and tech consulting group. An AMR Research paper stated that about a third of all SMBs with 250 to 499 employees and 19 percent of SMBs with up to 250 employees had CRM solutions.
"What's happening to the mid-to-larger-sized firms is that there is a drive, a need, to do sales and marketing and to keep more details on [their] customers," said Stanton. "The small firms need more tools than larger firms. In a five-person firm, those five people are doing everything from sales to tax prep, auditing and visionary work for the firm. They want and need more centralization when it comes to their clients."
AMR also reported that "software-as-a-service" or SaaS - a hosted solution where the software provider oversees everything from maintenance to data storage and security - is gaining momentum among SMBs, with 50 percent of those companies with 250 to 499 employees using a hosted CRM solution and 43 percent planning on using a hosted solution. Lower upfront costs, ease of use and the low maintenance costs associated with hosted versions make the SaaS model the most appealing to SMBs, said the Boston-based research group.
Yetter's custom-built solution is online, so data stored in the CRM system is never off-limits if someone is out of town or not in the office.
The choice between a hosted solution and an on-premise or server-based solution can depend on a number of factors: the level of customization that a firm or company needs, the integration abilities of the product to the back-office accounting system, or how feature-rich the customer wants the application to be.
