By Dustin Lubertazzi
Regional Consultant
The presentation of a ProfitCents report to a client is often times just as important, if not more, than the report itself. ProfitCents was designed to help small business owners understand financial statements and bridge the communication gap between client and accountant. The objective is not to merely recreate a financial statement, but rather provide a plain language interpretation of it. Business owners have varying levels of sophistication when it comes to financial data. Understandably so, some may be intimidated or overwhelmed by an eight-page narrative based on such data. As their accounting professional, you have the ability to highlight strengths and weaknesses of their business to help them understand what is most important.
Let’s take the Narrative report for example – eight pages of narrative analysis, graphs, charts and ratios. If simply handed a report, the typical business owner wouldn’t know where to begin. Instead, after generating the report, you can save it as a Microsoft Word document on your computer. From there, you have full copyright authority to alter the report in any way you see appropriate. I recommend that you simply copy and paste the most relevant pieces of the report into a separate one-page document. Use this concise summary as a guideline for the conversation you will have with your clients. This will show them you have taken a sincere interest and have a true understanding of their business. At the conclusion of the meeting, you can also provide the full-length report for them to keep as a reference. If you take an assertive approach to the presentation, you can expect more valuable conversations and more interest in consulting-type services.