I’ve done strategic planning for organizations of all kinds: public, private, growing corporations seeking IPO, and nonprofits. At the core of this work is financial modeling and forecasting. It doesn’t so much matter the type of business—the work is essentially the same:

We’ve had a great year teaming up with Mark Wickersham to help more accountants adopt value-based pricing for advisory services in their firms. In the past few years, these two concepts have grown from buzzwords to important strategies for accountants, helping them get paid fairly for their services in a changing industry.

LivePlan’s mission is to help people succeed in business, both accountants and their small business clients, which makes QuickBooks Connect the ideal conference for us.

We’ve just released some exciting updates to LivePlan that make it easier to create new financial forecasts. We’ve also given you a new option to forecast cost of goods sold and improved how we provide help.

Few professional experiences can be quite as exciting, rewarding, or potentially overwhelming as starting a new business. As a new business owner, you’re going to need all the practical and impartial advice you can get.

Small businesses want help from accountants on strategic planning and financial forecasting. This word cloud represents a summary of popular responses from small businesses when we asked them this question:

“If you could get help in one area of your business right now, what would it be?”

A SWOT analysis is an incredibly simple, yet powerful tool to help you develop your business strategy, whether you’re building a startup or guiding an existing company.

When starting a new business, surely your focus needs to be on getting the business and the product up and running. You only have a few employees at most, so there’s nothing to worry about on the “people” front.

Right? Wrong.

Summer break is ending, and I can feel it.

With three weeks remaining before the beginning of a new school year, there is a need to get it all in! There were big expectations for our summer plan: night time bike rides and star gazing, s’mores, family reading, and pool time. Maybe a trip to the mountains, and if we are applying stretch goals, the ocean too!

You and your business partner decided to go into business together for a number of reasons—probably in part to leverage each of your strengths so you’re more likely to succeed.

Ongoing collaboration is essential to your mutual success. In this ultimate guide to business partner collaboration, we’ll go over how to improve your collaboration and communication skills so you can grow your business together.

We’ve all sat through that horrible powerpoint presentation that’s nothing but bullets in 10 point font.

It’s not just boring—it’s mind-numbing. The information presented is usually hard to understand and nearly impossible to remember.

And it’s not just elevator pitch-type presentations that suffer this malady. When you get that stack of financial reports or that huge Excel file that’s nothing but numbers, most us of tend to tune out.

Scaling New Heights 2018 was a great experience! It’s always a true pleasure talking with customers face to face and reconnecting with industry peers. It’s also fascinating to see how the industry is growing and shifting year over year. This year there were a few big takeaways for me.

The accounting industry has seen rapid growth and change in the last five years. The message to accountants is clear: client advisory services are the focus.