Sky’s The Limit

It’s a bigger world for local accounting firms these days. Staying within the confines of traditional services is a thing of the past as new market opportunities have opened up and accounting executives have come up with innovative strategies to grow their businesses. Many have been proactively growing advisory service lines to include litigation support, bankruptcy consulting, business valuations, business management and other consulting services. Increasing regulations and the growing complexity of state and local taxes has also driven firms to create entire divisions to deal with specialty tax issues including hiring credits and the enterprise zone program, as well as federal credits pertaining to renewable energy sources. “The more services, and the more broad your services are, the more you can truly help your clients as a whole, you’re not just providing them one service and then they have to go somewhere else, instead you can give them the whole package,” said Michael Kaplan, a partner at Miller Kaplan Arase and Co. His firm has found a niche among high net worth clients, many of them in the media and entertainment industries, and offers these clients a long list of services beyond the traditional tax and compliance issues. These include business management services (Kaplan was recently named among the top business managers in L.A. by the Hollywood Reporter) and royalty and participation audits as well as audits of other business managers. “Normal business management firms don’t necessarily do that, they have to outsource those types of services, whereas here our clients can come to us and they get tax and estate planning, trust planning, they’ve got business management, they’ve got their royalty and licensing, all of those types of services are all taken care of in one place,” he said. A burgeoning field, business management is an area that smaller accounting firms tend to stay away from. A business manager takes care of all the finances for an individual, from the mundane every day things like collecting their cash receipts and paying their bills, to overseeing their investments and their investment strategies, dealing with attorneys, agents, looking at their contracts, and dealing with insurance brokers. Miller Kaplan Arase and Co. breaks the mold of traditional accounting firms even more by offering unique media measurement services for clients, which includes research of market advertiser expenditures and monitoring of the growth or decline in advertising spending. Technology Expanding beyond traditional audit and tax services continues to be a way for both large regional accounting firms and small and medium sized firms, to increase revenues in a changing and challenging environment. As technology becomes increasingly pervasive in the accounting practice, there is also a growing trend toward specialization in Information Technology consultative fields, said Bob Green, a partner in SingerLewak’s Risk Management Services Practice. Green is among the growing number of accountants who holds a CITP (Certified Information Technology Professional) credential from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants which distinguishes him as a CPA who bridges the gap between technology and accounting. Green said SingerLewak is unique in that within the risk management services practice, they not only know about the controls and compliance side of technology they are also experts on the actual practice of technology, meaning they can implement or design accounting software for a client. “Not a lot of firms are doing both,” he said. In fact, most firms rely on an external expert for their IT audit functions however, SingerLewak and others are growing and profiting as a result of having these specialized services in-house.