The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

228 | [Q&A] Partnerships, Profit First, and Complex Client Situations

• Serena Shoup, CPA • Episode 228

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 35:43

Send a text

Welcome back to our monthly live Q&A! We took a little break, but we're back and ready to tackle all your burning questions about building your bookkeeping business. Whether you're just getting started or scaling your firm, this episode is packed with real talk and practical advice.

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • Partnership pitfalls and planning
  • Tech stack essentials
  • Hiring and leading your first employee
  • Pricing strategies for startups and special situations

Resources mentioned in this episode:


  • "Make 'Em Beg to Work for You" by Dr. Angela E. Lauria
  • "Teamwork" by Natalie Dawson


Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram stories and tag me @ambitiousbookkeeper

For more information about the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:

Thank you for your support of our show. If you haven’t left a review yet it’s super simple. Please go to ambitiousbookkeeper.com/podcast and leave your review.

Podcast Publishing Tools we use:

Hello. Hello everyone. This is our, uh, January live q and a. we did take a little bit of a break from our live q and as for a couple months, so welcome back and if this is your first one, welcome. On our monthly live q and as, these are open to the community. If you're on my email list, you'll get an email alert So these are basically open. Ask me anything whether it's about building a bookkeeping business, whether it's mindset, pricing, client stuff pretty much anything is on the table. So if I have an answer of how I've done it, I will share that. If I don't have an answer, I will be transparent about that. So, um, so yeah, You may have noticed we didn't release as many podcast episodes this month. And a lot of people have been wondering when we're gonna open up B-B-A-V-I-P that we will be opening another round in March. So mark your calendars for that. Okay, good. We have a question. Allie says, thanks a lot for reopening these q and as. I'm starting my bookkeeping business and using your BBA course. Yay. I actually decided to start the business with a partner. We are both accountants. Ideally, I would love to split the work between us in a way where we can hopefully grow the business twice as fast. Do you have any recommendations as for how we can split the work for context? We're still in the beginning stages. Our website is almost done, and so is our engagement letter. We signed our first client but have not onboarded yet. Congratulations on signing your first client. That's super exciting. I would sit down with your business partner and outline your strengths and weaknesses and, and hopefully you guys have complimenting strengths so that you can divide the work up and have different responsibilities. So, for instance, I think one person should be responsible for the client operations. So overseeing, either getting the work done, communicating with clients. I'm not sure if you guys are planning on hiring bookkeepers and building out the team, but having one person responsible for operations, one person responsible for like sales and marketing. If your strengths allow for that that would be ideal. That way people aren't stepping on each other's toes. And then in your agreement, hopefully you have a strong operating agreement. And if not, now is the time to actually sit down with a lawyer and create that. Define these roles and have a, a source of truth for like, who has the final say if you guys can't agree on things, because that's still a, something that's gonna have to happen. So definitely make sure you have all of those ducks in a row when it comes to, your partnership and defining your roles and everything. But that would be my suggestion as a starting point. And also if you're in our community, I would post in there to see if anyone else has experience working with a business partner or even any other. Business owners that you might know in your community, I would strongly encourage you to sit down with someone else who has gone into a partnership and ask them what they would've done differently and things like that and, and ask for their input. I've never done a business partnership, so, um, I can't say really what I would do but I've definitely seen business partnerships fall apart. So make sure you plan for. I know this sounds really like dark, but plan for the breakup in the business partnership so that you can figure out how things are gonna go if it comes to that. But if you don't have that plan in place, then it'll make things a lot harder if you guys decide to part ways. So that's my 2 cents on that. Hopefully that's helpful. Thao says, when do you use TaxJar in Xero? What does it look like? I have a potential lead in e-commerce and it seems very straightforward. I just never have dealt with sales tax in Xero, but I am trying to transition completely to zero. Okay, so first things first. Tax Jar is completely separate from Xero. It's a completely different platform. You can integrate it. For e-commerce clients, you're not going to, what you're actually gonna integrate TaxJar with is their sales platform. So if they're in Shopify or Etsy any of those other Amazon, that's where you're gonna integrate, TaxJar with, and then you're going to just be like, nothing's really gonna flow through to zero from TaxJar. So hopefully that helps the only reason you would integrate TaxJar with Xero is if you are invoicing through Xero and collecting sales tax through Xero, but that's not where you're collecting the sales tax. So you need to integrate it with the platform where you will be collecting sales tax, which is usually Shopify, those types of shopping carts. That's my biggest advice on that. Tax jar is very straightforward and easy to work with. I suggest setting up AutoFile on all the states if you can. I have never used tax jars service for registering states. I've always done that myself. And then given them access to the state registrations that's probably the most complicated piece of sales tax is actually getting all the registrations done and. Loaded into TaxJar. The other thing I will mention is if your clients have international sales, TaxJar can't support VAT and other countries. You would probably want to consider a different platform. One of the platforms that we are moving our clients to that have International Nexus is a system called an R. It's spelled A-N-R-O-K. And if you're interested in that, I can share more information on that in the chat. Later on I'll come back and link the video. basically, you connect your Shopify or your Stripe or whatever sales platform you're using, and they will track Nexus and they will register for you. But the fees tend to be more affordable than TaxJar for larger clients. But they, you do have to go through a process of meeting with them and making sure that like your client is a good fit for their platform and all of that. It's a lot. A little more, a few more hoops to jump through than you have with TaxJar for setting up. But if you foresee your clients selling internationally, or if they already are and you wanna be tracking that nexus, you should plan for that and put them on a platform that can support that. So I know that was a lot. Sales tax is kind of a beast. If you have more questions, just let me know. Um, Jennifer asked, does BBA have templates or drafts of lOEs and proposals, I'm assuming you are referring to engagement letters? Yes, I do have templates. I do still recommend if you use the templates that are in there, you still have them reviewed by an attorney in your state so that it makes sure that it encompasses the rules and regulations that your specific state has. If you have business insurance, a lot of times they have templates you can start with. So I also recommend checking there, and if you don't have business insurance, get it. That is a necessary thing when you get your first client. Just set up some business insurance. I always work with a broker named Jock Walls with Risk Desk. His website is my risk desk.com. He's a great broker. He will sit you down and talk about the different risks that you have and recommend insurance products and then get you the best rates. So that is that on the insurance and engagement letters and proposed. Yes, we have templates and examples inside of BBA for that. If you are looking at using Dubsado for that, which is what we use for our engagement letters and proposals I recommend the Dubsado decoded course. That's a collaboration I did with a Dubsado expert. I will caveat that we have not updated it completely for the new Dubsado 2.0 version. But that is in the works. Clear ledger. Hello. I have a question. Could you please tell me a little bit about A QBO accountant versus zero? What is your preferred software? Why please? I'm having decision making issues. Okay. This is like a question that comes up almost every week from business owners and bookkeepers alike. even though I prefer working in zero. I put all of my clients on Xero. I do think it's important to also be very well versed in QBO and have access as a QBO accountant. So my answer to you is both because when you bring on new clients that have existing books. Nine times out of 10, they're gonna be on QBO or have nothing at all. So, it's important for you to know how to navigate that, to be able to access it as an accountant and understand how QBO works so you can clean it up before you move them over to zero. So that's, that's one piece of that question. The other piece of that question is why I prefer zero. I actually have a podcast on that that I'm gonna direct you to. It's like podcast number 14 or 15 I think. Back in the feed. So scroll way back and look at that. But long story short, zero functions more like an accounting software should, in my opinion has controls where you can't delete transactions unless they're not posted yet. And it's a lot harder to screw up. So. The short version. They also have really good customer service and they're not trying to poach our clients. So, um, alright. Bryce says, hi. Currently work full-time in a financial role for a small family owned construction company. I would like to start aside bookkeeping business. How would you recommend handling this with my company? Should I inform them? I'm starting a side business. I would first, before you go to inform them, I would look at your employment contract if you have one or your offer letter or your employee handbook, it should be outlined in. One of those three places, whether or not they allow side hustles or moonlighting or anything like that most companies have something around that. I know for myself in my company handbook, I actually do have a clause around other, like, I don't disallow other jobs or anything like that, but there is a clause about if it interferes with your work here, that's grounds for. Corrective action or termination. So just be aware of what you've signed a contract on, if it's a, and in the, in the employee handbook, you've signed that. And so you are bound by that. And I would just look at that first before you decide to inform anyone. I'm not saying that you should keep it a secret, but if you have something in there that, says you're not allowed to, you know, have a side hustle if it, sometimes it's more out, more direct around like the side hustle can't be in the same industry or compete with us, that's a different story. So I would just look at what you've signed in your employee handbook and go from there. And then it also kind of depends on the relationship you have with your supervisor or your employer. And if you feel. Comfortable sharing that with them whether or not it's allowed in, in their company handbook. Um, use your best judgment on that. Jennifer says, if I was to buy a Dubsado course, would I receive the update? Also, to clarify, Dubsado course is not a part of BBA. Correct. So, the Dubsado course is separate from BBA. We are, I think Kendra, she's who I partnered with. She is working on creating a lesson within the course to kind of share the updates, but. I don't know if we've come up with a plan for revamping the entire course yet. So to keep that in mind, I will report back when I get more information on that. But yeah, they did overhaul kind of the whole system. So we are working on figuring out how to roll that out. I don't know that it's going to be included when we roll out the updates. It might be like an upgrade fee. It might be a separate course, I'm not sure yet. So if you wanna hold off on purchasing, you can. And just go through BBA, because I do have examples of how I have my devs auto set up. Granted, it's on the old version, but you can kind of mirror a lot of that in the new system. And I think the new system is a lot more user friendly, to be honest. Cheyenne says, Hey, Serena, any additional resources you can suggest for improving skills, I'm in BBA, and planning on joining Elevate. I am not a CPA, but anything similar to CPEs to continue to improve on my knowledge. I feel like I left college without knowledge, with knowledge, but not the experience, and now feel like I need to refresh on knowledge, if that makes sense. Yeah. So I, this is kind of a loaded question, so if you are. Even though you're not a CPA, you can take CPE courses and just attend them to expand your knowledge. I'm gonna ask a follow-up question on where you feel you're lacking if it's in the experience, I would say. I know you're gonna want to keep learning and learning and learning, but what you really need to do is actually just try to get your first client and you are gonna struggle through it. And that's gonna be your learning like that you really need is hands-on. If you have the ability to contract for another bookkeeper, that's a really great option too to build your knowledge and have someone kind of supporting you and looking things over and making sure you're doing things correctly. So that's an option as well. But I know a lot of times we will hold ourselves back on making the leap and trying to get clients because we feel like we need more knowledge . But what we really need is hands-on experience. And the only way that you're gonna get that is by doing and struggling through things. So my suggestion would be to either try to contract with another bookkeeper and help them with a few clients. Or just go out and get your own clients. If you have an accounting degree and you have all that, like you already have that knowledge. If you've gone through the QuickBooks training or the zero trainings and understand how the software is supposed to function, that's a really good start too. And most of what you learn is gonna be working directly with clients. If you are in BBA, when we have our VIP cohorts, we do have coworking sessions and. coaching calls. Frequently when we do our cohorts, we usually do them over a course of eight weeks, and so we'll have weekly coworking and weekly coaching where you can bring what you're working on with clients and get support on that. So that's an option too. Like I said earlier, I don't know if you were on when I made this announcement, but we are opening that back up in March. So we will be running another cohort through April and May. So you guys can kind of plan around that if it feels right. Jennifer, I think I just answered that question. but VBA self-paced only includes these live q and As. But when we do the VIP cohorts, we do have the weekly coaching calls and weekly co-working. And I will be having support through this next cohort with one of our resident. Alumni students who has been in the community for several years now, and so she's gonna be helping run those calls. Um. And I'm really excited about that. So it won't just be me on the next round, but yeah, you'll have one of your peers there to support as well, who also has experience starting and growing a firm from scratch and building a team. So she's a wealth of knowledge as well. Kelly. Hello. I just hired my first employee. Yay. Congratulations. Does elevate help with how to be sure to keep a beat on employees and reviewing how long is reasonable to get someone up to speed to take client work? Okay. So number one, your question on Elevate, does that help to keep a beat on employees? I do talk about the review process in Elevate. like the very technical review process. What I don't talk about in Elevate is the leadership stuff, which is more what you would get from a program like Alyssa's or Workflow Queens Breakthrough Program or her. growth seat mentorship, which I don't think is open for enrollment right now, but. If you are looking more for, towards like, how do I really like, make sure I'm leading this employee and doing the right checkpoints and having the monthly reviews and all that kind of stuff, that's all stuff that you're gonna get from her programs. but I cover the technical, like how to review their work in elevate. Also those are things that you can bring to the calls in BBA when we, um, start those up again. Then your second question is, how long is reasonable to get someone up to speed to take client work? It really depends on what their drive and their technical skills are. So for example I've had various experiences with employees also depends on what, role they're in, and their experience. So. I've had some employees take multiple clients getting up to speed to be able to be on their own with client work. And then I've had, like my most recent hire, was able to jump right in and figure things out without much guidance. And she already, she came in as an account manager and she already reviewed every single client on the second month end. So, which I wasn't expecting, I was expecting to maybe slowly ramp her up into reviewing all the clients instead of like the first month she was on, she reviewed A handful of clients, like three or four, and then the second month she was just like, I'll review all 20. So it really depends on the person. And the expectations that you set when you hire them. So I would suggest, there's a couple books that I really suggest reading. One of 'em is more around the hiring process, and that's make 'em beg to work for you. And then the other one is more around like keeping a pulse on your employees and their growth and all that kind of stuff. And that's called Teamwork by Natalie Dawson. And then there's. Like a podcast that I recommend called stacking Your Team that has a lot of really good leadership stuff in there. But yeah, really it comes around to, like, one of the things that I do is when I bring on an employee, I meet with them multiple times in the first week. Definitely meet with them on their first day, make sure they're getting everything, like they're getting access to everything, to carve out like a couple hours every day to be helping them gain access to all the systems and learn the systems you're using your, like your project management and all the backend stuff. And then. After that, you wanna schedule a recurring weekly, one-on-one with your employee to carve out time to answer their questions and co-work with them. Scheduling co-working sessions with your employees if you're working virtually is really important to do that at least once a week as well. Until they're up to speed and then establish that expectation of, okay, I expect you to be able to take over these clients doing X, Y, z. By month three you should have all of these clients. So kind of giving them a plan like that is really important too, so they know what to expect and know if they're meeting expectations, by the time it's their three month review. So hopefully that's helpful. I'm gonna take a sip. Cheyenne said thank you. Good to know. I can look into CPEs. I have about eight clients that I've taken on after working as a tax preparer for a small firm. And then taking on some tax clients who wanted bookkeeping. I have some experience now and feel like I've forgotten my college courses and how to implement more to that to my clients. You know, it's been like 15 years since I was in college, so I don't remember much from them at this point. It's more just hands-on experience and I think you're, you're probably doing okay. You're doing better than you think you are, I'm sure. Um. Yes. Kelly. Can't wait. Awesome. All right. Let me pull up some links that I promised yeah, if you're interested in working with ro I. Anyone, just shoot me an email at support@ambitiousbookkeeper.com. And I will send you my referral link or refer them to you and they'll reach out. I don't exactly know how it works, but since you will have to be meeting with them yeah, I'll send you their contact and all that good stuff. Okay. Cool, cool. Just realized the mess that I have in the back of my background. It's been a crazy couple of weeks y'all, with your end and. All of that. Onboarding a new employee. Like I said, I brought on an account manager at the beginning of December, and it has actually made this year end so much easier because I had a second pair of eyes reviewing every single client. And then I got to, you know, do my year end review, which I didn't. I knew that things had been thoroughly reviewed. that was really, really helpful. But it's still a lot of extra work at your end, as you may know. and if you're watching this and you're like, oh, what should I be doing at year end? I don't even know. I have a program that I think is still for sale until the end of this month. At the end of January. It's called, the Confident Compliance Bundle. And inside of that. I have a workshop on sales tax, a workshop on 10 90 nines. And I have my year end workshop where I cover exactly how we put together our year end tax package, a Canva presentation that we do for all of our clients. Although this year I'm kind of changing it up I don't think I'm gonna be doing a Canva presentation for everybody. I'm gonna be doing more of like a Canva graphic summary that I send to them in an email, kind of like, kinda like Spotify wrapped, but for their business to make it a little more instead of them watching a loom video with a whole slide presentation and we'll see how it goes. All right. Kelly says, how would you price a small startup hourly? Yeah, honestly, I've done some different things with startups in the past that I probably wouldn't suggest people do unless you really wanna have skin in the game. But one of the startups that I worked with at one point, I actually kind of worked for, for free based on like a revenue share agreement for when they started making revenue and, it just, it didn't work out for various reasons. I ended up parting ways with them before they really started making a lot of money. So I did not recoup all the time that I put in. Um, I also have done trades and things like that, but I, I found for myself the best exchange of energy is money. And so yes, I would suggest doing an hourly pricing agreement and. Not discounting too much because that just builds resentment and then they tend to be more difficult. The lower you price them. So yes, thank you for asking that question. Um, alright, Carolyn said, hi, Serena. Have you ever worked with Profit First clients? If yes, do you reconcile the expenses to ensure they were paid from the right account? I have a client that wants me to track it, so I'm essentially reconciling twice to the bank balance and to the expenses. Okay. I'm curious honestly what you mean by reconciling to the expenses. Because yes, I do work with clients who practice Profit First and we do reconcile every bank account. Pretty much every month unless there's no activity. And some of 'em, we, we reconcile quarterly with the low activity accounts, but we're still categorizing everything in all of those accounts every month through the bookkeeping system. So you're recording all the expenses if you want to charge extra because they have lots of bank accounts, yes, you should do that because it is extra work. Yeah, I would definitely charge more based on however many accounts they have and how much activity are in each. It sounds like maybe you're doing something from a spreadsheet for them as well. They want to make sure the opex items are paid from the opex accounts. Sometimes they accidentally pay from their sales and marketing account or somewhere else. that's on them. Okay. I would not be tracking that separately, I would say. Like what you can do is since you're categorizing everything in the bank feeds, you're marking things when they're reconciled, you're keeping track of the operating expenses. If they wanna see that, they can look at the p and l. That's what that's for. If they wanna know if they're paying from the correct accounts or not, you can give them. An export every month of the activity that happened in their income and their sales accounts and whatever other accounts they're accidentally paying from and show them and then let them go and correct it. But that's as far as I would go. Honestly. I would not be tracking it separately. I would just rely on what's happening in your accounting system, whether it's QBO or zero. Or something else, just give them an export of the activity in that account and show them like these are all the expenses that were paid out of this account. You go fix it and fix your transfers. What I'm doing is focusing on reconciling each bank account and categorizing things. And if you wanna see a true picture of your operating expenses, here's the p and l. even though some of our clients use Profit First, I even use it on my business to just keep. Like track of having certain buckets for different things. I don't go overboard. I don't have like 10 accounts. I have the five and that's it. I mainly use it as a way to just like set aside profit and taxes. I always encourage the clients to still look at the reports that we're giving you and, here's your operating expenses and like all of that because that's what they should be doing. Profit versus really designed for someone who is either not keeping books or not looking at their reports. So we always work to encourage our clients to really look at the reports and we. Do things to help them understand it so that they're not relying on their bank accounts to run their business. Yep. Sounds like this client wants more handholding, so I'm just justified in charging more based on the time I'm spending. Yes, absolutely. And I would just sit them down and be like, look, it looks like this is what you're asking for. This is what I can do. But if this is what you want, this is. Profit First consulting, and that's gonna be an extra, you know, three or $400 a month. That'll probably get them to fix their issues on their own if they don't wanna pay that. But if they're willing to pay it and you're willing to do the work, then so be it. Just charge extra. Michael says, how do you prefer to handle assets in your accounting software? Example one lump total, one per asset, et cetera. And how do you flag assets throughout the year to make sure they get passed along to tax filer with relevant details? Ooh, that's such a good question. Okay, so Most of our clients are online businesses, and so the only assets they have are like a computer, maybe some office furniture. And so what we do is we record things as they come through the bank account. So if they purchase something from ikea, that's a thousand dollars. Also, we set a threshold for most clients, it's at a thousand dollars. So we don't put anything in fixed assets unless it's over that. So say we see a transaction to Ikea for a thousand dollars, we're gonna flag that and we're gonna go and ask if the client hasn't submitted that receipt to Hubdoc, we're gonna ask for it and so that it's attached to the transaction. And then we can have the detail of like what that asset is and then. For a couple of our clients, they actually have storefronts. So they have a lot more fixed assets. They have shelving, they have buildings, they have all the stuff, right? And so we utilize the fixed asset module inside of Xero. And so the way that that works is when you turn that on. when you have it linked to the various fixed asset GL accounts, like we have one for computers, we have one for furniture and fixtures. We have one for buildings and land. When anything hits any of those accounts, it automatically triggers this. Asset detection in the fixed assets module, and so it puts it in draft and then we can review that. We can add details to it, look at the bill that the receipt or the bill that came through with it and add more details around serial numbers and all that kind of stuff. And then at the end of the year, we export that listing to the client and ask them to review it and make sure they have all of these assets still. If there's anything that needs to be disposed of, that's a process that you need to incorporate, especially for the clients that do have a physical location and have property tax that needs to be filed. That's something that we do for our clients. And so we're going through this process right now with a couple clients, having them review their fixed assets listing, telling us which items they've either sold or gotten rid of. One of our clients was in hurricane Helene. And so they had some damaged stuff that we were potentially going to need to be removing from their listing. And then at year end, that's part of our, tax package. We send a gl detail of, of all the fixed assets that have been added in the year. And we include that for their tax preparer. Yeah, that's pretty much the process. Hopefully that answers your question. Michael, I'm not sure if you're using zero or QBO. I really love the fixed assets module on QBO. And then the other piece of that is if clients do have fixed assets, we make sure that after taxes are filed, we get a copy of that depreciation schedule so we can record depreciation. Jennifer says, how could we make ourselves known as freelance option for busier bookkeepers if you're in the ambitious bookkeeper community or in the BBA group post there first because there's always people that are bringing on more clients and need extra support. So that's a good place to start. Another place is inside of the bookkeeping side hustle. People will post, part-time or contract positions in there. And then yeah, I would start with those two places for sure. Ally says, when a client uploads their receipt to Hubdoc, does it get automatically attached to the transaction in the zero feed? Yes, it does. So the way that we process everything, because a lot of our clients have different bank accounts that they pay things from, like either a credit card or whatever, and we don't wanna have to spend the extra time looking at the receipt to figure out which account it came from, which debit card was used, yada, yada. So we process everything as a bill, which means that we have to put them on a different plan in zero so that they can have more bills. And then when that transaction comes through the bank feed, it automatically detects that bill and the receipt is attached. Bryce says, recommendations for laptops. Do you have Microsoft Office or Google? we use Google workspace for everything. And we use MacBooks, and I know it sounds a little bit bougie, but I made that decision based on a couple factors. Number one, we won't have to replace the computers as often. Like I'm still using my MacBook Pro from 2020 and it's still going strong, so. Ultimately, like yes, they're more expensive upfront, but they last longer. So I'm not having to send people new computers or replace things as often. Number two is the security is better. It's really hard to hack a MacBook. take my advice with a grain of salt, but ultimately it saves us money. And then I use something called Apple Business Solutions where I can control, like when I. Bring on a team member. I can purchase their MacBook through Apple Business, have it linked to my company, and I can provision apps and I can lock down the computer if something like. if the employee leaves, I can wipe it and all the things remotely. So, and that's like $20 a month or something. It's a per employee fee of maybe like 10 or $15. So it's definitely worth it. And just for me, the peace of mind and the security is mostly why I did it. And then the third reason is because they're just really nice machines. The tools matter. I really appreciate, how. It just seamless. Everything works on my MacBook, so any who I know that's a tech is always a debate between people. But yeah. Is BBAA good option even if most of my clients are in QBO? Yes, absolutely. Uh, nothing is, everything in BBAI actually demo a lot of stuff in QBO because I know that it's like you're gonna come across QBO stuff, but I also demo things in Xero, but most of the QBO content, the curriculum. Is system agnostic. So it doesn't matter what bookkeeping system you're using with your clients it's more around the business processes and pricing and marketing and things like that. So, but I do have some bonuses in there where I do demo things and QBO and Xero how to run your own firm's books and client management in both software QBO and zero, if that makes sense. So if you have clients across both softwares. I did that for a long time and it was okay. Like you'll definitely be more efficient if you have all your clients on one system because you're not toggling back and forth between softwares. that's something to consider. Your own firm books, I would decide which system you prefer and which system ultimately in the long run you're going to be doing with your clients and put your own books on that. So for me, I knew from the beginning I was going to, even though I was taking clients on QBO and Xero, I knew ultimately my end goal was to have everybody on Xero. And so I put my own company books on Xero so that I could learn it better and also. So that would be, it would be in the same place as the rest of my clients. So when you become a zero partner or a QBO Pro advisor, you get a free account for yourself. So utilize that and just choose which one you wanna do. You can even keep the books parallel in both for a while to decide which one you wanna use ultimately. Link them both up to your bank accounts and all that good stuff. just to see. but yeah, that's my recommendation on that. Kelly says, well, Hubdoc allow more than one piece of documentation for an expense. For example, if a reimbursement has a receipt and a reimbursement form not unless it comes in as one upload. So what I usually do in those instances where I wanna attach multiple things is. I don't know if you can do this in QBO, but in Xero there's something called zero files. And so you can push it just to zero as a file in Cub Doc, or you can just download it and then upload it to the transaction in Xero, like as another attachment. So that would probably be what you have to do in QBO. So hopefully that helps answer your question. Bryce says, since you use Google, are you still ab able to export reports to Excel or Google Sheets? Yes, so you can open Excel files in Google Sheets. I also still have Excel on my computer, on my machine because I just prefer the functionality of that better than Google Sheets for when I have to manipulate data. But across the board, when we send financials to clients, we download them as a PDF and as a Google sheet and put them in their drive. Because most of our clients also use Google. However, when it comes to year end tax packages, I export those into an Excel file because most of the time they're giving those to their tax preparer. And tax firms usually prefer Excel. So, but you can open either one in both. So yeah, I still use both too. All right. Lots of good questions today , guys. Um, So thank you all so much for joining our first live q and a of 2026

Podcasts we love

Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.

Accounting High Artwork

Accounting High

Accounting High