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Profit Preparation Essay

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How Selling Your Tax Services Can Actually Hurt Your Profits

How can selling your tax preparation services hurt your profits? Aren't you supposed to be selling your services? How else can you stay in business if you're not selling? While selling your services may look like a good idea on the surface, it's the way you sell and market that could actually end up costing you in profits.

Here's how: For one thing, when you sell and promote yourself as a tax professional you're locking yourself into a limited pay scale. There are only so many hours in the day and there is only so much money you'll be able to make off each return. Once you've completed the return, you're waiting on the client to call you back. If you're offering service year…show more content…
Think beyond the simple tax return and begin to promote yourself as a package deal. This enables you to move away from simply doing tax returns and into a flat fee per project rate. Your package will spell out all of the ancillary services and bonuses that you do to help your prospect and clients. For example, when working on your client's tax return, there may be some research required. How many sites, books, web pages, worksheets and forms do you have to locate, research, and collect?

Be sure to list all of these steps in your proposal, so your client can see what is actually involved in working on the project. Don't assume that your clients know. Next, you'll want to evaluate how long it takes you to gather all of the necessary information from your client. Did you speak on the phone? For how long? Did you meet face to face and for how long? All of this takes up your time for which you should get paid for. Your connections and network counts for something too. Businesses have a variety of needs and while they may be in need of a tax professional, they may also be in need of a loan, bookkeeper, or some other services. By building your list of trusted vendors, you then can offer your clients the additional bonus of being able to refer them to quality vendors. Alternatively, you could team up with
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