Helping your clients through the corona virus crisis

It is during turbulent times like these that accountants should proactively reach out to clients to help them think through the impacts of the corona virus on their workforce and overall business financial health. Now is the time to truly show your clients that you care and that you are here to help them make the best decisions possible for their future.

Accountants should be helping clients understand both the current direct impact of business downturns and closures, as well as the longer-term impact of a recession and recovery. You can help your clients by doing any or all of the following:

• Assess the impact of the current business downturn. Should a client stay open? How long can they afford to stay open? You can’t make these decisions for a client, but you can help them do the projections and scenario analysis so that they are making an informed decision. Be sure to consider loan covenants and other potential liabilities that may not be top of mind for a business owner dealing with operational issues. You also don’t want a client to wait until they’ve exhausted all their funds (including personal) and thereby potentially put their own personal financial health at risk too.
• Help clients think through alternative business models. One strategy to deal with the crisis is to change (temporarily) the business model and interaction with customers. For example, restaurants that may not have previously offered delivery or that may not be perceived to offer take out, switching to offer these services. This could potentially help to alleviate the impact to the business’ employees as waitstaff could potentially be re-purposed to be phone order takers and delivery drivers. Changes like this, even temporarily, could help to offset employee wage loss while maintaining incoming cash flow. But it also opens up other risks, such as food handling and delivery temperature issues, or car accident liability—help your clients identify and mitigate these risks proactively. There may be additional business expenses like employee car mileage, that the business may now have to be able to track. Help your clients think through all these changes as well as the additional paperwork (e.g. expense reports) or apps (e.g. mileage trackers or expense reporting apps) and how to streamline the accounting flow for them.
• Be a second set of eyes for vendor proposals. As with any crisis there will be people out there who take advantage of the situation for profit. Offer to be a second set of eyes on contracts and proposals from vendors who are offering “solutions” to clients, whether financial, technological, or otherwise. While we aren’t lawyers, accountants can often spot contract clauses that may cause issues later when the client wants to terminate services or get their data back. My firm has also been working to raise clients’ cybersecurity awareness and potential risks of some of the free remote work solutions that are being offered to ensure that they are not opening up doors for a data breach or other issues that could compound the business impact of the virus.
• Understanding government financial relief options. It will be interesting to see what financial relief options and vehicles the government ends up enacting to help stabilize our economy. Be sure to keep informed of developments both at the federal and local levels so that you can properly advise clients of options and help them craft a recovery plan for their business. Hopefully that includes figuring out when they can re-open and how to ramp back up toward full operations. Depending on how the relief comes and consumer behavior, it may not make sense to immediately go back to full operations. (See the AICPA Coronavirus Resource Center for updates on federal government actions.)
• Being prepared for the next business interruption. Once there is more stability (which may be while the crisis is still going on but there’s no or low business activity), be sure to work with your clients on a business continuity plan. Think through various business interruption scenarios like hurricane, fire, floods, or a potential biological threat, and look at how your client’s business may need to adjust depending on the type of threat and business impacts. The best time to gather lessons learned is while the incident is fresh in people’s minds, so take the time now to analyze and learn from this crisis.

All of the above and be done via phone or even better using virtual meeting tools. The additional benefit of using the virtual meeting tools is that you can draw diagrams or work through spreadsheets with projections in real time together. If you use video, you can also see your client’s non-verbal reactions to suggestions or scenarios you propose. (See this article for info on the free remote work offerings from vendors if you aren’t already using a remote meeting tool.)

Provide your clients with peace of mind and hope

Many of us may feel powerless in the midst of the current corona virus crisis, but you can provide clients with Peace of Mind and Hope (see my article on these accounting services) in dealing with this crisis. If we focus on what we can control, and respond with reason and prudence, you can truly prove yourself to be an invaluable advisor to your clients. We can all get through this together!