What does it take to be a Firm of the Future 2017? Finalists Compared

Meet the finalists:

Intuit’s Firm of the Future competition is an interesting snapshot of the firms that Intuit considers to best represent the future of the profession. Intuit doesn’t fully disclose how it selects firms but we can reverse engineer what matters.

Digital First asked each finalist questions about their business model such as pricing and cloud penetration, and the technology stack they use to run their businesses. The results are in the table below.

Business model

All four finalists are small firms averaging 10 employees and most are more than 10 years old with between 100 to 150 clients. The majority of their clients are in the cloud and also on the same product, QuickBooks Online. In the debate about multi-vendor firms, Intuit’s Firms of the Future trend towards supporting a single vendor.

There are several ways to read this. The more you support one vendor the better support you will receive in return. And the more clients on the same system the easier it is to operate your business. You only need one set of processes for your staff to follow and can focus your efforts on improving that system, rather than spreading it over multiple systems, interfaces and support requests.

All the finalists have plenty of experience at selling their services under fixed fee or value pricing agreements. However, selling management reporting is still a relatively low percentage of their business.

The ratio of staff to clients hovers between 15-22 clients per employee. The firm most successful at selling management reporting has a correspondingly lower number of clients, perhaps indicating the extra effort involved.

Table 1: Business model

Name	All That Counts	Business Works UK LTd	Business Cents Inc	AIS Solutions
Location of company (City and Country)	Sydney, Australia	Garforth, England	Spokane, WA	Burlington, Canada
Pricing	Mainly fixed fee	Mainly fixed fee	Mainly fixed fee	Mainly fixed fee
What % of your clients are on QBO? (est.)	85%	60%	96-98%	96%
What % of your clients are on cloud accounting software? (est.)	100%	65%	98%	100% – remaining 4% are hosted QBDT
How long have you been in business?	13 years	8 years	9+ years	17 years
Age of principal (est.)	46	50	55	–
How many years have you sold fixed fee services?	4 years	8 years	2 years	7 years
No. of staff	5	9	7	12
No. of clients	100-120 (includes consulting + project work)	150	150	–
Staff to client ratio	1:15	1:17	1:22	1:20
What % of clients buy management reporting on a monthly basis? (est.)	60%	10%	>25%	–
Do you outsource any bookkeeping or accounting work?	No	No	No	No

Technology Stack

The four finalists have moved all their systems to the cloud as well. DropBox is the most popular document storage though not the only one. AIS Solutions uses four services to send files to its clients. It looks like accountants and bookkeepers will be dealing with multiple storage locations for some time yet.

Expense tracking is another category where multiple apps are common for at least two of the firms. AIS Solutions and All That Counts have found use cases for Receipt Bank, HubDoc and Expensify within the one firm.