3 Tips to help clients tackle uncertainty with annual planning

When your small business clients make their plans for the next year, are they doing it with a solid understanding of the financial underpinnings of their businesses? Can they clearly see the potential risks and tradeoffs that come with making one decision over another? Large businesses have entire teams of accountants and financial professionals charged with this responsibility, but most small businesses don’t have that luxury—they make the best decisions they can with the information they have. Too often, they don’t have enough information.

Your firm has a critical role to play in this process for small business clients. Through annual planning and forecasting services, enabled by advanced technology tools built for the job, you can help these clients better prepare for a wide range of potential scenarios in the future so that when the time comes, they can make smarter, more informed decisions for their business—fast. This is even more important at a time when ongoing uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception. From domestic and global political instability to persistent inflation and an unpredictable economic environment, dealing with uncertainty is just part of doing business today.

I’ve spent decades building annual forecasts as a client-side CFO, as a firm professional helping clients, and now as a solution provider (with Jirav). And while I don’t know the future any better than anyone else, I’ve identified a few foundational approaches that can help ensure the success of client forecasting and planning initiatives no matter how chaotic the business environment may be. As you start this process with clients, here are three approaches that can help you keep a steady hand on the wheel.

Start with client conversations.

No matter how well you understand any individual client’s business, nobody knows it better than the person who owns or runs the business. They live and breathe it every day—and when the day is done, they probably go to bed thinking (and worrying) about it. They know that if the price of oil doubles in the next year due to foreign instability, their transportation costs alone could sink their profitability. They worry that if new tariffs are implemented, their customers may not be willing or able to absorb the costs that get passed along to them through higher prices.

Your firm needs to know which issues are top of mind for your clients, and that’s where a focused, planning-centric conversation can make all the difference. Enter each conversation prepared with powerful questions to help you get to the heart of their business, such as:

• How well do you think your business performed last year, and what would you do better in the next year?
• What do you anticipate changing in your business next year?
• Are you planning any major cash outlays for asset purchases, capital purchases, or other strategic investments?
• How well do you understand the non-financial drivers of your business? What are they? How do you measure them?
• What do you expect your market to look like in the coming year? Have you looked at market benchmarks? How does your business compare to those benchmarks?

Build on their insights with your firm’s understanding of similar forces facing other clients operating in their industry. Then you’ll be prepared to focus your efforts where it matters most.

Use financial modeling to give clients a more complete picture of their options.

There are dozens of issues that could deeply affect your client’s business—successful client conversations will uncover many of them. From there, work with your client to focus on the five (or three, or seven—a handful) that are most likely to have the most significant impact on their income statements in 2025.

Working with a focused set of key issues, you’ll be prepared to do what most clients cannot: Create a detailed, highly sensitive view of exactly how these issues could affect their business over the next year. For example, if they’re worried about transportation costs, build models that help them understand the likely impact by degrees: What if oil prices increase by 10%? 20%? 30%? What other variables are likely to be affected? At what point would the business reach a breaking point? This is the type of flexible, fine-tuned insight they need to make smarter decisions if and when these external variables begin to change.

Plan on meeting with each client monthly (quarterly at minimum) to check the health of their business, update assumptions built into plans and forecasts, and recalibrate as necessary.

Lean on Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) technology.

Any CPA who’s been in the profession for a while knows that forecasting and planning activities can be executed with traditional spreadsheets—that’s how they were done for years. But today’s more advanced financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solutions, built specifically for supporting planning and forecasting activities, introduce a ton of benefits that make it easier to use more data to deliver more nuanced, accurate, detailed forecasts in ways that clients can more easily understand. Data like cost inputs, market factors, financial assumptions such as interest rates and loans can be fed directly (and often automatically) into Jirav’s solutions to create a vivid picture of the client’s operating environment. Even data on non-financial drivers such as website traffic and demo requests can be integrated into planning activities to generate richer, more holistic insights.

Your clients need your help today. Here’s how to deliver.

Together, CPA.com and Jirav have seen annual planning and forecasting services transform firms’ relationships with their small business clients. It’s one of the most powerful ways to demonstrate your firm’s full value proposition—not just as a service provider, but as a partner capable of helping clients successfully navigate their most important strategic issues. That’s how lasting, profitable relationships are built.

For more comprehensive insights on how to deliver annual planning services to clients, be sure to check out this Guide to Annual Planning, which offers step-by-step guidance to help accelerate your move into this valuable service offering.

Guest contributor Evan Wells is the Head of Accountant Growth at Jirav. In his role, he helps high-growth firms build strategies and client deliverables to accelerate their FP&A advisory practices.