An accountant plays a vital role in running a business. They help track income and expenditures and ensure statutory compliance. They provide investors and management with quantitative financial information to be used in making business decisions. Whether you are an accountant for a publicly traded company, a small private business, or just a freelance accountant that helps multiple people, utilizing a VoIP phone system can help you be reachable, productive, and organized. Accountants need to have a robust phone solution to help them deliver clear and concise information. From there, they can assess business performance and make smart financial decisions.
How Can an Accountant Benefit from Using VoIP?
Whether you’re an independent accountant or part of a larger firm, you can make the switch to a VoIP phone system to enhance productivity and lessen costs. Features such as call recording and live analytics ensure that the right information is getting to the clients. Through a robust VoIP phone solution, accountants can perform their tasks in a smooth and efficient way. They are able to use powerful productivity features such as voicemail, business SMS, video conferencing and more.
CallHarbor also offers a free Google Chrome extension that integrates with CRMs such as Salesforce, Redtail and Zoho. We have dozens on integrations, and are adding more monthly. Integrating with a CRM can allow an accountant to keep detailed notes on their clients. In this way, the accountants can automatically retrieve important client information during calls and use this to deliver a higher level of personalized service. They can also utilize click-to-call, and screen pops.
If your accountant firm has remote employees or satellite offices, VoIP can help keep everyone connected. Using features such as ring groups, inner-office chat, and conference calling, people at all locations can stay in the loop. With CallHarbor’s included mobile app and web softphone capabilities, an accountant can utilize their business phone number from anywhere. With these features, VoIP can help you effectively communicate with clients by having option to take the call from wherever you are.
Key Features That Enhance Service & Productivity for an Accountant
VoIP systems are have powerful and easy to use features that can help an accountant deliver top-notch service. Whether your customer is a bank, small business, or neighbor, you’ll give them unmatched customer service with VoIP. You can read our separate blog post here for more specific details on how VoIP and UCaaS help you give better customer service.
There are a number of specific VoIP features that can help accountants handle day-to-day time tracking. Features such as call reports, call analytics, call routing, and others will help with the important logging. This way, companies can easily see how much time was devoted to complete the projects for each client, and bill them accordingly for the services performed.
Another great feature that CallHarbor includes is find me/follow me, or answering rules. Setting your personalized answering rules will help an account stay connected to their clients at all times. This feature, also known as call hunting, and sometimes call forwarding, makes sure that you and your company won’t miss an important call. It allows you to route and re-route a call through a series of numbers until it has either been answered, or reaches your voicemail. You can also choose to ring multiple lines simultaneously. Check out a screenshot below of our answering rules section of our customer portal.
VoIP Helps an Accountant Reduce Costs
We know that accountants are good at crunching the numbers, so we’re bringing the hard facts on why switching to VoIP is financially beneficial. Not only are VoIP systems traditionally cheaper when comparing month to month costs, but with CallHarbor, there are also NO upfront costs, no costs associated to installation, support, or service, and free training.
VoIP phone systems allow voice and data communications to run over a single network. This greatly reduces infrastructure costs by eliminating the need for a dedicated phone line. With a VoIP system, you call via your existing Internet connection, so there’s no need for outdated copper wires.
The average savings a businesses should expect from adapting a VoIP system can range a lot. It depends on factors including the business size and what system they were using before. Ballpark estimates put the saving at between 30% and 50%. The biggest savings will be seen by companies getting rid of their on-premise phone system for a cloud-based one. On top of this, VoIP costs will decline as much as 5% annually. VoIP is already cheap, but it’ll get cheaper in the future, thanks to new advancements and consolidation. Estimates from Gartner show that prices for cloud telephony can be expected to decline by between 3% and 5% annually.
Switching to a hosted VoIP service means eliminating all on-premise server equipment. Instead of housing equipment at every office location, businesses can access a virtual phone system for all operations. They can do this without purchasing any new equipment. Switching to a hosted phone system means that you never have to worry about system updates or maintenance issues.