How Blain Heckaman Drives Value at Kaufman Rossin

The ever-increasing commoditization of traditional services such as tax preparation, accounting and audit makes it crucial for accounting firms to discover methods for increasing the value they bring clients, according to Blain Heckaman, managing principal at Kaufman Rossin CPAs in Miami.

“Accounting firms need to think beyond compliance to provide actionable insight and forward-thinking solutions to clients,” says Heckaman, who joined Kaufman Rossin in 1984 and was named managing principal in 2012. James Kaufman, one of the founders, remains CEO. The company’s $73.9 million in revenue last year ranks it among the nation’s top 100 firms.

Kaufman Rossin is beefing up its ability to add value for clients by increasing its expertise in its client industries and adding new services. In March, for example, it became an implementer and consultant for Intacct, the cloud-based accounting and enterprise resource planning application.

Kaufman Rossin also offers consulting on Intuit QuickBooks, designed for businesses that generally would be considered smaller than the small and mid-sized businesses that use Intacct. By adding Intacct, the firm can offer its QuickBooks clients an optional application to transition to as their operations grow.

The firm’s technology services also include specialties such as advising clients on cyber-security along with consulting related to electronically stored information.

“We are harnessing the power of technology to help clients improve their operations, whether it’s using data analytics to see trends, identifying gaps or inefficiencies in their processes, or managing their accounting needs remotely with secure, cloud-based services,” Heckaman boasts.

In other business sectors, Kaufman Rossin is enhancing its offerings by bringing in experienced talent, such as Scott Soucy, who joined the firm as a business advisory services director last November from Anders CPAs in St. Louis, where he was a partner and led the firm’s technology services affiliate Inflexion LLC.

“Increased specialization and expanded expertise in the areas of business, risk and forensic advisory are enabling us to focus on our core practice – improving our clients’ businesses and helping protect them from risk,” Heckaman says. “While tax, audit and accounting remain vital to our firm, we need to go beyond these traditional service lines to provide our clients with the sophisticated consulting that will help them run their organizations more successfully.”

Kaufman Rossin’s $73.9 million revenue last year also ranks it as Miami’s second largest accounting firm, behind Morrison, Brown, Argiz & Farra with $94 million.

Heckaman expects his firm’s revenue this year to grow to about $75 million, even though it recently sold a unit that provided administration services to hedge funds and private equity investment funds. While the sale, valued at $95 million, means losing a revenue stream, Heckaman says it strengthens the firm’s overall business “by allowing us to focus on our core practice of improving our clients’ businesses and helping protect them from risk.” A “significant amount” of that sale price will be distributed to the company’s employees, Heckaman told a local newspaper. The fund services company, founded in 1994, has about 125 workers and $26 million in annual revenue, according to a federal regulatory filing. The buyer was ALPS, a subsidiary of Kansas City-based DST Systems.

Kaufman Rossin reportedly decided to sell in part because of changes in the hedge fund industry. “It is a significant time of mergers and acquisition,” Heckaman told a reporter. “You’re seeing larger and larger hedge funds now and fewer of the boutique, middle-market funds that were our niche. Bigger is better in order to attract these larger funds.”

Kaufman Rossin is also improving its own internal workings via a slightly un-traditional approach — putting together its own internal team of professionals dedicated to improving the firm’s processes for delivering services.

The so-called “Innovation” team, which includes software programmers and code writers, is looking at ways to automate functions that the firm has been doing manually and to improve the efficiencies of processes that are already automated. “We’re looking to do things differently and better – to crank them up through technology,” Heckaman says.

For example, the innovation team recently made custom changes to the tax preparation software the firm uses to streamline its use of electronic signatures in submitting tax filings. The firm’s tax prep software package is developed by third-party vendor CCH Inc.

As per the “actionable insight” that all CPA firms could provide clients, Heckaman says, “Staying ahead of regulatory changes and market trends affecting clients in the segments they serve is important to protecting those clients’ interests and positioning them for success.”

Kaufman Rossin, for example, has been steering its banking industry clients through that sector’s fast-growing concerns about money laundering by advising them on establishing processes for detecting potential launderers. “When a foreign customer comes to your bank and starts pushing a lot of deposits, it’s incumbent that the bank knows who the customer is and the source of its funds,” Heckaman says about the recent consulting initiative.

Money laundering became a front-burner issue for banking regulators in early April with the public release of the Panama Papers, which revealed information on more than 214,000  companies – all associated with same Panamanian law firm – that have been hiding billions of dollars of assets they own from public scrutiny and from taxation. The type of money laundering underscored by the Panama Papers is an especially big concern for banks that handle international flows of money. Heckaman notes that his firm’s south Florida home area is one of the busiest markets for international money flow.