H&R Block and Liberty Tax have been expanding from traditional tax preparation services into other areas such as bookkeeping as they reach out to service small business clients year-round, giving traditional accountants some extra competition.
On Tuesday, Liberty announced a bookkeeping service built around the cloud-based accounting software Kashoo. The new bookkeeping service, dubbed Liberty Accounting, is intended to help Liberty Tax’s 4,400 franchisees expand beyond tax season and provide additional services besides tax prep and filing.
The number one tax prep chain, H&R Block, recently announced plans of its own to attract CPAs and other accountants into selling their practices to Block or becoming franchisees (see H&R Block Reaches out to Attract Accounting Firms). In conjunction with that effort, Block also said it would start offering bookkeeping and payroll services to small businesses through cloud technology.
Competing tax chains such as Jackson Hewitt and TaxSlayer are still sticking to their core tax prep services, but if they see significant growth from Block and Liberty, they could be induced to change their minds.
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Source: Mike Cohn (www.linkedin.com)
