Too many accountants are using the body of emails to deliver information instead of using the attachment function.
By: Dwayne Bragonier, published in CPA Magazine, April 1, 2014
More and more, we are delivering our finished goods electronically via email. That’s OK, as long as the expertise being shared — the interpretation of data, presentation of results, recommendations for action, compliance reporting, etc. — is not private in nature. However, many of us are starting to slide down a slippery slope and into a bad habit. We are using the body of the email to deliver our product instead of using email to deliver our attached product.
As accountants, our product is our expert knowledge. We structure and package our knowledge into a document so that it can be delivered to our clients. That is to say, we do not normally communicate this content verbally and if we do, we follow up with a document that contains the content we communicated. We use a document for two reasons: so that our client can easily access it on demand and so that we can easily file away a copy for evidentiary and client-service purposes.