Hi, it's Darren Root here again. Welcome back to our episode 4 of our Accountant Connect certification. Rhonda, welcome back. Thank you, Darren, excited to be here. We have some exciting things to share in this next module. We do. This one has a lot to it, it really does. We're going to talk about the concept of client insights. I love the idea of having insights on my clients. What I love about that Rhonda is, it's insights that allow me as an advisor to go from being reactive to proactive. Most firms I've talked to over the years and even firm that I have, you sit there and you've always waited for somebody call you and ask you for something. It's client insights that allow you to know something. You think of a lot of the tech platforms out there today, whether it's on-demand videos or buying online, they're surfacing up things that you think you might like. The way they do that is through essentially insights and what your buying habits or watching habits are, those sort of things have been. We're going to talk about this concept of client insights and how that can help you become. The title of this session is better advising with analysis tools, so we're going to dig into being a better advisor, adding value potentially with additional products. We're going to touch on this. We're going to talk about productizing this section, but we're going to talk in Section 5 even more about some of the products that you can add on. Then we want to get in and talk a little bit about compensation benchmarking. Tell me, Rhonda, you guys do several million paychecks every single week, right? To say the least, yes, we definitely do. We pay one in six Americans across the country. We have a wealth of data and we have a team within ADP that specializes in curating that data and looking for trends and bubbling that up in meaningful ways. Compensation benchmarking is one of the tools that our data Cloud team actually sells, but we give it here at Accountant Connect to you for free. Awesome. We'll talk about that, we'll show you how to look at that, and then we'll hop into industry insights. Industry insights is one of those things that I've always found that my SMB clients were always really interested in, how am I doing compared to other people and things like that. We'll talk about the IBISWorld industry reports, wrap up talking about a tool in here around business valuation, and then even talk about some calculators that are in here. Are you ready to kick off today, Rhonda? Yeah, let's go. Let's do it. On the left, let's just talk about analysis tools at a high-level one and what you were thinking there, Rhonda, as you created that. I've been working very closely with our accounting partners over the years and you mentioned it in the opening statements, the demands of your clients to push you towards the advisory services. They come to you for the answers, and we really want to give you the data that you can help serve your clients. That was the intent here is to give you some tools that can help you advise your clients, and this whole section is dedicated to that. If we just start with the concept of client insights. We're on analysis tools right now and we're going to click on Client Insights, which is really just what it says it is, it's client insights. Talk through what all we're seeing here. This is a really valuable area. We give you the client list and you can have easy access from the dashboard. This is taking those same set of clients and trying to bubble up some trends and some summaries for you, so you can easily understand your book of business that's with ADP. You can quickly at a glance see of all your clients using ADP, what payroll solution they're currently leveraging, you can also look at which of your clients are adding new jurisdictions. Where we are, employees can work anywhere so your client could add a new jurisdiction, and that could have implications for that client that you need to be aware of. We want to bubble that up as well. Employee trends, what's going on with your clients? I'm sure you're staying in touch with them but you might not meet with them every month, and you could quickly see are they having an attrition problem? Are they growing in their new compliance or implications for their growth and employee? These high-level trends at the top of the client insights is really to give you just a quick summary, what's going on with my client base with ADP. What action items, Ron, do you think these insights would prompt for people? I think I get the jurisdictions. But what kind of action items are you seeing firms take as a result of any of these insights? We're just looking at payroll product to start. You can see, what if the client terminated and you didn't know, and they stop doing their payroll at ADP? That's something that you need to know. You can drill into that and see who has terminated. In terms of employee trends, this is also very helpful because this could be a trigger event to use some of the other tools that are available in analysis tools. If you notice that they are having an attrition issue and they're losing employees, this might trigger you to say, hey, let me go look at compensation benchmarking , or industry insights. Are they not paying competitively? This could lead you into a compensation advisory service like; are you paying your employees? Are you really being competitive in the market with what you're paying? Look at their overall employees and their tenure and the benefits that they offer. Employee trends can be a real trigger to say, hey, let me dig into this a little further. What is standard for the industry in terms of compensation and tenure? Is this normal behavior? What's going on with my client? I should maybe reach out and see how they're doing. As I mentioned as I teed up the section, Rhonda, it's the concept of going from being reactive, you're the payroll processor or you're just getting payrolls done to being that proactive advisor. We're talking about advising, using these tools to advise. It's a mindset shift, I think, that everyone in the firm has to have. The reality is it's typically the processor that is in Accountant Connect and they're the ones who are seeing this information. You may have a partner in your firm that's not in Accountant Connect very often, so they may not be seeing this information. What we want to get all of our users looking at is this information and thinking about how can I make a client's life better by these insights that are being surfaced? If they're not a client anymore, that gives you a reason to reach out or if they stopped providing payroll for whatever reason, it gives you a reason to reach out, or if their employees are trending down, again it gives you a reason to reach out and be proactive. You know in the old days we just had to wait for a client to eventually call us and then we did something. Today, the insights are being surfaced, we want to give you the tools to reach out to people. Does that makes sense, Rhonda? That makes sense. It also triggers another thought like, yes, Accountant Connect is like a processing powerhouse where you can come here, you can get easy access and you can go through your clients and process payroll or access their accounting software, you can do a lot. There might be different functions in your firm, and I think Accountant Connect has something to offer for various roles within your firm, so certain people might come in for certain purposes. But there's a lot to offer here for other members of your firm, so encourage them to say, hey, there's other stuff in here it's really not my wheelhouse, but hey, Mr. Partner, this would be really valuable information, I think you should take a look, and it's free to you to be able to access anytime. I can't understate that. This really is a mindset shift inside the firm though to being proactive. It is. You got to be proactive to take advantage of this information. What we hear over and over from SMBs is they want the accounting firm to be more proactive. They want them to be that advisor to them, so this is a toolset that helps with that. I want to talk a little bit, Rhonda, about adding some value with additional products. Staying on the same screen, we see down below that there's some additional products. In section 5, we'll talk more about these additional products, but right now really what I want to hit on is just what the screen's all about, showing the lay of the land as to what products your firm is using or your clients are using. Exactly. You may be tracking this information manually in your firm, it's like this client is with ADP and they currently have retirement and time. But this gives it to you on an automated fashion. You can quickly come and see, here's all my clients that are with ADP, and here are the additional services they have. It's really, again, just giving you that high-level view of your book of business. You don't have to dig, you don't have to maintain it manually, it's all right here for you to reference. Again, we're on the Client Insights tab. There's just a wealth of information here about your clients that gives you the tools to reach out to them. Let's take a moment now, Rhonda, and go to compensation benchmarking. I love this section anyway. Talk about this a little bit. Again, this is leveraging everybody that ADP pays. We take that data anonymized, of course, and we are able to determine trends. You can come in here and you can look at specific industry. You can look at different size companies and you can select a region and you can drill down so you can figure out what is the average salary for an accountant based in New Jersey. If you want to look at your own compensation strategy, ''Am I paying too much, am I not paying enough? "or ''My clients, how are they compensating their employees?'' One tip that I'd like to say here is there's lots of filter options. Start at the highest level, and then drill down. As you do that, you're going to see the data change, and it will tell you the data being displayed, how many organizations, and how many employees. I encourage you to stay at the higher level and then drill down and watch as the population shrinks because you have to think about the labor market, especially today, it's across the country. Somebody could be living in California but looking for a job in New Jersey and anybody can work anywhere. You've got to look at the higher level and then drill down as it's really important, don't start by drilling down because it's going to give you a very small view. Also, it could apply for a chef as well or a specific job just because I'm currently a Product Manager in technology who's focused on payroll solutions, my job is transferable to other industries. Just be careful how you use this data, but there is a wealth of knowledge in here. As you go down, you can see what the median base salary is, the total cash compensation. What's the average over time for a specific position in a specific location? What are the bonuses being paid for different positions? There's just a lot of data here that you can drill into and really interpret. This is where you're really good at, interpreting data and drilling into the data. Use your natural skills to drill in and really help your clients here. There's a lot of information even goes down into tenure, a lot of really great information here. Again, Rhonda, I'm going to keep reiterating that the user of this information inside the firm needs to become more proactive. There's a wealth of data here. Just imagine for a moment, if you became a consultant to your payroll clients as opposed to only processing, but you're still processing but you're also becoming a consultant to that client. Talking to them about, ''Here's what we're seeing. Here's the information that we're seeing across the country.'' I mean that this would be huge, I think for the SMB client to get this kind of data coming from the firm, don't you think? I think so and there's some great tools in here. You can explore, you can use it as a deliverable to your client, and have used it as a talking guide as you're meeting with them, so there's really great opportunities in here for you to leverage this data. We're going to talk in Section 5 about the concept of productizing some of these and turning them actually into a product and I think that'll be a lot of fun. Let's move on. We've talked about compensation benchmarking. Let's talk about industry insights and what the difference between those two are. Sure. I love industry insights because, within compensation benchmarking, you're looking at one job title in an industry or region. Industry insights is really powerful and that you select the industry and the region, and it's going to give you in one snapshot, the top jobs in that industry. Think of the shortcut. You could search through each one individually on compensation benchmarking or you could look at industry insights and say, ''Here's my industry in my region, I want to know what's happening with the top jobs in that area.'' It's going to give you those two tabs of data there. There's the metrics that tell you overall, what's going on in that industry, in the specific region you selected and you can edit that at any time. What's the turnover rate headcount by age, female percentage, span of control, tenure, employee contributions from a benefit perspective, benefit coverage? There's a lot of information there that's at the high level about the specific industry and the region that you selected. But when you move to top jobs, that gives you the quick snapshot of all the jobs. Let's say, you have a client come to you and they're thinking about opening up a new business in a new area or maybe in a different state or they currently have multiple pizzerias, but they want to open a bakery. You can say, well, "let's look at what that's going to cost you from a compensation perspective." Really powerful opportunities for you to leverage this data and we just recently added industry insights in here. Really great tool. I know, in a lot of cases, people taking the certification course may be saying, "That's just more than I want to get into. I just need to come in and get my job done." What I would encourage you to do is make sure other people inside your firm who are doing maybe the consulting work that may or may not be you. They understand that this data is in here because you can add them as a user. Then, like I said, as we talk about in section 5, we can talk about how to productize these and really make this a win for your firm. As we move across Rhonda, the page, let's get into IBISWorld Industry Reports. Can you just one, tell us what that is and then two, what what's inside of it? Sure. We partner with IBIS, who is a great provider of just general industry reports. You might specialize in a specific industry or you've got a client that's in a new industry and you need to learn more about it, you can come here and you can get these industry reports. We feature in Accountant Connect ten of the most popular industry reports in the most popular industries but if you don't see one, I think we have access to nearly 300 of them. You can always reach out to your dedicated representative and they will get the report to you if you don't see the industry that you're interested in here, but there's really great information in here. It can be a deliverable to your client. You can say, "Hey, take a look at what's happening in your industry." At the end of each of the reports, there's also a really nice section which has questions and answers that you can use to guide your conversation with your clients. If advising is new to you, there's actually some tips at the bottom of these industry reports that I think are really helpful in making sure you're having really helpful, meaningful conversations with your clients. Last tab under Analysis Tools is business valuation. Again, I believe there's another partnership with BizEquity, but let's just walk through what business valuation's all about. Sure. This is really cool tool. I think it's an exclusive partnership with ADP and you get a discount from accessing it through Accountant Connect. But imagine you have a client that is considering retiring or looking to sell their business, performing a business valuation can be quite time-consuming and labor-intensive. This tool and the service and I've seen demos of it, allows you to do it in literally minutes or hours. Something that could take you weeks, which I'm sure we'll talk more about how you can productize that in leveraging this tool, but really valuable. You want to make sure your clients are making wise decisions about their businesses. Maybe they're saying, "I'm going to retire. I'm just going to leave that to my son." What's the value that you're actually leaving or if you're looking to sell it, what should you be looking in terms of selling your business if you're ready to retire? There's lots of good implications for how you can leverage this exclusive partnership and it's a really cool tool that again saves time. Time is money, and this is a really nice time-saver. As we wrap up the analysis tools. Rhonda, again, I know I keep saying this, but there's a lot of information here from client insights to compensation bench marking to industry insights. All this stuff is great stuff. If you've taken the certification course, you need to make sure this gets in the right hands to the right person inside the firm. If it's not, you, make sure that they take the certification course and they have user access into Accountant Connect so they can use these tools to be better advisors to your clients. That's what this is all about. Let's wrap up Rhonda, with just overview of the calculators. I think the calculators provide some nice value to people. Exactly. You may google these, if you need to go in and calculate an hourly paycheck but we have them all here for you within Accountant Connect so you can have quick access to them when you're working with your clients. We have a host of payroll calculators. We also have some 401-K, retirement calculators, and then some other calculators as well. ADPs, R&D tax calculator and we also have a calculator with our partner BizEquity so you can quickly go through these different calculators. Some of them will take you out of the site like the IRS withholding calculator, but we just keep that all centralized in one place so that you don't have to go searching for what you need when you're trying to help your client through whatever need they might have. Awesome Rhonda, great job as always. We're really trying to make sure that firms have tools they need to become that better advisor because advisory services seems to be where it's at right now. We want to give you the tools, make sure you have the tools to become that better advisor. Thanks, Rhonda. Thanks, Darren.
