The One With A Sextant

TL;DR

So if we can use the word “quadrant” for a plane divided into 4 sections, can we use the word “sextant” for a plane divided into 6 sections? I declare it so!

I saw this image on social media recently with the question “What quadrant are you in?”. It is sure did stick in my mind.

For much of my life, I was a hard-core, heroic, happy #1.

I have receipts.

But then I entered a phase of life where I was no longer publicly achieving in a career. I found other ways to “achieve”, I suppose (apologies to my children for any torture I may have subjected them to).

Achiever is my nature.

But I’m not really sure where I am now when it comes to my career/business. My innate personality might still be in “High” on the Y-axis, but the units on the X-axis are different. Or better said, don’t I have several of these charts going on simultaneously in my life? Don’t we all?

Anyway, this image has caused me consternation of late because, by not being clear on where I want to be (at least in the short term), I’m really not anywhere.

That is why all the business coaches and gurus talk about “finding your why”. I am inclined to move past that sort of talk, and then I see a clear chart like this and it smacks me in the face.

Here are some examples of tensions I see playing out for folks reading this:

• Do you see the ads/influencers glamorizing the entrepreneur or Digital Nomad life, but know that you’d be happiest working part time for someone else and shutting your computer at the end of the day when your specific task list is done? Perhaps you can be a subcontractor or could apply to work for QuickBooks Live. And you’d never have to wrestle with your website or set up Google Workspace or decide about whether you should run Facebook ads or not.

• Do you think solo operator is the way to go, but then it turns out you have a real distaste for clicking around in a general ledger. Whoops! Maybe you should have bought a course or read books on growing a business instead of spending so many hours learning Xero. You just need to find someone who does love spending time in Xero.

• Did you start your small business thinking you’d like to work just 10 hours per week as a SAHM/D, but you keep bringing on more clients and not getting rid of the low paying ones because the siren song of higher revenue and bigger client load is luring you to your demise because you haven’t set clear goals for yourself and your family? You need to have a heart-to-heart with yourself.

As the saying goes, when you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.

The clearer our destination, the better our ability to pick a pathway that is not as fraught with frustration and disappointment. This is especially important if your natural inclination is to one box of the sextant, but you really need to be in another professional box for your given phase of life. The clearer our goals/vision/I-will-not-do-X-Y-or-Z, the easier it will be to get into the box we know is best for us at any particular moment.

Gah! Easier said than done.

I am not clear about which (professional) box I am? Which one are you in? You can comment directly on this newsletter! It would make for an interesting discussion. I hope you do!

But one thing that all readers of this newsletter have in common is that, no matter what our professional goals are, we understand how important technology will be in our careers as accounting professionals. The better we successfully implement cloud technology, the better long term success we’ll have, whatever box we are aiming for.

So check out our sponsor Digits if you have clients on QBO. It is free! It can be useful no matter what box you are in.

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Deals Deals Deals

💰 When I demo’d Ignition proposal and billing software (see "Kate Builds In Public” section for more info about that demo), I was offered 4 months at $85/month. Go book a demo if you want that deal.

💰 Seth David of Nerd Enterprises is running a Labor Day Sale. Big bundle of 5 courses.* Savings of $797. You get his 2 real estate courses (one for brokers and one for property managers) PLUS you get his Notion, Airtable, and Dynalist course (I am not sure what Dynalist is…y’all comment below and tell me!). He is a top notch “explainer”, y’all. These courses would be great training for new staff or for the solopreneur who wants to niche in Real Estate.

Deals section is slim this week. 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

Check the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Calendar for the latest times and info.

📅 Mondays in September: Co-Working time for BSH at 11:00am EST. Join the zoom HERE with the password HUSTLE. FREE!

📅 +September 9: Everything you want to know about the QuickBooks Payroll Certification with Margie Remmers-Davis. If you can’t wait and want to get started on the cert with the help of her course, you can use our BSH link* and use discount code Hustle. You can also just go straight to the training inside your QBO Accountant training portal.

📅 +September 12: What is a CFO? First of a 2-part webinar series in partnership with The CFO Project.

📅 +September 15: How to Successfully Run a Remote Firm. Episode 3 of the webinar series in partnership with Financial Cents.

📅 September 20: Start of the 4 sessions of The Bookkeeping Biz Workshops with Serena Shoup*. These workshops are $47. Remember to use code KATE for 10% off all of Serena’s courses.

📅 +September 26: How to be a CFO? Second of a 2-part webinar series in partnership with The CFO Project.

📅 September 27-28: Gusto Next FREE vCon. This 2-day virtual event allows you to get your People Advisor certification (which I have obtained and learned A LOT about payroll because of that free cert). And then it is speakers and breakouts. You know the deal. The sessions look very good. The most compelling slot to me is “How I won my first People Advisory client and 10X’d payroll revenue” 👀

To sign up for Gusto Next:

• If you are already a Gusto Partner, it is free. Just register here. Go to your Gusto Account.

• If you are NOT a Gusto Partner yet (also FREE), you FIRST can use my accountant referral link to sign up* (we’ll both get $500 if you add 3 clients in 12 months). Then go register for your free ticket.

📅 +September 28: Solo 401(k)s and Retirement Planning for Bookkeepers and their Clients with Sean Mullaney, The FI Tax Guy. This is the info many of us need for our own retirement accounts AND the info we need to be able to share with our clients (while not giving official financial advice). We are even going to have some trivia questions during the live stream to give away some free copies of his new book “Solo 401k: The Solopreneur’s Retirement Account”. I’m so pumped about being a stop on his book tour! I’ve been a fan of his for a long time as my family has been on our Financial Independence journey.

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Featured Posts

🌶️ How many reports is too many reports? At what point do you make the client pull them?

🌶️ A CPA gave Alisha P. unsolicited pricing feedback. She came to the group asking for feedback about how to handle this. Boy, did I give my feedback! And so did others. Bottom line. Do not be intimidated by those 3 letters if you do not have them. Getting a CPA is hard. No doubt. A ridiculously amazing accomplishment. But we’ve all done hard and amazing things. Some of us chose different hard things to do. PLENTY of bookkeeping entrepreneurs without that credential make WAY more $$ than folks with CPA after their name.

🌶️ Bookkeepers do accounting. Everyday. All day. I’ll beat that drum until the day I die. So go park on this post about where folks discuss where wages for cooks and waitresses belong in the COA for a bit and make sure you understand the conversation. Even if you will never, ever serve a restaurant client, you can ponder the big picture discussed here.

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Help You Hustle

💪 I did an interview with Jeremy Wells because I was intrigued about how he could crank out SO.MUCH.CONTENT. I asked him to share his secrets with us, and he did! In this video. Long, but very good.

💪 Call me Boomer if you want (I’m only 41), but I was today years old when I learned that if you hit your little Window Key + V on your keyboard, you get a clip board of all the recent bits of text that you’ve copied. Do you know how many times I’m wanting to copy and paste multiple things all at once. This tiny stroke is a game changer for me. (But I’m still hitting space bar 2x after periods…my thumbs can’t help it!).

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Jobs

In the #JobOpportunity HashTag (right bar inside the Facebook group on your desktop), there are some new leads. Or just search for the names listed in the Facebook Group. I deliberately make you do a little work to go find these so that these folks don’t get inundated with people who aren’t serious. SorryNotSorry.

💼 Dream Accounting is hiring a part-time bookkeeper and payroll specialist.

💼 Kelsey Blackwell is looking for a very specific type of bookkeeper to join her team.

💼 NewWay Accounting is hiring a part-time, remote admin assistant. Check out Candace Galiffa’s post. There is potential for this to turn in to a full time bookkeeper position.

💼 Molly Isenbarger shared a job posting for a local biz.

💼 A new posting for a position in the Philippines on the CloudAccountingJobs.com job board.

Don’t forget the standing opps on my Find A Freelance Job article. 1099 and W-2 opps.

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Kate Builds In Public

🎢 I have two proposals out with FreshBooks prospects. And both have watched my Loom video. Doh! Waiting the signature and payment. “The waaa-yaa-ting is the hardest part!” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

• Proposal 1: $708 for 4 months of clean up and $250 for 2 hours of training.

• Proposal 2: $540 for 2 months of clean up and $250 for 2 hours of training.

🎢 Last Monday, I hosted a “Co-Working Time” for Bookkeeping Side Hustle Community. 13 people came! The way it worked was you just came to the zoom and worked quietly on something on your to-do list that you needed accountability to get done. Everyone just typed what painful thing they were going to work on. My painful thing was getting my 11 year old son set up for Virginia state payroll. It was every bit as painful as I had expected because my own payroll is exempt from Virginia state taxes because I get to claim Texas residency as a military spouse. So my payroll in Virginia is a special flower. Had to work with Virginia Dept. of Rev. and with Gusto Support to get it set up right. Nothing fun about it. But done! I want to make this co-working time a regular affair. Come join us every Monday @ 11:00am EST for your dose of necessary hurt (whatever that is for you). Zoom Link. PW: HUSTLE

🎢I had a demo and started a trial with the proposal and billing software Ignition (formerly Practice Ignition). It is surely an impressive software. It is also not cheap. Paying $85/mo (4 month discounted price if you sign up for a demo) and then it will be $169/mo.

Thus far, I’ve cobbled things together with HelloSign for signatures and collecting ACH info and QuickBooks Online Merchant Services for billing. I was paying $20 per month for HelloSign (even with months of no signatures…I had like ONE month where I needed more than the free plan) and pay 1% for QBO payments with $10 cap.

I think I will save money overall because I’ll ditch HelloSign and Ignition has a $5 cap on ACH which will same some money on transaction fees for larger clean up jobs. And my plan is to move off of Mighty Networks for my DIY office hours group. Mighty Networks processing fees are not cheap and there is no ACH option. So just moving my FreshBooks DIYers on to Ignition is going to result in a lot of savings overall.

But most of all, the reason to go with something like Ignition is not because of the dollar-here-dollar-there savings on processing fees. I’m doing it because it promises to be a better tool. With templates and easy changes to name & date & pricing & bundles. See, I am doing more client training lately. That means more interaction with new clients and more admin work for billing. A $250 training client was becoming a real pain to engage and bill. I also have to bill vendors who sponsor this newsletter or my YouTube demos for this community. Lots of admin.

They also generally claim that three-tiered proposals lead to higher revenue overall. I’m hoping to start leveraging that feature to easily present 3 options to prospects.

So, Ignition, here I come.

If you are only planning onboarding a handful of monthly bookkeeping clients, you probably don’t need a product like Ignition and can do some much cheaper manual workarounds.

🎢 Not only did I sign up Dependent #1 for payroll, I supported Dependent #2 in making her first equity investment. Hot diggity dog! She has been asking to do this for a while now, but we were having trouble deciding which investment to pick. She ended up choosing $20 of VOO (a Vanguard mutual fund). Starting off with financial education early!

We executed the trade within the Greenlight Kids banking app. This year we signed our kids up for a bank account/debit card with Greenlight. If you need a bank for your kids that has some great features like allowance tracking, automatic saving and giving buckets, spending controls, then check out Greenlight (that is a referral link).

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From The Vault

⚡ That time I asked Michael Ly from Reconciled about where are all the MALE bookkeepers.

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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.