24. How I Can Support Your Accounting Needs

Is your business built on a solid foundation? Or is it built on dirt or soft ground?

When you build a house on soft ground, it might stand for a time, but eventually it caves in. Same goes for your business.

And your finances are the basement of your business. It’s the part that’s invisible to most outsiders, but what holds up the upper floors - your sales, marketing and your own personal zone of genius.

Your bookkeeping system is one of the first bricks in that foundation. And since you probably aren't an accountant, you need expert help building that foundation. That's where I come in.

With over 30 years of finance and accounting, I offer accounting and bookkeeping services to serve female CEOs up to $5 million in revenue.

In this episode of Purposeful Profit, you'll get an introduction to the 6 bookkeeping and accounting services I offer to help you build that strong foundation:

1️⃣ QBO Assessment
2️⃣ QBO Cleanup
3️⃣ QBO Setup
4️⃣ Monthly Bookkeeping Services
5️⃣ Simple Financial Bookkeeping Template
6️⃣ Ask-an-Expert

🎧 Listen in and you'll learn:

- The 6 bookkeeping services I offer to support your accounting needs
- Who each service is for and what’s involved
- How to take the next step

Mentioned in this episode:

Get your Simple Financials Bookkeeping template
Continue the conversation and book a free call

For the full show notes, including the transcript, go to www.carlamoats.com/podcast/episode24

DISCLAIMER: The information in this podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an accountant-client relationship. While we use reasonable efforts to furnish accurate and up-to-date information, we assume no liability or responsibility for any errors, omissions or regulatory updates.

Transcript

Welcome to Purposeful Profit, where I'll help you take your business to the next level. I'm Carla Moats, Finance and Strategy Coach and Fractional CFO for high-achieving female entrepreneurs. I'm here to empower women to build wildly profitable businesses to give them the freedom to live their dream lives. I'll use my more than 30 years of finance and consulting experience to take the mystery out of your finances, hope you make more money, and go after your next big thing. 

Hello there and welcome back to the Purposeful Profit podcast. If this is your first time joining us, welcome. And if you are a repeat listener, I'm really glad to have you back. 

I am Carla Moats, I'm your host. I am a financial and accounting expert. And I am a financial whisperer to female CEOs. I simplify their finances so they can put more money in their pocket. And today we are going to talk about bookkeeping. We're going to talk about the foundation of your business. 

So building a business is actually a lot like building a house. When you build a house, what's the first thing you build? Would you build a house and just put it on dirt or on soft ground? No, you lay a foundation or a basement. Because what happens if you were to, what would happen if you build a house and you just, without laying any foundation, you started building it on dirt or soft ground, right? You might be okay for a time, but at some point you would be risking those upper layers caving in and just everything sinking into the ground. And while your finances are really the basement of your business, it's the part that's invisible to most outsiders. It's the boring part. It's nothing glamorous, but it's one that holds up your upper floors. And in using this analogy, your upper floors of your business are your sales, your marketing, your delivery, your own personal zone of genius. And if you haven't built that basement, that foundation, and if you're not building those upper layers on a strong foundation, you risk that those upper layers will stay supported. And that can mean, you know, you have disruptions, you get distracted or you're spending time on, it has to rebuild that foundation time that had you built it, to start with, you would not have occurred. So I want you to think of me as your foundation gal. I will help you build that foundation. And a big part of that foundation is your bookkeeping system. It's kind of the first brick you lay in that foundation. Every business needs a bookkeeping system. And I am here to support you. 

So what we're going to do in today's episode is I'm going to talk about the various ways I can support your accounting needs. I might offer six different bookkeeping services currently that service all different types of needs, all different types of businesses. And I'm going to talk about what each of the services is for and what's involved. And then I'm also going to give you some instructions on how to take the next step. If you think you're ready or if that particular service is something where you're saying, Hey, I think that's what I need. All right, so let's dive in. 

First thing I'm going to talk about is what I offer, which is called a QBO assessment. If you are on QBO today and you have a gut feeling that something is right, maybe you're looking at your numbers and something, just doesn't add up. Maybe you have a relative who's been helping you, but is it really a bookkeeper? Maybe you've been doing QBO yourself, but you haven't kept up with it or you aren't really sure you're doing it right. Or you just have some kind of misgiving about your current bookkeeper. This is the service that's for you. 

What this is is this is a service to assess the state of your  QBO books is your QBO bookkeeping complete knack. Or if that's really the question we're going to answer. If you are coming to me for cleanup services, we have to do this service first. And the reason we do this service first is, cleanup varies a lot from business to business. And it's one of those things where you don't really know what you're getting into until you get in there. And so think of, if we go back to this building analogy, think of the assessment as the blueprint for your cleanup. It's going to give you a complete picture of what your issues are so that when you go to find someone for cleanup, whether you hire me or someone else, or you even attempt to do it yourself, you're going to have a much better picture of the scope of work. And you're going to have less surprises during cleanup. I'm going to talk about cleanup in a little bit, but this will also help ensure that when you get a price quote for cleanup that it's as accurate as can be. 

So we talked already about who this is for. So I just want to give you a feel for the things that I reviewed during this. I'll review your company's setup. How are you set up in Quick books? I'll review your chart of accounts. This is how all of your transactions are categorized and organized. I'll review that. I'll review your bankrupt conciliations. Are they up to date? And are they all being done? I will do a review of your profit loss and your balance sheet. This will help me with your chart, this will also help me with your chart of accounts organized properly or transactions being organized properly for the, for the tech business you have in your business model. I will look at undeposited funds. Okay. I'll look at uncategorized transactions. These are two categories that if you have some, if you have issues in your data, a lot of times there will be funds in these accounts that they really should not be. These are like temporary accounts. 

I will look at your vendor list. Our vendor is being set up correctly. I'll look at, do you have transactions without payees? This is something I'll often see as things are being categorized, but payees are never being assigned to transactions. And you want to sign payees to your transactions for a variety of reasons, which includes 1099 reporting, which I'll also look at. Are you capturing information properly? Do you do 1099 reporting? Are you doing 1099 reporting appropriately? I'll look at your customer list. I will look at service items. Service items are basically your products that you're selling, your service items, whether it's set up correctly or not, it has a lot to do with whether your financial statements are useful. So a lot of these things I'm looking at are kind of interrelated. If I look at your profit and loss statement, for instance, and I’ll find some issues with how things are categorized. It's probably originating with your chart of accounts and your service items. 

I will look at accounts receivable and payable, if applicable, not all the clients that kind of me will have accounts receivable and accounts payable. But if you do all look at those, likewise, I will look at payroll, if applicable. I will look at unapplied payments, just like I'm a positive fuzzy and uncategorized transaction. This is something that you, when you close out of Monty, you don't want to have. So you may have things in this account temporarily. Unapplied payments are payments you receive from clients that you haven't applied to a particular invoice. I will also look at your under distributions, especially small businesses. This is something where under distribution basically it doesn't count as an expense. It's something where we're distributing profit. It's also where if you have personal expenses that have been run through your business that they will go there. So I will take a look at this account. I'll look at any journal entries. Journal entries are transactions that are recorded that aren't coming through your bank feeds. They're moving dollars around. They're reclassing items. I will take a look at your journal entries. So I'll do all of that. So it's basically a complete review of your QBO. 

So how does this work? Once I get payment, you get an email with instructions on how to add me as an account and user a QBO. Your account and user a QBO does not count against your users. So depending on the level of subscription you have in QBO, I think if you're on plus, I think you get five users. Your accountant does not count as one of those users. And you could have two accountants assigned. So even if you have another bookkeeper, you can assign me and I can go in and that gives me access to QBO. You also get an intake form. The intake firm gives me some basic information for my assessment. You'll answer information in here about what your business does, what your business model is, how you like to look at your business. This will help me when I'm looking at your reports. I'm looking at your chart of accounts. I'm looking at your service items. This will help me determine if they are set up correctly. 

Sometimes when I get that assessment, I might ask for a short call to ask some follow up questions. But basically once I get that intake survey, I start doing my assessment which I get done within a week, typically. And at the end of that week, you get a few things. One, you'll get a video with my results. So I will record you a Zoom or a loom where I'm sharing my screen and I'm showing you actually in the system what I'm seeing, giving you some commentary on, so for instance, I might pull up some vendors and  when I tell you you have some issues in your vendor file, I'll pull up some vendors and I'll actually show you on the screen. The type of things I'm seeing. You will also get a resource guide that includes key bookkeeping best practices as well as links to QBO resources. So one of the advantages of QBO is they have tremendous volume that it produces in terms of videos, step-by-step instructions. Very easy to find, very complete and I will send you links to key ones that will help you based on your findings. And then we will have a 30-minute call. So you'll get the video first. You'll have a chance to listen to it and absorb it a little bit. I find that final call is more productive. If you've had a chance to listen to my commentary before we meet, within one of a 30-minute call to discuss the findings. And then based on those results, you have a few different options. You can hire me to do the cleanup as the service I do offer, which we'll talk about in a minute. But you'll also have the information to go hire someone on your own or some people will even attack the cleanup themselves. Maybe you have an internal bookkeeper and you'll come out of this and this bookkeeper will have a direction on things that need to be cleaned up. 

So the cost for the service is $500. And like I said, it gets done in about a week. And so your next step on this is you can either book a call if you have more questions, you want to talk to me. But or if you're ready to start, you can go to the payment link. And I will put both of these links in the show notes. So that is the assessment. And that is the starting point. Like I said, for cleanup, which is what we're going to talk about next. 

The second service I offer is QBO cleanup. This is a service that cleans up your books and QBO, so it's complete and accurate. And as I said earlier, we have to do the QBO assessment first, because that allows us both to have a better picture of what the scope of work is. It allows me to give you a better estimate of the hours and cost for the QBO cleanup. And I will say a lot of people who don't think they have cleanup end up with cleanup. Why do we have to clean up? We have cleanup, because we have, we're not keeping our books up on a monthly basis. We have a bookkeeper who maybe hasn't worked in our industry before them. We have books that maybe are set up, but they're not set up for your business model, your business type, your business needs. So there's a lot of different reasons you're going to have a clean up. And I've done cleanup that’s, cleanup runs on a continuum. You can have cleanup that takes a few hours, and you can have cleanup that takes 30 hours. A lot of it will depend on the club complexity of your business, the volume of your transactions, how far back we want to go. Some people will come to move with cleanup and maybe they've been on QBO for a few years, but we made a decision we're only going to clean up the last 12 months. We're not going to go back past that or we're going to clean up the last fiscal year. So, definitely when you think of cleanup, think of it as being on a continuum. This service is for service business owners using QBO today. I want an experienced accountant to ensure their QBO books are complete and accurate. Now, I've been in accounting and accounting of finance for over 30 years. And so,that's my jam. You know, I know what I'm doing. I've dealt with a variety of different business models. So it's really meant to give you a piece of mine that my QBO is now clean. It's complete and it's accurate. 

So how this works is, once we do the initial stage of that assessment that I talked about, if you say that you're interested in hiring me for the cleanup, then I will give you an estimated number of hours. So the clients that come to me, I would say this estimate is generally 10 hours on the low end and 25 on the high end. I might say 80 percent of my clients are somewhere in that range. Now, you will not get an estimate that says, hey, 10 to 25, you'll more likely have an estimate that'll be, 10 to 15 hours, 10 to 12 hours, 15 to 18 hours. You'll have a much more focused estimate. Those estimates are usually reliable, but cleanup is actually a little bit like renovating a house. I'm going to stick with this, I'm going to stick with this house, house analogy I've been using. When you renovate your house, you know, your builder or contractor gives you an estimate. And then they tear up the floorboards, for part of the plan, they find turbine damage. Well, now they've got a bigger issue to deal with. So sometimes we do run into any, I'm for scene issues, but if at any point that happens, you know, if I think we're going to exceed that estimate, you get notified, we talk about it in detail, we talk about why and we discuss how we're going to move forward. What are our different options? Sometimes when we'll find those, one of your options is. We’re not going to clean this up now. We're going to clean it up later. You know, there could be very, there's more than one way to skin the cat as we go through cleanup. 

Cleanup is one of the only services that I build hourly. Because until we get in there, I just don't know exactly what we'll find. So flat rate billing, which you've heard, we talk about value bills like flat rate billing, which I'm a big fan of just doesn't work in space. So if we want to move forward, what I do is I take a retainer for the estimate. Cleanup bills out at $115 an hour. Cleanup is more complex than regular bookkeeping. It requires a higher level of skill in my experience. There's a lot of research and troubleshooting. You're often unwinding transactions. So it's more time intensive than normal, than normal bookkeeping. So for instance, if I give you an estimate of 10 hours, which is, he loved it times $115 is he loved it 50. You'll give me a retainer for that amount. And then I'm basically working against that retainer. So, you pay me the retainer up front. I do the work. And then, if, like I said, if at some point we say we run into something, we're saying to take an extra two or three hours, we have a discussion with you and then you would get bill for that extra time later on during the engagement.

Once you make payment, you get an intake survey with a request for information on need. This includes getting me set up with access to your accounts as needed. During the assessment, you gave me access to your account. But now I will need greater levels of access. I will need things like, depending on the type of cleanup we're doing, the scope of the cleanup, I'm going to need things like bank statements, credit card statements. I may need to access your passwords. Bank accounts, what we usually do is I, most banks, you can call the bank and you can set up specific accounts for your accountant, your financial planners, where they couldn't go in and access your account to see information, but don't have any transactional authority. That's usually the easiest way to do it, so that we're not sharing passwords. But you'll have a list of things that you need to provide. All right. 

Once I have any, once I have the intake and required documents, I begin work. We may have a follow-up after the intake depends on your answers and the complexity of your business. For instance, if you are a straight coaching business with one-on-one coaching, and that's pretty much all you are offering. Versus, you are a coach that's making $3 million and you have 15 employees and you have multiple revenue streams on, you have coaching and you have a membership and you have a course. There could be some more involved questions that could require some follow-up. How long does it take? So, for instance, when I tell you 10 hours, does that mean 10 hours later it's going to be done? No, probably not. It really depends on how quickly you get me the information that we initially need. And then how quickly can you apply to questions? Because as I go through, I do the cleanup and I start to look at transactions, when I first go in and look at your transactions, your vendors, maybe new vendors to me, vendors I'm not familiar with. I may have, I'm almost always going to have follow-up questions. One of the things I've talked about is your bookkeeper. It should be inquisitive. I'm very inquisitive and curious. I'm going to ask questions because I want to make sure things are being properly done. So, how quickly can you apply to those? We do this typically via boxer. We set up a boxer and when I have one off questions, I'll just put them on boxer. But how quickly can we turn things around? We'll largely depend on, how quickly I can get access to things. And how quickly you can follow up on my questions and give me the quran information. 

Then once the cleanup is done, you can either then hire me to do continued services. So, people will do that. If I have capacity, you can DIY it. I do cleanup, say you're a DIY person and part of the reason you're hiring me for cleanup is you just have it kept up with things. You don't really understand. You weren't properly using the system. I'll go in and do your cleanup and then I can hand it back to you. And then you can take it from there or then some people go and they hire their own bookkeeper. You are not obligated to continue with me. So, don't think that just because you do cleanup with me does this, I mean, you're obligated. Part of what you get to do during cleanup is we get to both, see how good of a fit we are, and whether we both want to continue that relationship. This one does require a console because I want to learn about your business. So, your next steps with this are www.carlamats.com/workwithme, I will drop the link in the show notes. And if this is something you think you're doing if you're thinking, yeah, I really need to finally get my books cleaned up. This is the service for you. All right. 

Next one is the QBO setup. QBO setup is a service that provides you with a professional QBO setup to ensure that it's complete and correct. Once you do QBO setup, then you can DIY it or you can track ongoing services. I always tell people that are going to DIY QBO that unless they have an accounting background or they have extensive QBO experience. I met with somebody the other day who is using QBO now for her coaching business, but she used to have a cleaning business as she used QBO before. So she's got some experience. She actually had a cleaning business for like 15 years. So she's got a lot of QBO experience. But if you're not in that boat and you've decided to use QBO, but you want to DIY it, I always encourage people to invest in professional setup. There's a lot of different setup she does. There's a lot of little flags to turn on or off and how your chart of accounts is organized, how your vendors are set up. A lot of this is what ensures that two years down their own, you're not coming back to me for cleanup. 

A lot of the cleanup issues I see come back to a poor QBO setup to start with. So this is for the person who does not have QBO today. So you're either on another system or you're not have a system at all. I would say most people that are doing this are probably more likely don't have a system at all today. You may want to DIY it, but you want to make sure that things get set up correctly. You want somebody with an accounting background, with a knowledge of bookkeeping to get you set up correctly. You could be on another system that you want to move to QBO. This service does not, and we'll talk about this in a minute, the service doesn't include migration. That would be a different fee. And it's also going to be for the person who's in the early stages of business and wants to start out right by building their financial foundation. Sometimes people will come to me for QBO setup and they'll already be into doing six figures, but they've been using this spreadsheet to keep tracking things other than other ways to move to QuickBooks. But I also have people that will reach out to me and say, listen, I know I need to have a bookkeeping system. I want to start out right from the gig gal. Can you help me set up QBO? 

How this works? Your basic setup includes your Alcomputure company setup. I will set you up on your QBO subscription. There are three different levels of subscription. Very few people need the top level. Most people will be on what's called simple start or plus. And the subscription for you for those changes, you do get billed for your subscription fee separately. I think right now I was recording this QBO is running something where you get like your first 30 days free and then you'll pay after that. So I'll set you up on your subscription, but the subscription bills to you directly. I will set up your chart of accounts. And again, these are the accounts we're going to use to categorize transactions. I have because I worked with several businesses. I kind of have a feel for, this is what a coach you model needs to look like, this is what an organizing company needs to look like. And this, how I set up your chart of accounts customized to your business is coming from information that you're going to provide to me. I'm going to link all your bank and credit card accounts. One of the big benefits is QBO is that it allows you to automate your bank feeds. You basically, authenticate into your bank. It's all encrypted technology. It's bank level security. But if it brings your transactions and so you're not having to manually interchange actions, I'm going to create your service items. These are basically again, for these ties to how we're going to record your transactions. And these are the products of services that you want to track. I'm going to categorize one month of transactions. So this is important. Some CBT is set up services out there. Just do the initial setup,  I just talked about. They don't do anything else. 

I want to categorize one month of transactions. So you're basically getting a month of bookkeeping. I'm going to set up your vendors for your first month of transaction and other key vendors. One of the reasons I want to do one month of transactions because I can set it up and I can get maybe 80% of the way there. But until I actually start to see your actual transactions coming in, there may be some things I need to tweak. So I'll get your vendor setup. And this will include, as vendors come in, determining which ones we should be tracking for 1099. Another reason I'm going to do one month of transactions is one of the key features of QBO. And especially if you're going to try and DIY it down the road, you can create categorization rules. Where applicable and what this does is these categorization rules will automatically categorize the transaction for you. Now you still have you or your bookkeeper self to go in and accept that categorization, but you no longer have to for every single transaction. Try to, oh well, where did I put this? So for instance, I'm going to take an easy, an easy example zoom. I can create a rule that says any transaction that comes in from zoom is going to go to software description, software subscriptions. That means, every time I have a subscription from zoom, I don't have to remember where to put it.  And I can't do this really without having a month of transactions coming through. So I can see what you've done. You'll still have to create additional rules after that because you, and a lot of us are paying for things on an annual basis. So, it's not going to capture those. I mean, it's basically just going to capture that one month. 

Things that are not included in this that can be included and this is where the initial meeting becomes important because we'll talk about this. Are we going to migrate data? If you are on another system, you want to migrate data and a lot of that depends on what system you are coming from. Do you have a payroll? If you have payroll, we're going to need to do Augusto setup. That's going to be an additional fee. Well, are you going to need invoices set up? Are you going to be invoicing out of QBO? Obviously, most of my clients are not. But are you going to be invoicing out of QBO? Do you need me to set up invoice templates? You have the ability to create different templates and bring in your logo. If I'm doing any of that, there'll be extra time involved in that. Are we doing any third party integrations? For instance, in my system that I've set up for myself, I have an integration. It's a third party integration that integrates Stripe with QBO for me. And some clients might opt for that. If you're a coach, they're doing a lot of work and Stripe. That might be something you want. That integration, any type of third party integrations are going to do are going to take extra time. So they'll be I have to factor that into the cost. So all of your quotes end up being custom. So the services I've listed are basically the thing that the minimum base lines can be in all your packages and all of your setup services. But then based on the discussions we have, there could be additional services. It could also be something, down in my graciousness, if you're going to do that, that has to be done up front. But so for instance, say for instance, you're like, well, I want to do this Stripe integration, but that could be done, down the road. Maybe we'll talk about some of your different options. There’s an integration that does, you know, XYZ, but we don't have to have it done now. We could do it down the road and come and some people, even if they're on another system, they may opt not to do the data migration. I had a client recently who was on QBO on QuickBooks Desktop and her husband did the books. He didn't have any kind of background. The data wasn't any good. She would have had to clean up the data in QuickBooks before it came over to me. And we made the decision. We were not going to even though she had data, we were not going to do any type of data migration. 

So your next step for this is to go to the link I've mentioned earlier, www.carlamoats.com/workwithme. You will book a free call there to discuss what you need. How does it work? This generally gets built out of flat rate. There may be rare exceptions, but generally I'm building it out on a flat rate so that the setup and then, like I said, based on any type of additional add-on, you'll get a flat rate. The investment for this starts at 650. 650 would be a business who is brand new and just doesn't have a lot of transactions. It doesn't have a lot of stuff to set up. And it's going to vary based on the number of accounts we need to sub for banking. What's your transaction volume? What are the different add-ons you need to have? But it basically gets started at about 650. So you can go and book if this is something you think you need, if you really want professional help, you can keep your setup. You can go book a call and I would love to chat with you. 

That takes us to monthly bookkeeping services. Monthly bookkeeping services are my subscription service for business owners, typically with a consistent six-figure months up to about 5 million in revenue. If you are under that amount, I take on select clients below that level. So if you think you're ready, when I give you how to move forward, I can encourage you with a book of call, but generally I take consistent six-figure months because a lot of times I find before that clients are, I consider myself a little bit of a premium bookkeeping service. And then I'm adding some additional services in there. And I think below that level often they are DIY-ing it or in some cases they are doing a spreadsheet system or a system like Wave. So again, if you're below that level, and you're like, hey, I really want this. I really want to work with you. Please feel free to book a call. 

This is a boutique low-volume service. Right now I cap this at 10 clients, which is not many. You're dealing with me. At some point I will probably, you know, start adding in some team to do some of the lower level bookkeeping services. But now you're dealing directly with me. So this is very much a low-volume service. And even if I do it at some point and on staff, you'll always be the primary point of contact in terms of reviewing everything, conducting your call. So it is very much a boutique service. There are three levels of service. This is a tiered service. And it ranges from the solopreneur at the first level. It has very basic needs. solopreneur don't typically don't have very complex business models. Don't have a big team. Often don't have a lot of volume up to the larger or more complicated businesses. They have a team, have higher level straight, higher level strategic needs, and have more volume. So my three levels of service right now, I'm calling them solopreneur , growing and scaling. And these tiers break out. There's a little bit of gray between the tiers. And in our call, I basically tell you where I think you'll fall. But it's based on the number of accounts or transaction volume, whether you have employees, how complex is your business. 

But all the tiers include monthly bookkeeping. And then you'll get either a monthly or quarterly video with commentary. So the the solopreneur level, I'm doing your books monthly. But because you don't have a lot of volume, I'm just giving you a quarterly commentary where the other two levels are going to monthly commentary. I'm similarly saying monthly or quarterly financial statement reviews. Now you will be having the ability to go in and run your reports anytime you want. But when I say financial state review, we're sitting down and doing your review. It's a quarterly basis for the solo printer level and for the other two levels it's monthly. But they all include 1099 reporting. And depending on the package you have, they're going to include quarterly semi-annual or annual meetings with your CPA or tax professional. I do not do tax services. The way I explain my knowledge of taxes is I typically know more than you do. I know where the skeletons are buried and know where the issues are. But I refer tax work out to tax specialist. 

And tax work is very specialized. No, I refer that out. But what I do include in my packages is a periodic consult with your tax pro because I feel like we need to, the worst part of your team. And I think that we need to be working together. And I give you, again, are there quarterly semi-annual annual meetings with your tax professional? I think you're not being billed for additionally. One of the unique ports of my service when I say kind of a premium service is you're getting a limited box or access to me at all levels. So you've got a quick question. Leave me a boxer. Don't have to send me emails. I like the boxer better. You can't send me emails for certain things. And there will be things where, maybe we're talking on boxer. And then my answer is forward XYZ to me in my email. But boxer's quick. It's a free video message or a free audio messaging service. You can send tax. And you could also send audio messages. But I find it's quicker. And you're no longer sending it to your bookkeeper, waiting for your bookkeeper, to get back to you three or four days later. You also get discounts on additional services, including coaching packages. I do business coaching. I do financial coaching. I do profit first coaching. It's you decide to do any of those, depending on the level, you'll get a certain percentage discount on any of those packages. Additionally, if you require additional financial services that are outside of your package, which can be, things that are outside of bookkeeping or can just be maybe you're in the solopreneur stage, which doesn't include an annual budget. But we decided we want to do an annual budget. I’ll give you a quote for that service and you'll get 10% off of my normal billboards. 

The grinding and scaling include gusto payroll. Gusto is an extra software fee, but it includes, me processing your payroll via Gusto. And one of the things I love about Gusto is Gusto does all your payroll tax filings. Parallel taxes are another area that are there's a lot of changes and the Gusto service keeps everything up to date and they handle all your payroll tax filing and it is a really good service. I'd much prefer over QBO payroll. I think it's a much smoother interface. It's much less complicated. 

The top level is the scaling level. And really, I think of this as CFO light. I'm working with service business owners. So even when they get to CFO services, their needs for CFO services are much different from companies that carry inventory, cell products, manufacturing companies, construction companies, companies going outside seeking private equity. So it's kind of a CFO light service, includes things like additional forwarding, budgeting, advisory services, and they get a little bit of a priority boxer access. So, they're kind of going to the top of the line. They tend to be higher users of the boxer access. So that takes us through the typical QBO services. The other two things I'm going to talk about are really not QBO related.

So if you are out there and you are a business owner, who's making less than a 100K, who's got 50 to 75 transactions a month or less. And what's a really simple solution that's not techy. You don't want to pay for QBO. I have what I call the simple financial spreadsheet bookkeeping template. This is a Google Sheets based spreadsheet template. It allows you to easily prep for tax preparation. I developed this. I'm recording this in January 2024. I think I launched this in December of 2023, a little over, and that's about 13 months ago. I devised it because I was actually talking to some friends of mine who were coaches, who were downed trying to make the first 25 to 50,000. And they had no bookkeeping system. They were at this time last year. They were scrambling trying to put receipts and everything together and trying to prep for tax prep. And it was like, there needs to be an easy solution for you. And this is what I created. Now, it allows you to see your financial results each month without needing to learn any new tech. If you can enter data in a spreadsheet, you can use simple financials. It is for solo service business owners. Without any W2 payroll, with low transaction volume, you obviously don't have inventory. If you have inventory W2, I already have partners. This is not the tool for you. It's Google Sheets based. It contains a transaction register that works very similar to your, to your checkbook register. It's where you're going to enter all your business transactions. I always tell people, keep churches to separate it business and personal separated. But the reality is a lot of people that are new in the business, they're just paying expenses out of multiple accounts. Sometimes it is business accounts. Sometimes it doesn't have a personal account. Sometimes they're putting, business expenses on a personal credit card. The Google Sheets can handle all that. I mean, if she just a place, you're going to manually enter your transactions, all your business transactions in one place. Some of the features that this has versus, you can create a spreadsheet on your own. But I've created drop downs for transaction categories. So just like in QuickBooks, you have categorizations. I've built categorizations into the spreadsheet. So when you enter a transaction, you will have a drop down that says, is this supplies, is this legal and professional fees. And I have created these transaction categories to align with a schedule C. The people that are completing this are 99% of the time going to be filing their taxes as a sole proprietor, which goes on your schedule C of your 1040. And so again, it's meant to make tax prep easy, whether you do your own taxes or you send your taxes out to somebody else. So that the transaction categories are very much aligned with schedule C. 

Then once you've done the transaction register, there are reports that ought to generate behind this behind the scenes. I have to go look, I want to say seven and nine different categories or seven and nine different reports. So like, for instance, there's an annual profit summary that just shows you, now here's my revenue, here's my expenses, here's my net. Then there's a detailed version of that that shows me on all my revenue. And then all my expenses by category and my net. There's one that shows me my vendor payments, who am I paying? What vendors am I paying? And what am I paying them every single month? There's, I think one that shows you the same thing as the annua, l two annual reports, all it shows you by month. What's my revenue by month? What are my expenses by month? In case there's about nine different reports. This is a 79 dollar digital download. You get the ability, you reuse the file for multiple years, so you're paying for it one time. Now I do occasionally, I'll do upgrades to it. Those are not included, but you don't need them. Whatever you're going to buy now is basically the version that you do 20, 2024 in it. If you want to buy it now, you can actually use it for, to do your 2023 taxes, or to do your 2023 transactions. And then next year, when you want to do it, you can basically just make another copy, clear out the 2023 down and start entering 2024. 

In my ideal world, you're actually entering your transactions every month, minimum or at least every quarter, and you're actually using it to actually see where you stand every month. That's one of the reasons I created it. But the reality is that for a lot of my clients, this is the time of year when I start getting questions on the tool for people who already have bought it or about it last year, but haven't used it since then. A lot of people will just do this and use this to prepare for their taxes. This is a direct digital download. I will drop the link for this in the show note. You basically just go out, you pay for it, and you will get an almost instantaneous link to PDF and the PDF has all the, as the file on the instructions. I also occasionally host, like this week, I hosted a box, our office hours where people could come in with any questions. So once you buy it, anything that I'm doing, for that, office hours or whatever, if I may do a training session, you'll get invites to those. 

Finally, last but not least, my last service that I'm going to talk about today, this really isn't necessarily a bookkeeping service, but it's more of an accounting service. I call it Ask an Expert. This is a one hour single session consultation for when you have a specific question or new financial expertise. You just have a one-off question you want to have answered. I encourage you to always take advantage first, by the way, of the free consultation that you can go to at the work with the main link, but you've done that, and now you have a particular question that you really want to talk through specific to your business. Maybe it's even a follow-up to a podcast. Maybe you listen to a podcast episode and you're like, well, they, yeah, but my business is different. I wonder how to apply this to my business. So, some areas where I've helped clients just to get your mind going is, help selecting the proper bookkeeping system for your business. Maybe you listen to the episode I did recently about how to select your bookkeeping system, but you're not really sure if you need QBO or not. Book a call and I can walk you through that. 

Help developing a budget for your business. Maybe you're doing your bookkeeping on your own, you're pretty happy with that, but you want to create, you want to be a more forward-thinking one's developed budget. We can use the time for that. You have financial reports, could be DIY, could be the you're using another bookkeeper, but you don't understand your reports. And you want me to somebody to just sit down and go through your financial reports with you. That's a great use of it. 1099 questions. I mean, you can't figure out who you need to send 99. Who you know, don't understand the rules. Then feel free to book up for that.

Maybe we're trying to understand how to record a specific type of transaction in QBO or you have some kind of specific question about how to use QBO. You want to help identify a profit at least in your business. Maybe I'll set financial goals, you want to figure out how to set your profit first. Taps. Those are just a few things, but pretty much anything you can come up with, it's counting your finance related. I mean, if in this call we identify that there's some kind of bigger project, and we are both interested working together and we could discuss that, but this is really designed to be just a one-off consultation. This one again, just directly book it. I will drop a link to the single session and the show notes. You just use that link and you would book a time and you would pay for it using that link. 

So why me? Why use me for your accounting and financial services? I've got 30 years of finance and accounting experience. I have experience in just about every aspect of finance. I have worked in financial operations, which is managing the day-to-day accounting. I have implemented financial systems from QBO to SAP and Oracle. I've done a tremendous amount of work and process improvement. I've done forecasting and budgeting, mergers and acquisitions. I've missed a controller for a $200 million product line business. So, there's not too much you're going to show me that I haven't seen. I have a mix of corporate consulting and public accounting experience and all three of those things develop a little bit of a different skill set. One of the things I don't talk about too much is I'm what you call an inactive CPA. So an inactive CPA means I pass the CPA exam. I'm not going to tell you if I've served in 30 years of business 30 years, you can do the math, but I pass this CPA exam. I'll just sit back in the 90s. But I haven't maintained my license after about five or six years. For my corporate accounting career, it wasn't really necessary and this, you go through, you have CPA requirements, which are quite honest, quite expensive. And I just didn't keep it active. The other thing is CPA, when you move from once I was licensed in Maryland and I live in Illinois now, and you move from one state to another, it's just do all my merit, a transfer of license.

What that means to you is I have the counting knowledge, I have the expertise, but you're not paying for the CPA letters. Your CPAs are going to build a little bit higher rate because they are doing all that CPA. And I have a little bit different specialty, you can see CPAs and public accounting, average tremendous amount of tax accounting and a tremendous amount of auditing experience, but they don't have experience in things like implementing financial systems, forecasting, and budgeting. And I am a boutique firm, small volume high touch, and all my work is very bespoke, I've talked about packages, but even within those packages, we're very much customizing things to what you need as a business because not all businesses are the same. 

I know this was a lot. I just wanted to believe in transparency. I want to make things simple. So I wanted to really break things down for you in terms of how you can work with me. And if you are ready for a done for you, DFIY, DFY Bookkeeping Services, you want to get it off your plate. I would love to have a further conversation with you. 

You can go to www.carlamoats.com/workwithme. If you aren't sure if you've heard all these things, you're like, I know I need something. I just don't know what. Please book that call. I will help you make a decision. 

We can talk about your business and your best options. Very low pressure call. And then check the show notes for the links to the other resources that I mentioned in this episode. I hope this was helpful. And I will see you next week. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show. Remember that your finances deserve some love. Finance doesn't have to be complicated or overwhelming. And you do not have to do it alone. I'd love to talk to you about your business. So please come on over to www.carlamoats.com to learn more. Or if you're ready for financial and strategy support that will upload all your business, go to www.carlamoats.com/workwithme to book your free financial assessment. And the last favor I'll ask is for you to help me get out the word. Tell your friends about this podcast and share it on your favorite social media. Until next week, go create some Purposeful Profit.