Accounting Website Design, Website Design, CPA Site Design, Operating Expenses, Accounting, Website,

When considering websites most folks think of them as marketing tools. This is just fine. Marketing is actually the central use of a proper accounting website design. Websites are especially intense instruments, though. By adding a few elementary pages and grasping the best way to apply them you can substantially reduce your operating expenses.

A "Track Your Refund" feature is easy to add to your website. Financial calculators are also easy. Get some interactive calculators to help your clients with their personal and family finances. Make sure your administrative assistants are familiar with these features so they can refer callers to the appropriate web pages. Once your clients are familiar with this content they'll quickly adapt to using it. A lot of unbillable phone hours can be eliminated by simply providing the information on your website.

Transition your communications to email. You've already begun the transition. You already rely on email for the vast bulk of your daily communications, but are you still wasting money on stuff like postage and printing? You can almost eliminate these costs completely by incorporating certain functions right into your accounting website design.

The first feature is your newsletter. You can post your newsletter online for free. Instead of mailing out a paper newsletter just send an email to your clients with a few article "teasers" and links back to the stories on your newsletter pages.

You'll save even more money around tax time. Are you still mailing out your annual tax organizers? Try distributing them over the internet instead! There's two very effective methods to accomplish this.

Let's look at the easy solution first. Post your tax organizer on your accounting website as a downloadable document. Use Adobe Acrobat to convert your tax organizer as a PDF file so Mac users can access them, too. This solution is the quickest, easiest, and cheapest solution. Your clients can just download the form, fill it out, and mail it back to you.

The other solution is much cooler, but also a lot trickier. You can set up your tax organizer as an online form that your clients can fill out and submit online. There are a lot of advantages to this method. You'll get better participation because your clients don't need to mail it back. Better yet, once the client is finished filling it out you get access to the results instantly. On the other hand this requires some advanced programming. For security reasons you can't use a standard email form. Instead you need to run the password protected form directly off the host server. Most small accounting firms won't want to deal with the advanced programming required to make this work.

The last thing I want to talk about is your file exchange. Secure file exchange will substantially improve your office's efficiency. No more traveling across town to pick up and deliver your clients Quickbooks discs, and no more expensive express deliveries. You can easily transfer this information securely and instantly over your website. Many accounting firms, especially ones with multiple offices, have taken this design concept a step further. They are actually running their accounting software right on a web server so they can access any clients data, any time, from any place, and in real time.

Accounting website design is actually for a whole lot more than simply marketing. Even a bad site will attract a few new clients into your firm, and a good website will rapidly become your primary marketing instrument. But there are slews of other ways your website can increase your profitability. If you make use of these methods your accounting website design will pay for itself in lower operating expenses and client retention even if it never brings in new clients.

Brian O'Connell is the CEO and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the nation's leading edge web companies oriented exclusively to accounting website design.