Bonnie Nagayama is a CPA-turned-author. As president of the firm, McWilliams & Associates Inc, in Moraga, Calif., she spends much of her time providing software and business management speaking, training and consulting to 350 small business clients. And when she's not supporting QuickBooks accountants and end users, Nagayama pens advice to accountants through the Intuit® ProConnectionTM newsletter. Taking a new approach to sharing tips of the trade, Intuit ProConnection turns accountants into authors, enabling them to creatively teach, and learn, from one another about how they have successfully worked with Intuit offerings to offer quality client service.
Launched just over a year ago, Intuit ProConnection has already attracted 50,000 subscribers who rely on each other to help build their accounting practices. Intuit ProConnection offers a monthly email newsletter featuring a range of best practices, insightful tips and tools for using QuickBooks® and other Intuit products, as well as other valuable resources. All are designed to help accounting and financial professionals work more efficiently, deliver a wider range of value-added services to clients, and market their practices more effectively.
"I've been a contributor to Intuit ProConnection since the newsletter's launch," said Nagayama, who is also a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisorSM. "Among the reasons for the newsletter's success is that it's aimed at small accounting firms, giving them the tools to more efficiently work with their clients - tools that they may not otherwise have access to," she added.
"In addition to providing colleagues with helpful advice on working with products such as QuickBooks, my contributions to Intuit ProConnection, as well as the other information in the newsletter, serve as great marketing pieces to educate my clients on different products and increase the visibility of my own business," she said.
"When we launched Intuit ProConnection, we wanted to offer accounting professionals a resource that would help them better serve clients, manage their practices and build business," said Brad Smith, vice president and general manager of Intuit Accountant Central.
In addition to the advice found in the monthly newsletter, Smith believes that a key factor to Intuit ProConnection's popularity is that members submit their own success stories and tips. "We're providing a newsletter with content written by accountants, for accountants. It's a way for them to share with each other what works and what doesn't," he added.
Smith said a recent satisfaction survey shows that a large number of Intuit ProConnection members are very satisfied with the newsletter's content, with almost half of them having been members for more than a year. "We are continuing to work closely with accounting professionals to learn about their needs, so that we can consistently develop quality content that will benefit their practices," he said.
Benefits of Intuit ProConnection
Driven by accountant feedback, Intuit ProConnection has also recently added valuable new benefits for accountants including:
- Checklists for QuickBooks® software, marketing, and more;
- Client Microsoft PowerPoint presentation templates;
- Benchmarks against which to measure an accountant's practice;
- A marketing guide to help accounting professionals build their practices;
- Marketing templates and brochures to help conduct marketing campaigns quickly and easily;
- Engagement and other client letter templates; and
- Special offers and more information on Intuit products and services.
Accounting and financial professionals can sign up to receive Intuit ProConnection at http://accountant.intuit.com/proconnection.
