How Accounting Admin Leaders Shape the Entire Client Experience

When Angela Jenkins talks about her admin, she doesn’t describe someone who simply answers emails or keeps the calendar organized. She describes someone who has completely changed the way her firm works and engages with clients.

She’s very creative and very organized,” Jenkins says. “She keeps me on task as much as she can and has really elevated some of the things that we do for our clients.”

Angela Jenkins

Answering emails and following up on missing documents might not sound like things would have a major impact on client experience. And in fact, many firm owners see admin work as a collection of mostly minor tasks that happen around the “real” accounting work.

But when combined across dozens of interactions, those tasks play an outsized role in each client’s perception of your firm—as well as your overall reputation. In many cases, the admin is the person who ensures the firm does what it says it will, and from the client’s perspective, that is perhaps even more important than the quality of the work itself.

For firms like Jenkins’s that were built around thoughtful, intentional client service, admins are actually some of the most crucial people in the entire organization.

The Accounting Admin as the Face of the Firm

Most clients don’t experience an accounting firm through the people at the top of the org chart. They mostly experience it through the person who answers when they call, provides an explanation when something goes wrong, or simply makes sure they know that someone is there for them. Jenkins, who runs Mindful Money Matters, has seen that firsthand.

My admin staff has been with me for three years and has elevated how we interact with our clients,” she says.

Angela Jenkins

In an industry like accounting, where communication is the bedrock of client relationships, every interaction is an opportunity to make clients feel seen and supported.

Katie Helle, founder of  Scaled Accounting Solutions, learned just how valuable that support is when her firm hit its first tax-season crunch.

Helle had been building the business on the side before going full-time in October 2024. Her client load was still relatively light, so she expected her first tax season to be manageable, if not seamless.

“I went full-time with my business in October of 2024,” Helle says. “I was expecting to take a nice, easy tax season into the start of 2025. It was far from that.”

By March 2025, the firm had grown so much that having an admin on staff was no longer optional. “I was like, my gosh, I have to hire somebody. This is just far busier than I expected,” she says.

Since coming on board, Helle’s admin has organized the firm’s internal processes and taken over much of the day-to-day communication with clients—which has freed Helle to focus on growing the firm.

My admin helps me out a lot with client communication, which has been really helpful,” Helle says. “[Clients] just want to know that someone is there to help them when they need something.”

Katie Helle

Along with getting the firm through tax season more calmly, Scaled Accounting’s admin has enabled Helle to dedicate more time and attention to all the things she cares about outside of work: traveling, doing Pilates, and hanging out with her family.

For Anne-Marie Kaden, owner of Tiny Paws Bookkeeping, hard skills are only one part of what makes someone effective in a client-facing role (e.g., an admin). There’s also the emotional intelligence aspect, which is essential to keeping the client experience on-brand—whatever that means for the firm.

I need somebody who can recognize when eyes are about to glaze over, and they’ve gone too far down the technical side,” Kaden explains. “At which point they need to back it up and make sure that the client is getting it right.”

Katie Helle

The Elusive Combo of Skill and Personality

Clearly, the admin role is critical to the success of most small firms. But finding the right person for the role is anything but straightforward.

Just ask Tyler Otto, Owner of Specialized Accounting. When he set out to hire his firm’s first admin, he didn’t find someone who could handle the work, fit into the firm’s culture, and communicate well with clients on his first attempt—or even his second.

It took me three assistants to find an admin assistant that was amazing,” Otto says.

Tyler Otto

On paper, the requirements don’t seem particularly complicated. You need someone who is organized, communicates well, and keeps things moving when the owner and everyone else are busy. But therein lies the rub: finding all those qualities in one person is difficult.

Cathryn Vidal, founder of Crema Bookkeeping, has certainly made her share of hiring mistakes. Her current team has been together for years and, as she puts it, “clicks well together.”

But even after hiring enough people to learn what works and what doesn’t, she doesn’t pretend there’s a foolproof formula for identifying the right person for any role. For her, a lot of it still comes down to instinct.

“It’s just kind of that gut intuition feel,” she says. “What are they like? How do we converse with each other? Is it easy? Does it feel natural? Or are all the questions and answers kind of forced?”

Vidal recalls how one of her early hires, who appeared to have all the right skills and qualifications, ended up not fitting in.

One of my last not-so-great hires was somebody who presented very well,” Vidal shares. “She had a lot of the qualifications that I was looking for, but her personality sort of felt flat. She wasn’t able to get along with anybody else on the team.”

Cathryn Vidal

That person’s communication style, in particular, just wasn’t aligned with the culture of the firm—internally or externally.

“Her communication with clients, especially, was very clunky,” Vidal explains. “The wording was funny. I want all our client communication to feel very natural, and with her it never did.”

A technically capable employee can learn a new workflow, understand the firm’s software, and know where documents belong and how a particular process works. But it’s much harder to learn how to make a client feel comfortable—or how to explain something without making them feel foolish or incompetent.

That’s why Kaden always puts culture ahead of experience when evaluating job candidates.

We’ve had clients who are very afraid of what their numbers are going to tell them about their business,” she says. “We always try to approach those conversations with the same level of compassion. We’re not here to pass judgment.”

Anne Marie Kaden

For Kaden, that connection starts with listening. “We need someone who can listen and really hear the context of the business before they start to explain the numbers,” she says.

Technical knowledge tells someone what the numbers mean. Personality and emotional intelligence help them explain those insights to the human on the other side of the conversation in a clear, non-threatening manner.

The Calm Voice in a Hard Conversation

Difficult conversations are pretty much unavoidable in accounting, even in the best-run firms. If an error doesn’t show up until it’s too late in the process, a client might miss a filing deadline. Or, if there’s an unforeseen shift in economic conditions, a business decision they were confident about a few months ago suddenly might not look so good.

What separates a good client experience from a bad one is how a firm handles these situations.

For Melissa Miller Furgeson, owner of Bookkeeping for Good, that means steering clear of feeding the client’s panic. When things get difficult, her team makes a point of reassuring clients that they’ll work through it together.

When things go wrong, we always approach it with, ‘It’s gonna be alright, we’ll get this figured out. We can help you,’” Miller Furgeson says.

Melissa Miller Furgeson

That attitude has become part of how clients experience the firm. “A lot of clients tell us that we make them feel really calm. Like, we have this calming effect,” says Miller Furgeson.

Kaden has learned that conversations about money can be triggering—and incredibly personal. For some clients, looking at their numbers is routine. For others, discussions about finances can bring up fear, embarrassment, or years of complicated feelings about money.

For a lot of people, financial conversations or money talk comes with a lot of baggage,” Kaden says.“We have our own emotional and psychological connections with money throughout our lives and, potentially, past trauma.”

Anne Marie Kaden

Accounting admins and anyone else who regularly interacts with clients should remember that they aren’t always talking to someone who sees a financial report as simply a collection of percentages and dollar amounts. An email asking a client to clarify a particular line item might come across as an attack or critique, and it should be drafted with that in mind.

“Clients are very afraid of what their numbers are going to tell them about their business,” Kaden says. “That can be a great conversation for some people, and it could be devastating for others.”

Kaden’s approach is to always lead with compassion rather than judgment. “We’re not here to pass judgment,” she says. “We’re not here to beat anybody down for not making better decisions or different decisions in their business. We are here simply to show and illuminate.”

Jenkins has developed a similar instinct through an unexpected source: yoga. As a certified instructor, Jenkins knows that sometimes the right response to a client’s discomfort is to slow down, lean in, and really understand what’s happening before moving forward. And great admins do the same.

When you start talking to people about money, it’s the same thing [that you see in yoga],” she says. “You see people’s shoulders will start to raise or they’ll start twitching, or the answers come very quickly and clipped because they just want to get it out.”

Angela Jenkins

The client isn’t necessarily resisting the conversation. They may simply be uncomfortable with where it’s going. So instead of pushing ahead, it’s a sign to slow down.

“For me, it’s, ‘Let’s take a step back and see what’s happening.’ Like, there’s no judgment here,” Jenkins notes.

Jenkins also reminds clients that she isn’t sitting atop some pedestal of perfect financial decision-making. “I just looked at my books, and I was like, wait, you just did that?” she’ll say, showing that even when it comes to her own finances, she’s still human. And at the end of the day, whether you’re an owner, a bookkeeper, or an admin, simply being real and human with clients goes a long way toward fostering a great experience for them.

The Translator

Clients don’t always know what they need. They may have a question about their business but don’t know enough accounting terminology to ask it properly.

The accounting team has the opposite problem. They may understand exactly what is happening in the numbers, but they don’t always know how to explain it in a way that makes sense to clients who are not looking at those numbers every day.

The admin lives in the middle of all that—which makes their role more about translating between two different levels of knowledge than merely passing messages back and forth.

Kaden appreciates this translative work even more because most of her clients don’t have a business or accounting background.

My clients don’t understand financial reports,” she says. “They really need somebody to bring the technical jargon down to plain English and be able to explain the numbers in a way the client understands.”

Anne Marie Kaden

If a client doesn’t understand what their accounting firm is telling them, adding more technical language only takes the situation from frying pan to fire. That’s why Jenkins approaches this translation from a place of calmness and empathy.

“How can we make this easier? I work from a place of discernment, not judgment, which is where a lot of this comes from,” she says. “Because, again, I tell people, it’s your money. I’m just telling you what it says.”

Clients get nervous when a financial conversation starts to feel like their competence is on trial—and they’re waiting for the accountant to deliver the verdict.

The admin’s job, in such cases, is to help make that distinction clear: Here’s what we’re seeing. Here’s what it means. Here’s what we need from you. And here’s what we’ll do next. (Notice how blame is left completely out of it, because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who is at fault—it only matters how the client moves forward.)

As the firm gets busier (think: tax season or financial close), great admins also ensure clients continue to feel seen and valued—not lost in the shuffle.

Helle has seen how much clients appreciate the fact that someone is always paying attention and looking out for them.

The biggest complaint I get from every new client that comes into my firm is the lack of communication from their prior tax preparer or accountant,” Helle explains. “They were not getting communication.”

Katie Helle

That’s exactly why she’s made communication a priority in her own firm, even when she doesn’t have an immediate answer in every single situation.

“Even if I don’t know the answer right away, I still communicate with them like, ‘Hey, let me do some research into that, and I’ll get back to you,’ type of thing,” she says.

For Helle, that simple commitment has become an important part of the client experience. “I think communication is all people really want,” she says. “And that’s where firms fall short. They aren’t providing that communication to clients.”

Misconceptions About Admin Roles

When Otto first realized he needed an admin assistant, he didn’t put a ton of effort into clearly defining the role or the kind of person best suited to it.

My first assistant, I failed in the hiring process,” he admits. “My system wasn’t a good setup. I outsourced it. Then I hired internally. They all went wrong.”

Tyler Otto

Otto’s initial approach is not uncommon. Many firms think they just need someone to handle a handful of administrative tasks, so almost anyone who is organized and capable seems like a great candidate.

But ideally, this person will become responsible for coordinating work, keeping clients informed, and making sure the rest of the team stays focused. With that in mind, the requirements take on a very different weight.

Plus, in many cases, even the “little” tasks can be deceptively time-consuming and difficult.

I didn’t realize how many little things there were to do until I started pushing things off onto her plate,” Helle says of her admin. “She’s doing a lot of the little lifting for me, which seems little, but it’s a huge relief.”

Katie Helle

Interestingly, many firm owners only come to this realization after hiring their first admin. The admin’s role is largely misunderstood and undervalued, and it initially feels like an expense that only a growing workload can justify.

As a result, the admin often joins the firm when the owner is already overwhelmed, clients are already waiting too long for responses, and processes are already poorly managed. In other words, the admin comes onboard to fix the chaos rather than prevent it.

But that approach isn’t the most effective one—as these stories show. Ideally, an admin has the space to create the conditions necessary for the rest of the team to thrive.

Over time, they become the person who knows how the firm actually works, which clients need a little more attention than others, who is likely to forget a document, and which internal processes tend to get stuck.

The Admin as the Glue Holding Client Relationships Together

In any small firm, every team member has a hand in creating an exceptional client experience. The owner isn’t just the boss. The bookkeeper isn’t just the person who crunches the numbers. And the admin isn’t just the person who answers emails and follows up on documents.

Technical accounting expertise will always be essential. Clients need people who understand their books, their taxes, and the decisions those numbers can inform.

But technical expertise only goes so far if the people receiving the service don’t feel seen, heard, and valued.

A perfectly prepared set of books doesn’t mean much to a client who can’t get someone to answer their questions—just as a well-designed workflow can still fail if nobody unblocks the unexpected bottlenecks quickly enough.

The admin is usually the person making sure the firm stays on top of all of that—and more.

And that’s why, in an industry where every interaction impacts the client experience, the admin role is just as important as any other—sometimes even more.