Best Practices
We suggest the following best practices when using CCH Axcess Advisor.
Get Advisor events delivered to your inbox
After opting in from the Advisor events list settings pane, you will begin receiving weekly email notifications about new and updated Advisor events. This will help avoid potential advisory opportunities going un-noticed.
Focus on advisory opportunities during tax preparation
Review impactful Advisor events from within your current CCH Axcess Tax 1040 return. These events show up in the Tax Return Dashboard for staff users who are licensed for CCH Axcess Advisor. The list of events can serve as a reminder to make updates to your current tax return, or to schedule a meeting with your client to discuss additional advisory opportunities. The editorial content linked to the event will help you determine to how to take next steps.
Create an agenda for client meetings
Having taken note of the CCH Axcess Advisor events that impact your current return, and deciding to schedule a meeting with your client, use the Client Dashboard to view the events that affect your client based on all their current- and prior-year returns. Presenting clients with a holistic view of their tax situation is a great way to increase customer service which may lead to additional revenue-generating advisory opportunities.
Establish a team and process for triaging new events.
Consider limiting CCH Axcess Advisor access to those staff members whose responsibility it is to monitor and report on new Advisor events. These team members should meet regularly to review recent Advisor events and client communication. They can then determine which events and staff are best positioned to help the firm meet organizational goals.
During these meetings, use the filters and view options in the Advisor Events and Affected Clients lists to narrow the scope of work produced by each event. For instance, viewing only Missouri and Illinois tax events might help you decide whether to focus on state rather than Federal events. Alternatively, viewing the events tagged as “Favorite” can be a great way to streamline the meeting.
Let contextual data drive your path forward.
For a more tactical approach to triaging Advisor events, add columns to the Affected Clients list that provide important context for each tax client. For example, one event may provide a column for student loan interest deduction reported, while another may include a column for corporate income tax. These additional data columns, which are specific to each event, can help you made informed decisions about which opportunities to pursue. Drill down even further into the list to identify the clients who need special attention by using columns to filter the list. For example, to review your high net-worth clients, begin by filtering the "Adjusted Gross Income” column to be greater than $100,000.
Use the provided client letters and downloadable PDFs in your communications.
Each Advisor event provides a client letter that can be edited, personalized, or used in part for other communications. For instance, the summaries and calls-to-action in each client letter may generate interest as social media posts. To communicate with a large set of clients, you can use the mail merge functionality in Microsoft® Office to generate letters in batches.
To drive intra-office communication, you can download a PDF of an event and attach the PDF to emails and chat sessions. Click the
on an event to download a PDF.
Use Microsoft® Excel® to generate work plans and mailing lists.
The affected clients lists for each Advisor event provide valuable opportunities to provide better customer service, mitigate risks, and drive revenue. These lists become even more useful when combined with the powerful sorting and filtering capabilities of Microsoft® Excel®. Viewing the affected clients lists with an eye for tax return type, industry, email, or any of the unique reporting definitions (ie. adjusted gross income) makes the list more actionable and ready to integrate with third-party email marketing tools.
Use CCH Axcess Advisor APIs to integrate with your own tools and dashboards.
CCH Axcess Advisor APIs give you the ability to export events and affected clients lists to third-party platforms and tools via the CCH
Some popular use cases for these APIs include exporting the email addresses in affected clients lists to your preferred customer relationship manager or email marketing tool.
Track your projects in CCH Axcess Workflow.
Some Advisor events may generate a large number of complex projects. Workflow can help you manage the work needed to drive such projects to completion, increase staff productivity, and help you measure profitability and client services for each Advisor event.
We recommend creating project templates, which function as project blueprints, that are tailored to your Advisor projects to ensure consistency and conformity to organizational standards.
Enroll in a training course for additional best practices.
Wolters Kluwer Professional and Client Services provides a one-hour consulting session to help you tailor a plan and workflow that is specifically suited for your team. Contact our Professional & Client Services professionals for more information.
Additional Resources
The following resources and tools make known the productivity and revenue gains that can be achieved by including CCH Axcess Advisor in strategic tax advisory services throughout the year.
- Best Practices for Providing Strategic Advisory Services (infographic) – additional best practices best suited for firms wanting to incorporate CCH Axcess Advisor into their advisory service workflow.
- Return on Investment Calculator for CCH Axcess Advisor – a tool that delivers data insights regarding how much profit margin can be increased by including CCH Axcess Advisor in your advisory services throughout the year.
- On-demand webinars – informative discussions that explain how best to leverage tax data through predictive intelligence that delivers valuable client insights.