The outbreak of Omicron requires accountants to step up their service offerings and fulfil their role as the most trusted adviser to their clients.

You will need to perform the role of superheroes and provide businesses with up to date information around government support, advice on managing cash flow, access to finance and scenario planning.

In fact, you must take these actions today to safeguard the well-being of your clients and pre-empt any further restrictions which may be introduced over the weeks ahead. This is the right thing to do and will allow you to become more embedded within your clients’ businesses to deliver value-added services rather than just fulfilling compliance requirements.

Segment clients

The first action you should take is to segment your clients into groups most likely to be affected by a drop in trading levels from Omicron.

Those most in need of support are businesses with a high street presence, including restaurants, bars, cafes and hair salons. Additionally, B2B companies providing goods and services to them (such as short term recruitment companies and food manufacturers) will also suffer from an unexpected decline in sales during an ordinarily busy seasonal trading period.

Depending on the size of the client base, you can identify these businesses by eyeballing your client list. However, it’s probably easier for those who serve hundreds of clients to order accounting or practice management software into sector categories.

Implement daily or weekly bookkeeping

The uncertainty of trading patterns during the coming weeks and months means that it is imperative for businesses to have up to date accounting records.

You should implement weekly (or daily for those with very low cash balances) bookkeeping to allow businesses to pivot their focus. For example, restaurants may change to a takeaway only model. This will also enable them to ensure they have enough cash in the bank purely to survive and also be able to make timely applications for debt finance.

A lot of the heavy lifting can be done by using automation features on core cloud accounting software (setting bank rules to automatch transactions – i.e. taking bank lines with the word “Uber” to the travel category) and implementing receipt scanning tools with OCR technology to extract data.

Inform clients of government support available

A range of existing and new government initiatives should be communicated to clients to make sure they can take advantage of available support.

Existing measures include:

• VAT for hospitality has been cut to 12.5% until 31 March 2022.
• The Recovery Loan Scheme (RLS) allows qualifying businesses to access up to £10m. The Government guarantees 80% of finance to the lender, and this drops down to 70% from 1 January 2022 until the scheme closes on 31 March 2022.

On 21 December, the Chancellor introduced new initiatives worth £1bn to support disruption to hospitality and leisure businesses from the incoming wave of Omicron.

These include:

• One-off grants of up to £6,000 per premises.
• The Government covering the cost of Statutory Sick Pay for Covid-related absences.
• £30m of funding for cultural organisations in England, made available through the Culture Recovery Fund.

Additionally, the Government’s Help To Grow: Digital initiative, which aims to improve business productivity measures, opens up from January 2022 for all companies. Clients may be able to use the scheme to get a discount (of up to 50% of costs, worth up to £5,000) on their cloud accounting software.

Value-added advisory services

Assuming that accounting data is entirely up to date from regular bookkeeping, you can use this close to real-time data to advise your clients better and cross-sell advisory services.

Depending on the severity of individual business circumstances, you will need to consider what proportion of these fees are recoverable or should instead be deemed sunk investment costs for client retention purposes.

At a minimum, clients should be provided with cash flow forecasting to have visibility on their cash positions and advised on precautionary actions to plug short or long-term cash gaps.

Businesses likely to experience cash collection issues should be offered working capital cash management services consisting of insights around the risk of customers not paying, advice on credit terms and access to finance support.

Tools like Satago can help automate many of these processes by connecting to your client’s accounting solution directly. This allows you to get a centralised view to monitor the credit-control of individual clients, with Satago’s Risk Insight feature examining the health of clients’ customers, alongside the ability to set up rules and templates for automated invoice chasing. You can use Satago to offer Credit Control As A Service (CCAS) to your clients, as a revenue opportunity for your practice.

Finally, outstanding invoices, either singly or via the whole ledger, can be funded through invoice finance, bringing much-needed cash into client’s bank accounts faster.

Conclusion

The fast-moving nature of both Omicron and the news cycle means that further restrictions and support may shortly be introduced.

So take action today to identify those in need, help them access government and non-government support and ensure they have enough cash in the bank to meet their obligations.