CASE STUDY: Business Valuation at a CPA Practice
Sipes & Associates
Using ValuSource to Automate the Valuation Practice in a Full-Service CPA Firm in the Heart of America’s Roots Region
Bill Sipes in the Heart of Tennessee
Bill Sipes opened his CPA practice, Sipes & Associates, in Jackson, Tennessee in 1979.
The company has a straightforward and attractive mission: Minimizing Taxes, Protecting Assets, Building Wealth.
A full service shop, Sipes & Associates has shrewdly responded to changing business cycles and economic waves reshaping the region by developing expertise in a number of different areas.
Strategically located between Memphis and Nashville, and less than two hours from both cities, Sipes, a trumpet and guitar player himself, once built part of his practice serving the music industry.
Called on to settle contractual disputes, Sipes developed a reputation as an arbitration expert, and even did work for a very famous country singer.
At the turn of this century, a wave of consolidation swept through the medical industry, and hospitals regularly turned to Sipes to establish accurate business valuations for the medical group practices they sought to acquire.
"At that time, most of our valuation work was in the medical industry, but now we are serving a wide range of industries."
Today, Sipes himself focuses on litigation support by assessing commercial damages, providing expert opinion on business valuation, and doing higher-level tax planning associated with valuation.
Why ValuSource?
"I discovered ValuSource in 1993 or '94," Sipes says, "and began using ValuSource Pro almost immediately to gather relevant data, discover key business ratios, and analyze business problems and growth opportunities."
SIPES & ASSOCIATES
On why ValuSource
enhances its business
valuation services:
Accurate: "ValuSource provides me with data and analysis I'm confident in, and don’t need to second guess."
Customizable: "I can grab raw data from all sorts of different databases and transfer it seamlessly into my own templates and formats."
Customer Oriented: "ValuSource staff has been available to me very quickly whenever I’ve had a question or a problem."
— Bill Sipes, President, Sipes & Associates
Previously, Sipes says, he created almost all of his work manually.
"I put together a lot of little bitty five and ten page valuation reports which took forever to create," he explains.
"Looking back, I'm actually a bit ashamed of them now, because today my work is so much better."
Some appraisal professionals are wary of valuation software, Sipes says, because "the knock is, it's not a hand-crafted report."
But Sipes disagrees.
"By golly it can be!" he says, and over the phone you can almost hear him pounding on his desk.
"I don't use ValuSource straight out of the box, and I probably never would, but that’s not the point.
Instead, I bring in my own charts, graphs and template styles so I can build exactly what I need for my clients."
The significance of ValuSource, Sipes explains, is that the software automates the routine drudgery of mind-numbing number crunching.
ValuSource allows Sipes to focus on adding value where his insight, perspective, and experience make a real difference.
"The program comes with a lot of data, and makes it easy to access the must-have databases when you need them.
"Without ValuSource, I'd have to go to all sorts of different data sources to access the raw data I need," he explains, "And even then, I’d have to spend a lot of time remapping and interpreting the data."
ValuSource offers Sipes interfaces to 11 different financial databases and is structured so that raw data downloads seamlessly into standard report templates—or even custom formats that Sipes designs himself.
ValuSource also provides dozens of schedules—trends, benchmarks by industry, and so on—that help analyze financial statements.
Return on Investment
The great worth of ValuSource, as Sipes measures it, is that the software:
- Organizes and interprets data
- Provides thoroughly documented conclusions he’s confident in
- Offers exceptional customer service when he needs it
- Automatically generates written reports with his format and style
Given a healthy dose of suspicion perhaps common to most accountants, Sipes says he's spent a lot of time checking the analysis ValuSource provides as well as the legitimacy of its data sources.
He hasn't been let down yet.
And Sipes makes a special point of the customer service he receives.
"Often I have to work weekends to finish a report. One time, a few years ago, I had an urgent question, and I needed to track down [ValuSource CEO] David Fein at his home number."
Fein answered the phone right away, and was able to help Sipes out within hours.
"Anyone who offers that kind of customer service, I’d better stick with them."
Sipes & Associates
CPAs, Business Advisors, and Appraisers
www.sipescpa.com
731-664-7777