Loren Nancke Partner, Candace Nancke, FCPA, shares insight into our firm's proactive financial services framework

Over the past year, our firm has steadily updated the messaging around our services, as we've rolled out a new concept that we like to call Financial Serenity.

At its core, Financial Serenity is an accounting and advisory framework that Loren Nancke is using to help our clients gain clarity, confidence, and consistency in their financial decision-making. It's a holistic approach that seeks to support our clients with proactive annual services that help:

• Define their financial, business, and life goals
• Ensure their entire team of professionals are aligned
• Deliver detail-oriented, jargon-free advice
• Bring all the pieces of their financial life together under one big picture

Covering everything from tax advice to legal and estate planning, Financial Serenity is an offering that we're extremely excited about. It exemplifies our firm's belief that the best accounting relationships go beyond the numbers.

Continue reading to learn more about the inspiration behind the concept of Financial Serenity, the key differentiators compared to other firms' offerings, and how it fits in with Loren Nancke's commitment to customer service.

The inspiration behind Financial Serenity

If you've looked around our website, you may have seen that one of our company’s core values is continuous improvement. As a team, we're always searching for ways to make our firm, our processes, and our services better. It was in doing this work a few years ago that we found inspiration for what would eventually become known as Financial Serenity.

In reviewing our client relationships, we identified that there was a lot of overlap between our most satisfied clients and our own team's sense of fulfillment. Partnerships with these clients were the ones in which we were the most involved, offering proactive advice that touched on their entire financial lives, from their legal situations to their investments and cash flow preferences. Partnering in this way gave us a complete picture, enabling our team to provide the best advice possible.

Everyone at the firm felt really good about how we were able to support these clients by solving their financial challenges and helping them reach their goals. So, we made a key decision to focus on clients who wanted this type of holistic service.

Eventually, that kernel of an idea became a new framework for our integrated services. We decided to call it Financial Serenity because that’s the goal of the service model. Our aim is to help clients get all the moving pieces of their financial lives in place and under control, so they have a better understanding of what they have and what they may still need.

4 key differentiators of Financial Serenity

When we set out to build the services behind Financial Serenity, we immediately knew that we wanted our offering to be different from what most firms provide. From aligning our clients’ advisors to building long-term relationships through proactive advice, below are four pieces of our Financial Serenity framework that we believe are key differentiators within the accounting industry.

1) Aligning your advisors to help you save time and money

Often, clients assume that if we need to talk to another professional on their team of advisors, it will cost them. In reality, the opposite is often true.

When an accountant has a conversation with a lawyer, it’s typically more direct than the one they would have with a client about the same topic. This is because there are fewer interpretation issues. In speaking with a client, we're trying our best to talk to their sphere of knowledge. They might be a really excellent physician, consultant or engineer, but accounting is not their area of expertise.

If our team connects directly with a client's lawyer, however, we don't need to explain tax law. We can just say, for example, “We're doing an 85 rollover, and I'll get you the final fair market value of the transaction once the work is complete.” The lawyer knows those terms and the context, so the conversation takes all of five minutes. Whereas that one sentence could turn into a 30-minute conversation with a client, and then the client needs to relay that information to their lawyer. In many cases, the lawyer still contacts our firm to clarify.

It's much more cost and time efficient to directly connect your professionals to each other. For this reason, we ensure that we have the details of our clients' advisors right from the beginning.

By connecting with a client's team of professionals, our firm helps ensure each piece of their financial puzzle is aligned. This alignment eliminates redundancies and helps them meet their goals more effectively.

2) A long-term relationship to help you achieve all of life’s goals

Over our 30 years in business, we've discovered that there are many people who prefer a long-term relationship with their accountant. They're looking for a professional who gets to know them and can provide proactive, custom advice, not just someone to file their taxes once a year. Financial Serenity is a great model for this type of service.

Defining and achieving your financial, business, and life goals is not something you can accomplish overnight. And these objectives will look different for each and every client. A trusted, ongoing partnership between client and accountant is imperative when working towards Financial Serenity.

Our team ensures that we sit down with our clients annually to discuss where they want to be next year, five years from now, and into retirement. Over the years, these recurring conversations help our clients avoid making ad-hoc decisions that may contradict one another. They understand where they're going long-term and the actions that they need to take to make their goals happen.

We're committed to working with our clients until they reach Financial Serenity, and then beyond. Once a client has accomplished the majority of their goals, we then get to work planning out what they need to do to maintain those achievements. Often, we also help our clients identify the best ways to prepare their estate for the next generation.

3) Proactive advice with annual Goal, Advisory and Planning (GAP) Meetings 

One of the crucial components of our long-term partnerships with clients is the annual Goal, Advisory and Planning (GAP) Meetings. In a GAP Meeting, our team digs into what our clients want to achieve, benchmarking their progress every year.

When a client first starts with our firm, we offer a Foundation GAP Meeting. This is our first opportunity to define a client’s goalposts and identify what financial pieces they already have in place. Together, we figure out what’s important to them, what they need, and then we determine what steps they should take to get there.

Every year after that, we meet at least once annually to check in and reflect on last year's goals. We discuss if our clients have moved closer or further away to achieving those objectives and determine if they need to pivot at all.

Life changes, and your plan should change along with it. These regular conversations help bring it all together with a proactive approach.

A failure to plan is a plan to fail. So, we help our clients plan on a regular, recurring basis.

4) Striking a balance with AI to help ensure you get the best advice 

With many different applications available, artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful and accessible tool that people are leveraging around the world. From editing an email to analyzing data, AI can be useful for a number of things, including some simpler accounting tasks.

That said, it's very important to understand the limitations of artificial intelligence within an accounting and financial advisory lens. While an AI tool may be able to help you with something like payroll remittance, more subjective topics like tax law are incredibly nuanced. The output from AI is typically very black and white, which means that it can be tricky to trust it to comment on legislation that often requires interpretation. In this regard, only an accountant can provide the necessary experience and ability to interpret the law in context to a client's unique financial situation.

We work with our clients to ensure they understand which areas of their financial lives AI can help support and when they should seek our professional advice.

Importance of customer service

At the end of the day, our primary goal as a firm is to support our clients in achieving their goals. We're committed to good customer service. It's really important to us.

This focus makes our job more about helping people than it does about crunching numbers. Of course, providing exceptional advisory and accounting services is key to what we do. However, one of the biggest driving forces at Loren Nancke is actually making a difference to our clients.

We truly believe that the time and expertise we give to each client to proactively advise on their financial lives makes us a CPA firm you can count on.

Find out how Loren Nancke can support your finances

We’re known for our smart, straightforward corporate tax and accounting services, as well as our expertise in wealth, legacy and estate planning. Our ultimate goal is to support you on your journey to what we like to call Financial Serenity by bringing all aspects of your financial life together.

Get in touch with our CPA firm to learn more about how we can support you and your financial goals.

 

By Candace Nancke

Candace Nancke is a partner at Loren Nancke. She has served as Chair of the Board of Governors for CGA-BC and has been designated as a Fellow of the Chartered Professional Accountants (FCPA), one of the highest honours awarded to accountants in BC. You can reach her at 604-904-3807 in New Westminster, British Columbia.

Learn more about Candace and the rest of our team.