The One About Hierarchy

Kimberly D stirred it up this past week when she shared a photo about the different responsibilities for a Bookkeeper vs Acountant (direct link to the post down in the Featured Posts section). For what it’s worth, I prefer to use the noun “Tax Professional” instead of accountant in this type of discussion because I think bookkeeping is accounting (fight me). 

But the discussion is an important one and there are so many directions the discussion can go (as you can see in the comments of the thread!), but I want to focus Kimberly’s comment about “I can guarantee your client is paying their accountant well for their time and it’s extremely unfair for them to push tasks that should be done by an accountant on to your plate.” 

There is a difference in the work and traditional responsibilities, but there is no hierarchy. One is not better than the other. One is not in charge of the other.

There is also a lot of overlap in the work. Honestly, the two lists that she snipped from Business.com should really be thought of as one single list of tasks that a business may or may not choose to pay for. If you, reader, are capable of doing the work AND want to do the work, in America at least, you can offer any of these services on both of these lists.

I do things from both of these lists. I also do NOT do things from both of these lists.  Some tasks (from both lists), I do not know how to do. Some I do not want to do.

At some point a choice has to be made about who does the work. But the tax pro (who may be referred to as an “accountant”) doesn't get to make the choice about who does it. If you own your own bookkeeping business, there is no line on an org chart coming down to the bookkeeper’s name from your client’s tax pro. So the person who does the work should be the person that is getting paid to do the work. Don’t let clients simply forward emails from their accountant to you and leave you to sweat.

As you get more experience and confidence and training, there will come a time when you want to do more things for your clients. Harder and harder things inside a bookkeeping file because you and your client have agreed that you will be hired to do that work. Consider Nerd Enterprises’ mastermind group a place to help you navigate those choppy waters.  Even the most experienced accounting professional will have a head scratcher now and then. Seth has been around the accounting block in his own firm! Now he wants to be the safe place to help you grow your business and skill set.

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Deals Deals Deals

💰 5MB is having a pop-up sale on their Client On-Boarding Checklist. Use code 5mbchecklist to save $15 through May 31st. Grab your checklist HERE.

💰 Fast & Easy QBO Recertification Course will increase in price as soon as their own study material is released (any day now). Buy now to lock in the $50 price and speed through your recert by the June deadline.

💰 Use this link to get 20% off Keeper* for 3 months.

Please always send me any news of deals that you hear of that others might benefit from.

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Be There or Be Square

📅 +May 13 & May 20: Co-working Hour. RSVP for the last 2 community co-working hours before we take a summer break: May 13 & May 20.

📅 May 14: Products, Services, and Inventory in QBO. Learn to use QBO’s Products and Services list to track your services, product lines, and cost of goods sold. Armed with this info, you can make informed decisions on how to grow your company effectively. Sign up HERE.*

📅 +May 21: Accounting Nomads. Come here the pros and cons of running your business from anywhere in the world. RSVP in the Facebook group so you don’t miss this!

📅 May 21: Bookkeeping Buds Magic Hour. Cindy Schroeder hosts Magic Hour as time to ask your bookkeeping questions from an industry expert. Learn more and sign up HERE.

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Featured Posts

🌶️ As promised above, Kimberly D’s astute post about Bookkeeping vs Accounting.

🌶️ What would say to someone who is trying to discern if the bookkeeping industry a good fit for them? This post had some really great comments.

🌶️ Egle E. asked for advice about how to navigate serving a clean up where you set a target completion date but the client has not been responsive. 

🌶️ Jamie U. notified her clients of her reduced summer hours and one was not happy. This thread is what makes the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Community the best in all Accounting Land.

🌶️ Bianca C asked if Upwork was a good place to find clients quickly because she was crunched for time (not sure exactly what she means by that). Tons of folks have built their entire business from Upwork, so it might work for her, but I want to go on record saying that, unless you are an accounting or QBO rockstar, I don’t think this line of work is a great place to make money if you need money very quickly. This is a long-term play, y’all.

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Help You Hustle

💪 That Keeper Demo, y'all! The comments section during the live stream were just a love fest for the app. We tried to mostly focus on the new bells and whistles Keeper has developed since my last demo with him. A big one is “Keeper Receipts”. And the full-blown Xero integration.

• Remember, here is the community referral link to Keeper for a 20% discount if you ever do want to get started with Keeper.

💪 Xero Awards 2024 nominations are now open. If you use Xero, you should apply. Yes, YOU! Or nominate your friend who is not good at promoting him/herself. Make your nominations today.

💪 There is a woman on LinkedIn named Erica Goode who is doing a series of posts called Anatomy of a $200K, 1-employee, 15 hr/wk Firm. Spilling a lot of tea. I admit that I am slightly skeptical. I have questions. I think this is an extreme outlier for our industry. BUT, I am paying attention. I think you should, too. If anyone knows her and can convince her to let me interview her, I would appreciate the intro.

💪 Here is a link to all the Intuit Recertification training webinars. And a full FAQ about Recertification.  Remember, to recertify by June 30 and don’t wait until the last day because the website usually shuts down from too much traffic!

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Jobs

💼 Check out the BSH Job Opp Google sheet. Click HERE to see the list and go apply!. Be sure to use #jobopp when posting about jobs!

💼 Belay is actively hiring for both contract and corporate bookkeeping positions. Check out the jobs HERE (and if you apply, I would be grateful if you mentioned that I sent you there).

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My Family Circus

New section of this newsletter for 2024. Completely non-bookkeeping related.

🎪 So, I worked at school field day for 6th-8th grade yesterday. My station involved a relay that included 10 push ups.

Oh, my goodness. Please have your children do push ups! Like in your house. Regularly. There were a very sad amount of youths for whom that was a struggle.

I would like to tell you how I ensured my children can do a lot of pushups. 

My children have had to do pushups to earn time to play Minecraft (insert any screen time or other things they love but you know makes them have mushy bodies). Literally, we have done one-for-one pushups for a minute of video games. 30 pushups for 30 minutes. We’ve kind of lost that rule in our house, but the foundation was laid. My kids are capable of doing 10 pushups on school field day.

Maybe you could do 10 push ups to earn a popsicle this summer. Maybe you could do pushups as punishment for burping at the table. Or if they forget to feed the dog. Or for using bad language or anytime they call you “bruh”. Doesn't matter. Anything to make them drop and give you 20.

Just please insert pushups into your family life!

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Kate Builds In Public

🎢 Selling electronic downloads on my firm website.

I want to sell some resources on my firm website. Currently the only one I have is my Accountable Plan template for S-corps. I had a very clunky system where I advertised it for sale and people would ask for it and then I would send them a checkout link to pay and then manually email them the document. Obviously, that is terrible. So I updated my system to allow it to be completely hands-off.

I ended up going with Gumroad which takes 10% of every sale. Ouch! However the setup process and the interface is just so easy. I can’t emphasize enough how simple it is if you want to deliver electronic products and get paid. That 10% fee is the fee for simplicity.

I did consider a platform called Lemon Squeezy. It seems a little more complex than Gumroad, but it's basically a direct competitor to Gumroad but a lot cheaper per sale. But they rejected my merchant application! I'm actually quite bitter about it and almost didn't want to tell y'all about that because I feel like someone rejecting me to process financial payments on their platform is a personal attack on my character, but I'm going to act like a grown up and not a brat and tell you about that platform.

I have some other ideas of templates and checklists that I can sell. The rest are related to Freshbooks. I just have to get my butt in gear and carve out the time and create. I am definitely working IN my business much more than I'm working ON my business lately. I need someone to force me to do the more important business process work. That is how you increase your revenue in the long run!

Check out this post to see how other people have figured out how to sell downloadable resources.

(Note: you might know that I sell an ebook and a really cool T-account mouse pad on the Bookkeeping Side Hustle website, but that is through Shopify and that is expensive and way more hardcore than I think a firm who just wants to sell a few downloadable resources needs. And I need Print-On-Demand capabilities for the mousepad. You won't need Shopify).

🎢 Recently, my life has been characterized by a lot of therapy…as in, I’m the therapist. Anyone else feel like a therapist to their clients? Here are some examples of conversations I’ve had in just the last week, I kid you not.

• Toxic ex-husband who is manipulative about money and has sued to see her business books so that informs everything she does related to bookkeeping in her business.

• A client who I frequently train on FreshBooks whose business-owner boyfriend is a compulsive spender and she hides credit cards and she is looking for a solution to give him a card but not let him overspend.

• An in-house admin who I support who has a terrible boss and acts afraid of him and is obsessed with documenting what “she does vs what he does”.

• A member of my FreshBooks Office Hours is doing the books for her husband and he sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theorist and “doesn’t believe in connecting his bank to the internet”.  

To me, this is the exciting stuff! If I just did plain, ol’ bookkeeping everyday, I’d be bored out of my mind!

🎢 Anyone else with young kids feel like we should call this month May-cember!?! So much going on! This week I chaperoned the 4th grade field trip (Botanic Gardens and 4th grade girls are precious and a bit high drama!) and 6th grade field day (I was in charge of tractor tire flipping for 5 hours…also I am learning middle schoolers are a completely different species!). As someone who likes to work, it would be easy not to sign up for these things. But the whole point of my business is to do these types of things!

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From The Vault

⚡ Speaking of Keeper, if you ever use Keeper and want help using it, there is a little sub-community developed by two gals named Hughes & Strong. They do a free Keeper monthly discussion group, too. Learn more about these gals here.

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Letters To The Editor

✉️ Serena Shoup of Bookkeeping Business Accelerator wrote this to her own email list. I’m claiming the compliment as a direct communication with me! I’m so grateful for encouragement like this. Learn more about Serena from her podcast, The Ambitious Bookkeeper*.

“truth be told, I don’t spend a ton of time in Facebook groups anymore, but I do frequently pop into this one to answer questions. But mostly, I just read Kate’s newsletter on Substack… like religiously. She puts out some really top notch & transparent content”

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Classifieds (Clickable)

Want to have an ad in the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Pub? Click HERE for more in

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Keep hustling!

Kate

-Chief Hustler-

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I am down right rabid about transparency and full disclosure. If a link has a * beside it, it means it is either an affiliate link where I might receive compensation if you make a purchase, at no additional charge to you. Or it could be a tracking link that another business provided me to see how many readers click on that link.