Hello and welcome back to session 6 of our Accountant Connect certification. I'm Darren Root and I'm back here again with Rhonda Shurter. Hey, Rhonda. Hi Darren. We're going to be hopping through a lot of things today, Rhonda. Our goal here is just to make sure that each of the users is aware of all the tools and resources that are available to them. Let's just kick off, Rhonda. On the Resources tab on the left side, we've got a number of tabs across the top if you're on the Resources section, and we'll just kick off with the first one, marketing tools. Yeah, so I think I referenced this briefly in our last module. It's also on the dashboard as well. But within resources, we've given you an overview of what our partnership with CountingWorks has to offer. This is really to help you have a host of marketing tools to help you market your firm. I think the example I used last time is you can co-brand ADP marketing materials with your firm's logo, use that to promote services and sell them as products. You can also get marketing videos or even if you wanted to go as far as work on creating a website. CountingWorks is an exclusive partnership that we have that has some free assets in it that you can co-brand, as well as some additional discounted services that you can use to really help you market your firm and help you grow. I know the next one, Rhonda certainly has probably been used a lot, but it's the COVID-19 section. Yes. We have COVID-19. You'll see in two places, we have that nice little teal bubble on the, on the homepage and it appears throughout. These have just been ongoing as things evolved with COVID, we were constantly providing updates, dedicated reporting options to support clients and accountants as they went through the whole loan process and forgiveness, etc. In addition to the updates that are available there, we also have this dedicated area where you can link off to just everything that we have and know about COVID-19 and how to prepare for that, the different resources that we have, a CPE, recorded sessions, etc. There's a whole post of resources that we have in Accountant Connect to help, and hopefully we're heading to the end of it, but we'll continue to evolve this as needed. Again, it's a great set of tools that allow you to be a more proactive advisor in and around COVID for your clients. Love the next one, Rhonda. It's State Payroll Tax Rates. I remember it's just been time Googling back in the old days, flipping through binders, trying to find state in state rates and stuff. Just talked about that a bit. It's all here online off state as well as federal as well, and you can quickly go through the different states. I think we go back several years. You do. I think we go back now six years. You can go back and figure out what the tax rates were at a state level and then we also have federal available as well. Just click "Reference" guides again, no need to Google. It's all within Accountant Connect from a reliable source. This is curated and produced by ADP, so all the information is right here for you. Let's talk about key facts. Key facts, yes, so key facts, just really quick, reference guides. Some of your ADP dedicated sales reps maybe delivering these to you in a hard-copy, but they're also available for quick reference online as well. Whether you're looking for the Federal Tax Key Facts & Figures, Depreciation Key Facts, all the Sales and Use Tax Key Facts & Figures for 2000. Everything is right here. You can print, you can download, or you can just view and have it here for reference digitally, and we update these annually. We include past years as well for reference just in case you have to go back and remember what it was for previous year. But all of that is right here for you. What's the difference, Rhonda? You mentioned reference guides, which is our next tab. What's the difference between key facts and reference guides? The reference guides, this is just another collection. We have a team that is really dedicated to keeping on top of what our accountant is looking for, how can we centralize that? These are just some additional reference guides that would be helpful to have easy access to. Are you looking for a year end checklists? Like maybe you want to create one to standardize a practice. You have a template here for a year end checklist that you can modify for your firm or practices for record keeping, payroll tax liability. Just some quick reference guides. These actually, will link you off to the system or cite your record to get that information. But you can access it right here. If you're practicing and you have a payroll component to your practice, it's nothing like having all these tools in one place, Rhonda. I just don't have to go all over the place to find this stuff anymore. Let's talk a little bit about the last tab there which is tax forms. Tax forms. This is actually just a reference which to I think our next area, which is the CCH tax resource library. Within the CCH tax resource library, we have a fully curated repository for every tax form your heart could possibly want, and it's all curated and provided by CCH in that tax resource area. The master tax guide is here. I think it's current year and the past 25 years, I think we go for the master tax guide. If you ever kept the books for your bookshelf, if you no longer need that, you can do that all digitally through this and some firms may actually purchase their subscription to the CCH or the master tax guide or the resource library, and it's actually available to you in account and connect for free. You can be a hero here and let your firm know they don't need to buy. It's such a huge value because you get it all in here and that's all included at no cost. You have tax news that's in here, you have the master tax guide, you have some state tax law stuff in here, the tax reform library, forms and instructions. All that stuff is available right inside of account and connect. You definitely you may say, well, this doesn't matter much to me. I'm not the tax person inside the firm. But I guess what you should really understand is make sure everybody in the firm knows that you can set up a user login for them. They don't have to necessarily be doing payroll or accessing payroll. They could just be using this for the CCH resource library. Could be using this for some of the other resources that we've talked about or the analysis tools. There's just so much in here form Rhonda. There's another thing in the CCH resource library that I wanted to point out. There's the client letter tool kit. You talk about trying to want to be proactive and show your clients that you're looking out for your further needs. Within the CCH resource library, they actually have an area that's client letters that you can download the template, it's got all the information that you need, and then you can just customize it to your clients so quickly, show your expertise, show your clients that you're thinking about them in a really quick, efficient way. You can do that through leveraging the resources here. I think the last section, Rhonda, that I want to talk about is the CPE Learning. I know CPE sounds technical and it is. So if if you're a licensed accountant, you need to get CPE and you can get a lot of CPE in here, continuing professional education credits, but learning doesn't have to just be for people that need credit hours, you could use the CPE learning section Rhonda for anybody that just wants to become more knowledgeable in any particular topic that's in here. So why don't you walk through the CPE learning? Yeah. It's available on the left-hand navigation as well, but we also have a tile on the dashboard which shows you at a high-level everything. So we have 40 free on-demand CPE courses that you can take at any time, and those are free to you. We also have national webinars that are hosted by ADP and Wolters Kluwer, and then we even have live on-demand courses, so you're dedicated ADP sales rep will actually come out to your office and on a topic of your choosing and deliver a course to you and your staff for CPE credits. So again, just another way we're looking to give back to our accountant partners, make it easy for you to maintain your certification, and keep you informed of everything that's going on because everything is constantly changing. So this is our way of giving back and helping you stay informed and keep up your certifications. So Rhonda, just to summarize where we've been so far in session 6 here. In sessions one through five so far we've covered an administrative overview, how to manage your account and connect account. In session 2, we talked about adding and working with clients, that was a big section for us, and then the super-powerful automating reports and tax forms, just saving tons and tons of time. Then we went to episode 4 and talked about better advising with analysis tool, how to look at all these analysis tools and become that proactive advisor. Then session 5, we talked about going beyond just payroll and becoming more holistic and developing the concept of products and standardization, and then we finished up in this session around just getting more out of community resources. As the product continues to expand over time, I think it's job security for you, Rhonda, if the product keeps expanding and getting better. So I suspect there'll be things on your roadmap, we'll continue to add sessions for that. I hope that our audiences see something in it for them, I think there's something for everyone no matter what your role is in your firm and definitely exciting things on the horizon that we will continue to share, just with the accounting industry evolving so is Accountant Connect to try to best support you. I think one of the really important takeaways, Rhonda, for me is all the power in Accountant Connect, there may be a chance if you're taking a certification course that you're the payroll person inside of your firm, or that you have something do a payroll inside your firm, but Accountant Connect is so much more than just processing a payroll, there's just so much more in here, and so I think one key takeaways for me, Rhonda, is you may be taking a certification course because you're deeply involved with payroll, but make sure everybody else in the firm knows that they could be invited in as a user and take advantage of all the tools that are here, because ultimately Accountant Connect brings a lot of the tools that multiple different people inside your firm need together in one place.
