How we Pre-Billed 100% of our PPP Work and Still Sleep at Night

Of the gifts endowed to accountants, the ability to ask for things is not among them. Three things you’ll need to sidestep the PPP billing headache:

1. A product;
2. A sales channel;
3. A way to drive clients to the sales channel.

✨ A Product

Never productized your services before? It’s easier than you think! PPP forgiveness support will be comprised of:

• Calculators — The AICPA’s forgiveness calculator is a safe place to start.
• Forgiveness Application — The forms themselves;
• A Personalized Summary — This could be the delivery email, or the delivery phone call. This is an opportunity to apply your unique brand of razzle dazzle.

Maximum razzle-dazzle achieved

In our case, we’re providing weekly reporting to clients on an ongoing basis. We wanted delivery to be asynchronous (no-phone), standardized (no ad-hoc delivery emails), and something that sparkles in a sales channel.

It doesn’t need to be beautiful. It can be an excel spreadsheet. Just make it you.

Still intimidated? We open-sourced our initial design. Between the AICPA, the SBA, and #taxtwitter, you’ve got all the tools you need.

Advanced tactics: Give your customer options. Provide a free tier, the MVP, and a premium tier. We provided a generous free tier, and it it gave us the confidence to bill aggressively for the other two tiers. This guide for creating pricing structures includes a handy template creator.

💎 A Sales Channel

Your clients want your help. A sales channel gives them a way to opt-in to the support they know they need. A few options:

• Sign-up links on your website — A standard side-by-side service offering. Include a sign-up link that asks the client to complete a simple form.
• A single-page landing site — Is your website a headache to update? Does it stink in general? Take 10 minutes to create a single-page landing site with Carrd. It’s free, and gives you a purpose-built landing page for PPP support that you won’t be ashamed of.
• Mass Email — You can simply use email for this, describing the different service offerings, and providing a link to a sign-up form. The downside to this approach is emails are visually limited, and email clients display emails differently. The client needs to visualize the deliverable, and that’s easiest with a website.

Advanced tactics: Send a Practice Ignition proposal as quickly as possible via Zapier/Integromat automation and PI templates. Your client is ready to cut the check, don’t make them wait. If you haven’t used Practice Ignition, there has never been a better time. It’s a one-off project. If you don’t like PI, then don’t come back to it. If you do like PI, this test will inform a larger-scale transition of your revenue cycle.

📢 A way to drive clients to the sales channel

You‘ll need a mechanism to drive clients to your sign-up. Two options:

• Webinar — The easiest way to communicate why they need your help. Build a webinar that provides value to your clients, points out the technical headaches of the PPP, and directs them to your landing page if they want hands-on support. Three months ago we had never done a webinar. We’ve done 5 since then, and over a third of our small business clients, 200–250 have attended each one. They love it for some reason.
• Mass Email — Although more difficult, a mass email can communicate the importance of receiving PPP support. What are the gotchas you fear your clients will stumble into? Outline those concerns, and link back to a landing page, or the sign-up forms.

Advanced tactics: Record your webinar, and distribute it unapologetically. Put it in your email signature, send follow-up emails with a link if people weren’t able to make the webinar. You wouldn’t believe the ROI you can generate from a single webinar, when clients are hungry for help.

👹Fears

I feel bad billing for anything COVID-related
This is a valid concern, and something everyone must wrestle with individually. We’re all going to do free work during this process because there are people that need it, but doing some free work is not the same as doing all your work for free.

I’m afraid I will over-commit myself
Put a hard-limit on the number of clients you will support at each tier. For those who don’t sign-up, tell them you will do your best to support them on an hourly basis. The distinction is you can’t pro-actively look out for non-subscribers, because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

I don’t have the confidence/technical skills/time to do a webinar
Clients are familiar with zoom now, and if you can run a Zoom call, you can run a Zoom webinar. Presenting is a learned skill, but your clients will never give you more grace than they will now. You hold the keys to PPP forgiveness, you’re a superhero in their eyes. It takes a bit of time to build a slide deck, but the ROI on a webinar can be tremendous. Record the webinar, put a link in your email, and reuse that recording wherever possible.

What do I do when the is PPP extended to 16 or 24 weeks?
Make the scope of the agreement very clear. We provide our clients with weekly reporting for 8 weeks. If that 8 weeks changes, we will simply reduce the frequency of the reporting for our clients. If you are providing forgiveness application support, define the limits to that support.

What about agent fees?
Agents aren’t allowed to bill for application support, but restrictions only apply if you received agent fees. If you received agent fees, congratulations. Secondly, the first set of PPP IFRs indicate agent fees are “for assistance in preparing an application for a PPP loan”. Because this is in reference to the initial loan application, our interpretation is the restriction only applies to supporting clients through the initial loan application process.

I don’t think I have the technical skills to set this up
Ask for help! The accountant community is nothing if not generous. The software tools referenced above have support teams standing by to help, and my DMs are always open.

There you have it! There has never been a better time to try something new in the name of reaching more clients, more efficiently.

If this proved helpful, connect with me on Twitter. I’ve got some additional PPP reporting tools on the way that may come in handy.