The CRM for public accounting BD, where the sellers are partners carrying hour targets.
A BD leader at a 20 to 400 person public accounting firm runs a sales motion where the sellers are tax and audit partners, the pipeline mixes audit, tax, and advisory on three different seasonality curves, and every pursuit sits inside an independence check before scope conversations can start. Strkr collapses that into one workspace with service-line forecast rollup, partner-aware pipeline hygiene, and native realization visibility beside the booking number.
Public accounting BD leaders run a motion no SaaS or professional-services playbook covers cleanly. The sellers are tax, audit, and advisory partners carrying chargeable-hour targets that collide with BD time every week of the year, and the collision gets uglier through busy season when the audit practice goes dark on new pursuits for ten weeks straight. The pipeline mixes audit, tax, and advisory on three different seasonality shapes with three different margin profiles, three different cycle lengths, and three different independence rules that gate what the firm can even pursue. Relationships close deals, not sequences. Most CRMs ship assuming a dedicated sales team and a single sales motion, and most pipeline tools score a deal with stage percentage math built for product sales. The pains below show up on every public accounting BD buyer call we run with firms between 20 and 400 people, and each one is a direct consequence of the regulated, partner-led, seasonality-driven way accounting firms actually sell.
Partners sell, hours bill
The sellers are partners carrying 1,200 chargeable-hour targets.
A public accounting BD leader manages a pipeline where the sellers are tax, audit, and advisory partners, each carrying a chargeable-hour target that competes with BD time every week of the year. A standard CRM assumes a dedicated AE spending the full week on pipeline, and the activity dashboards punish partners for behavior that is actually a billable hour booked on a client engagement. Weekly cadence tools built for an SDR team demand touchpoint volumes a partner at a 1,200-hour realization target cannot sustain. Strkr ships a partner-aware tier that tracks BD time against chargeable hours, surfaces pipeline moves without demanding activity rituals, and lets the BD leader run a review that respects the dual role instead of forcing the partner to choose between a client and a pursuit on Monday morning.
Three services, one forecast
Audit, tax, and advisory roll into one number on three seasonalities.
Audit engagements close in the fall for calendar-year clients, run peak work January through March, and renew annually with the same client relationship driving the renewal. Tax pursuits land October through December for the following filing season, carry a scope conversation that pivots on recent IRS guidance, and renew every return cycle. Advisory engagements close through the year on a project cycle that looks more like a consulting deal, with scope that reshapes twice before signature. Rolling all three into one firm forecast inside a generic CRM means a Google Sheet with three tabs and a Friday night reconciliation call that nobody owns. Strkr runs native service-line forecasts that roll up to a firm number with the three motions treated distinctly in the math, and the renewal column captured as a first-class line on audit and tax books that already carry an annual cadence.
Independence gates pursuit
A deal moves to scope before the independence check clears.
Every pursuit at a public accounting firm sits inside an independence check: the client cannot carry an audit relationship if the firm is already running advisory work on the restricted services list, and the firm cannot pursue a tax engagement without clearing a conflict review against existing clients. In the standard stack, the check lives in an email thread the firm risk partner answers twice a week, and pursuits drift toward scope conversations before clearance lands. Strkr runs independence status as a first-class field on every pursuit, with the risk-partner approval queue surfaced on the BD leader dashboard, so no pursuit moves to proposal until the clearance is captured on the record.
Realization not on the deal
Realization lives in the practice-management system, not the pursuit.
Every public accounting deal carries a realization expectation (standard rates times estimated hours, discounted or not, against a target realization percentage) that drives whether the pursuit is worth the hours scoped. Today that math lives in the practice-management system (ProSystem, STAR, Engagement) on the realization lead desktop, and never makes it back to the pursuit record. Pipeline reports show gross fee only, and realization becomes a quarterly reconciliation surprise after the engagement runs. The BD leader cannot sort pursuits by realization band or flag the pursuit priced too thin before the proposal lands. Strkr lets the pursuit carry a realization estimate alongside the booking number, so the BD leader sorts pipeline by realization as readily as by close date and approves the realization before the deal moves to proposal.
Cross-service referrals
A tax relationship that pulls in advisory never gets logged.
The tax partner closes a return engagement at a dental-practice group. Six weeks later the client asks whether the firm can help with a transaction-advisory review on an acquisition the owner is weighing. The hand-off happens in a hallway, no record attaches the second engagement to the first, and the referral chain evaporates before QBR. Strkr runs a native cross-service referral primitive on the account record so the BD leader sees every multi-service path, credits the originating partner on every downstream engagement, and reports referral revenue as a first-class line at QBR time without a quarterly reconciliation ritual.
Busy-season blackout
Audit partners vanish from the pipeline mid-January through April.
Audit partners carry a 10-week blackout from mid-January through mid-April where the firm expects client-service time, not BD time. The BD leader who runs a flat weekly cadence through that window gets ignored, and the pursuits that need a nudge in February wait until May for a partner to re-engage. Strkr ships a seasonality-aware cadence that respects the audit blackout, auto-nurtures audit pursuits with Strkr AI drafted holding emails during the window, and surfaces the five pursuits most at risk for the first partner review after busy season ends. The BD leader walks out of April with a pipeline that did not go cold while the firm was closing books.
How Strkr fits a public accounting BD week
The primitives a public accounting sales manager actually uses.
Strkr for public accounting BD leaders is the same CRM the partners and principals use, with a BD-tier overlay for forecast rollup, pipeline hygiene, realization tracking, independence status, and cross-service referral attribution. Everything below ships on every paid tier with no premium professional-services module gate. The primitives below map to the five jobs a public accounting BD leader repeats every week: run partner pipeline reviews, roll a service-line forecast, coach specific pursuits, track realization on open engagements, and keep independence clearance moving. When those five jobs happen inside one workspace with partner-aware context, the BD leader stops reconciling spreadsheets and starts coaching deals.
Service-line forecast
Audit, tax, advisory on one rollup.
Audit, tax, and advisory each roll up through their own forecast with service-appropriate category math. Audit uses commit, best case, and pipeline on an annual-renewal cycle with the fall-close concentration surfaced. Tax uses the same categories on an October-through-December cycle, with the next filing season as the booking horizon. Advisory carries a consulting shape with scope-change checkpoints. The three streams combine into a firm number without a Google Sheet, and the BD leader sees per-service contribution at a glance.
Partner pipeline view
Every partner pipeline on one scrollable screen.
The BD leader opens the partner rollup and sees every partner pipeline grouped by partner, sorted by stage and close date. Filter by service line, deal size, realization band, independence status, or hygiene score to find the fifteen pursuits that matter this week. Collapse per partner when running firm-wide reviews and expand per partner when running a 1:1 on a specific pursuit, so the review flows from zoomed-out to zoomed-in without a second tool.
Relationship hygiene score
A score that reflects how accounting actually closes.
Every open pursuit carries a hygiene score built from inputs that match the motion: meeting cadence with the economic buyer (CFO, controller, owner), stakeholder count across the account, partner engagement in the last two weeks, referral chain depth, next-step date, independence clearance status, and scoping completeness. Sort the partner pipeline by hygiene and the five pursuits that need a partner nudge this week surface above the fold.
Realization on the pursuit
Realization estimate lives beside the booking number.
Each pursuit carries a scoping block with hours per role per week per partner, standard rates, a target realization percentage, and the resulting net fee. The number lands on the pursuit record, surfaces in every pipeline report, and lets the BD leader sort pursuits by realization band. The scoping lead edits the block inline, and the BD leader approves the realization before the deal moves to proposal.
Independence status field
Clearance tracked on the pursuit, not in an email.
Every pursuit carries an independence status (pending, cleared, conflict, restricted) that routes to the firm risk partner for approval and sits on the pursuit record once resolved. The BD leader cannot see a pursuit without seeing the independence line, and no pursuit moves to proposal until the clearance is captured, so the compliance posture lives inside the pipeline rather than beside it.
Strkr AI pursuit risk
The pursuit the partner is overcommitted on, flagged early.
Strkr AI reads pursuit activity, email thread tone, meeting cadence, stakeholder movement, and scoping completeness, then flags pursuits where the partner commit looks optimistic versus the signal. The flag opens into a specific reason (no economic buyer meeting in 30 days, independence check still open, scoping phase slipping twice) so the coaching conversation is grounded in a case, not a hunch, and the partner respects the surface.
Cross-service referral chain
Every multi-service path attributed to the originating partner.
An account carrying a tax engagement that spawns an advisory review and an audit renewal is one account with three engagements and one referring partner. Strkr renders the full chain on the account record with originating partner attributed, so firm-level reporting captures referral revenue as a first-class line at QBR time without a manual roll-up ritual every quarter.
Dashboards by service line
Partner, service, and firm, one page.
The BD leader dashboard renders pursuit velocity by stage per service line, average deal size per service, win rate per partner, cycle time per lead source, realization by service, and referral revenue by originating partner. Each tile filters by service line, partner, segment, and timeframe. The weekly firm pipeline review runs off the dashboard in 20 minutes instead of a Monday ticket to a shared services analyst.
What Strkr automates for an accounting BD leader
The repeatable work the CRM should do before Monday.
The best public accounting BD leaders are the ones who automate the repeatable moves and spend the week on partner coaching and account strategy. Strkr Flows handle the dozen automations every accounting BD leader should run, and each one ships as a native trigger with no webhook plumbing. The pattern below is what shows up in week two of every mid-sized accounting firm deployment, and each flow respects that the sellers are partners with chargeable-hour targets and a busy-season blackout.
Forecast submit cadence
Monday open, Thursday nudge, Friday lock.
A weekly flow opens the forecast on Monday, nudges partners on Thursday if the forecast submission is still open, locks submissions Friday 5 PM firm-local, and rolls each service number to the BD leader queue. Partners who miss the lock surface on a BD leader list without a chase email going out, and the service-line number that rolls up is the number the practice agreed on.
Independence auto-route
New pursuit routes to risk partner for clearance.
Every new pursuit opens an independence task on the firm risk partner queue with the account name, service line, and related existing engagements pre-attached. The clearance lands on the pursuit record with partner approval captured, and the pursuit cannot move to proposal until the status is cleared, so no partner accidentally pushes a scope conversation ahead of compliance.
Busy-season holding emails
Strkr AI drafts a January holding note for every audit pursuit.
The second week of January, Strkr AI drafts a holding email per audit pursuit, personalized from the pursuit history and timed for the economic buyer, and queues each one for one-click send by the owning partner. The audit pipeline does not go dark through busy season, and the pursuits that need a May re-engagement arrive at a specific list on the BD leader dashboard the first Monday after April 15.
Stale pursuit nudge
Pursuits past the per-stage threshold surface weekly.
Monday 7 AM, Strkr identifies every open pursuit past the per-stage age threshold with no partner activity in the window. Drops a nudge on the owning partner dashboard and attaches the batch to the BD leader partner review. The weekly review opens with the stale list already surfaced instead of the BD leader building the list live during the meeting.
Scoping handoff flow
Deal moves to proposal, scoping lead gets the brief.
A stage transition from Discovery to Proposal triggers a scoping handoff flow: the brief lands with the designated scoping lead, the realization block opens for edit, the BD leader is notified of the handoff, and the pursuit is tagged with the scoping lead for accountability. Nobody drops a handoff in the hallway, and the realization estimate reaches the pursuit record before proposal land day.
Cross-service trigger
A new engagement on an existing account flags.
When a second engagement opens on an account that already carries one, the flow tags it as a cross-service referral, credits the originating partner, and surfaces it on the referral dashboard. The firm captures referral revenue as a first-class number without a quarterly reconciliation call, and originating partners see their referred-revenue line next to their direct-closed line.
Risk-flag digest
Monday email, five pursuits, two paragraphs each.
Monday 7 AM email to the BD leader: the top five Strkr AI risk-flagged pursuits across the firm with the specific reason per pursuit and a suggested partner conversation. The BD leader walks into the Monday partner review with the risk list in hand. The digest frames the week coaching around five specific pursuits instead of a vague remark across a 40-pursuit book.
Tax-season renewal
Return pursuits open 120 days before filing deadline.
Tax engagements open a renewal pursuit automatically 120 days before the next filing deadline, assigned to the owning partner with the prior-year return data pre-attached. The renewal flows through the same forecast primitives as a new engagement, so the firm number captures renewal risk the same way it captures net-new pipeline.
What a BD leader sees that partners do not
The BD tier that respects the partner workspace.
A BD tier that creates a parallel UI is a tier partners resent, and in a public accounting firm resentment at the top of the sellers list kills adoption firm-wide. Strkr keeps the partner workspace identical for partner and BD leader, then adds a BD-only overlay for service rollups, private partner notes, risk flags, independence status rollup, and realization visibility that partners do not see on each other. The result is a shared source of truth where partners trust that what they see is what the BD leader sees for their own book, with no shadow view running on top.
Firm rollup
Every service pipeline on one scrollable view.
The BD leader firm rollup shows every service pipeline on a single screen, grouped by service line and then by partner, sorted by stage and close date. Filter by segment, lead source, deal size, realization band, independence status, or hygiene score. Collapse per service for firm-wide reviews, expand for a service-specific session.
Private partner notes
BD leader notes partners do not see.
Notes captured during a partner 1:1 can be marked private to the BD leader or shared with the partner. Private notes feed the annual review view and the partner development dashboard. Shared notes become visible to the partner with the related action items queued, both living on the same partner timeline.
Submit-lock override
The BD leader read beats the partner read when it has to.
Partners submit their weekly category calls through the Friday workflow. The BD leader overrides the partner call per pursuit where the BD read differs, and the override carries a one-line reason the partner sees on Monday. The service number that rolls up is the BD-adjusted number, with the partner submission preserved as an audit trail for the annual review.
Risk-flag inbox
The pursuits Strkr AI flagged, in one list.
Every Strkr AI pursuit risk flag across the firm lands in a BD-leader-only risk inbox. The BD leader triages each flag in two clicks: dismiss (false positive, carries a reason), schedule coaching (creates a task tied to the pursuit), or escalate (routes to the service lead with the flag history attached). The inbox clears to zero on a disciplined week, and dismissals train the surface to the firm selling style.
Realization visibility
Every pursuit realization visible to the BD leader.
Partners see the realization estimate for their own pursuits, the service lead sees realization across the practice, and the BD leader sees realization across the firm. The BD leader runs a realization review to spot pursuits priced too thin for the hours scoped, approves the realization before proposal, and defends firm pricing discipline with grounded numbers instead of a quarterly surprise.
Partner benchmarks
Partner against service, service against firm.
Every partner metric (BD hours, pursuits opened, win rate, deal size, cycle time, referral revenue) renders against the service average and the firm average on the same tile. The BD leader spots the partner a quarter outside the service on cycle time and runs a specific coaching session instead of a generic conversation grounded in no numbers.
Pursuit timeline
Every meeting, email, and partner note in order.
The pursuit timeline captures every meeting, email, partner note, risk flag, independence check, and category call across the pursuit lifetime. The BD leader walking into a difficult pursuit review scrolls the timeline in two minutes and arrives with context instead of an interrogation. The review stays grounded in events, not opinions.
Head-to-head
Strkr vs Salesforce plus practice management plus spreadsheets.
Most 20 to 400 person public accounting firms run Salesforce for records (often an inherited instance from a prior CIO), the practice-management system (ProSystem, STAR, Engagement) for realization and WIP, a Google Sheet for the service-line forecast rollup, an email thread for independence clearance, a shared drive folder for proposals, and email for cross-service coordination. The stack is five surfaces, five logins, and five places where the firm number drifts between tools. Strkr collapses that into one workspace with one bill, with the BD leader tier shipped by default on every paid plan.
What matters
Strkr
Salesforce + practice-mgmt + spreadsheets
Number of surfaces the BD leader opens for a weekly review
Google Sheet with three tabs reconciled Friday night
Partner pipeline view
Native partner-grouped rollup with chargeable-hour context
Salesforce pipeline report filtered by owner
Realization on the pursuit
Realization block beside the booking number
Practice-mgmt system on the realization lead desktop
Independence clearance
First-class field on the pursuit, risk-partner queue
Email thread the risk partner answers twice a week
Pursuit risk flags
Native Strkr AI flags with specific reasons
BD leader eyeballs the pipeline Monday morning
Cross-service referral attribution
Native referral chain on the account record
Quarterly reconciliation call across service leads
Busy-season holding cadence
Strkr AI drafted holding emails, one-click send
Audit partners go dark January through April
Tax-season renewal pursuit
Auto-opens 120 days before filing deadline
Calendar reminder in a partner inbox
Monthly cost per partner (BD stack)
One per-seat line, see pricing page
Four to five per-seat lines stacked
See the CRM built for the BD leader at a public accounting firm.
Start a trial with the full BD leader stack enabled: service-line forecast rollup, partner pipeline view, relationship-weighted hygiene score, Strkr AI pursuit risk, realization on the pursuit, cross-service referral attribution, independence status field, busy-season holding flows, tax-season renewal flow. One bill, one workspace, one source of truth for the firm. Migrate from the Salesforce plus practice-management plus Sheet stack in an afternoon and keep every account, pursuit, forecast submission, and open scoping block intact. The pricing page lays out the per-seat line in full.
Can Strkr handle a forecast that mixes audit, tax, and advisory on different seasonality shapes?
Yes, and it is the primary reason public accounting BD leaders adopt the product. Strkr runs native service-line forecasts that treat each motion with its own category math: audit uses commit, best case, and pipeline on an annual-renewal cycle with the fall-close concentration surfaced; tax uses the same categories on an October-through-December cycle with the next filing season as the booking horizon; advisory carries a consulting shape with scope-change checkpoints. The three streams combine into one firm number without a Google Sheet, and the BD leader sees per-service contribution against target at a glance. For firms running additional service variants (wealth, outsourced CAS, forensic), the forecast primitive scales with per-service weight configuration.
How does Strkr handle the fact that our audit partners go dark during busy season?
Strkr ships a seasonality-aware cadence that respects the audit blackout from mid-January through mid-April. Audit pursuits auto-nurture with Strkr AI drafted holding emails during the window, personalized from pursuit history and timed for the economic buyer, and queued for one-click send by the owning partner. The audit pipeline does not go dark through busy season, and the pursuits that need a May re-engagement surface on a specific list on the BD leader dashboard the first Monday after April 15, so the firm walks out of April with warm pipeline instead of a four-month cold-trail.
How does the independence clearance workflow actually work?
Every pursuit carries an independence status field with four states: pending, cleared, conflict, and restricted. When a new pursuit opens, Strkr routes an independence task to the firm risk partner queue with the account name, service line, and related existing engagements pre-attached. The risk partner approves or flags inside the pursuit record, and the clearance lands on the pursuit with approval captured. No pursuit can move to proposal until the status is cleared, so the compliance posture lives inside the pipeline instead of beside it. For firms running a formal conflicts database, the field supports a lookup to that external record for the audit trail.
Can we track realization on the pursuit record alongside the gross fee?
Yes. Each pursuit carries a scoping block with hours per role per week per partner, standard rates, discount percentage, a target realization percentage, and the resulting net fee. The number lands on the pursuit record, surfaces in every pipeline report, and lets the BD leader sort pursuits by realization band. The scoping lead edits the block inline, and the BD leader approves the realization before the deal moves to proposal. Firms running tiered pricing can configure target realization bands per service and per segment so the sort flags pursuits priced too thin before the proposal lands.
How does Strkr handle cross-service referrals between tax, audit, and advisory?
Strkr ships a native cross-service referral primitive on the account record. When a second engagement opens on an account that already carries one, the flow tags it as a cross-service referral, credits the originating partner, and surfaces it on the referral dashboard. The firm captures referral revenue as a first-class number without a quarterly reconciliation call, originating partners see their referred-revenue line next to their direct-closed line, and the BD leader reports cross-service contribution at QBR with grounded numbers. For firms running a formal referral comp plan, the attribution math exports to the comp spreadsheet without a manual pull.
Can a BD leader at a 60 person accounting firm configure Strkr without a Salesforce admin?
Yes, for the BD-tier levers. The BD leader can tune per-stage hygiene thresholds, service-line forecast categories, independence routing rules, realization bands per service, risk-digest cadence, and scoping handoff rules without an admin ticket. Deeper schema changes (new custom objects, API-level integrations with the firm practice-management system or financial system) still route through an operations admin by design. For firms migrating from an inherited Salesforce instance, Strkr ships a migration path that preserves accounts, pursuits, forecast submissions, and open action items on the way in. Pricing lands as Starter at $29 per seat per month, Pro at $59, Scale at $119, with the Strkr AI module at $49 per month covering 5,000 Strkr AI calls so the risk-digest and busy-season holding emails stay well inside the included envelope for a firm this size.
No sales call, no migration consultant, no four-month implementation. Enter your card, get 14 days of the full Pro tier, cancel any time before day 14 with zero charge. Spin up a workspace, import your CSV, and have something useful before lunch.
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