The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

115 ⎸ [SYSTEMS] Onboarding with Alyssa Lang

• Serena Shoup, CPA • Episode 115

Share episode

Send us a text

In this SYSTEMS episode, we have Alyssa Lang (Workflow Queen!) on with us again! We talk about ensuring clarity & efficiency in your client's onboarding journey, and we highlight the significance of creating seamless systems that allow for easier outsourcing or delegation.

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • the importance of separating processes in onboarding
  • tech and tools we both use to automate onboarding as much as possible
  • a walk through of the onboarding process & touch points with clients

Resources mentioned in this episode (some of these are affiliate links):

PROGRAMS:

SOFTWARE:

OTHER PODCAST EPISODES WITH ALYSSA:

About our guest

Alyssa, aka the Workflow Queen, teaches bookkeepers and accountants how to utilize tech and automation to create better workflows, systems and processes. As a result they can run their practices on autopilot, stress less and save time!

Visit her website

Follow her on IG @workflowqueen

Listen to her podcast: Conquering Workflows & Systems

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 website >

Thank you for your support of our show. If you'd like to leave a review, click HERE.

To fill out The State of Virtual Bookkeeping Survey, click HERE.

For each response, I'll be donating $1 to charity: water. Learn more here.

Join the next free training at ambitiousbookkeeper.com/training

the reason why people get so overwhelmed and onboarding is because there's so many questions. Like, I can't tell you how many times I've been onboarded recently. I'll just give you an example. I got onboarded by our social media management company because we switched over and people think you think it's fun when you have two companies and then when you have to onboard with a company with both companies, it's not fun people. Okay. So that was my life and it was so, so rough, like trying to fill out this thing that had so many questions. And also they go through things like branding, like your voice, your, you know, your brand voice. Granted, I had a lot of this stuff inside of notion, like documented, but I just remember looking at it. Like, I can't imagine people who aren't organized like me trying to fill this out and just being able to have like those questions that spit as needed is just really a great feature in my opinion. For the last two months, if you've been following along on the podcast. You may have been listening to our special niche series where I interviewed. Many accounting firm owners who specialized and niche in a certain industry or a certain software. And hopefully you gained a ton of value and took away lots of ideas that you can implement in your own bookkeeping or accounting business. This month, we are doing a series on systems. Again, I will be interviewing experts on systems as they pertain to bookkeeping and accounting. I hope you enjoy. If you've been enjoying these special series, please take a screenshot, share them on the socials. Tag me at ambitious bookkeeper. And let me know what has been your biggest takeaway? Another great way to support this is to go ahead and review our podcast and drop a question in there for me, because I have something special dropping, as well around little Q and A's. So if you have a question you'd like answered, please send me a DM. And I will record a short and sweet podcast episode and maybe you'll hear it on the air. Thank you so much for supporting the show. I truly appreciate you tuning in each week. And as does my team, we put a lot of effort into producing these shows, and I hope that you are finding tons of value, inspiration, and learning a thing or two. Alright, now let's get into today's episode. Welcome back to the Ambitious Bookkeeper podcast. I have another special guest for this series on systems that we're doing this month. None other than the Workflow Queen, Alyssa Lang. Welcome, Alyssa. Biz Bestie. How are you? I was like, I hope you at least say Biz Bestie somewhere in there. Cause I'm like, I prefer that title way better than Workflow Queen. Serena's Biz Bestie. But hi, I'm so excited to be here. As, as you know, I love talking about systems and I know the convo is going to go probably sideways a little bit, but we're excited for all that. Yeah. Yeah. So before we hit record. And just a side note, if this is the first time you're hearing Alyssa and I on a podcast together, you can scroll back in your podcast player for, and search for Alyssa's name. We've done several episodes together. In some of the older episodes, we cover how we met and why we're biz besties. So we're not going to repeat that today for efficiency's sake, as this is a systems. but yeah, so today before we hit record, we're trying to figure out like, where do we want this conversation to go? And one thing that constantly is coming up for your students and my students is onboarding systems. So we thought it would be pretty cool to talk about what your onboarding system looks like in your firm and what mine looks like, the systems we use, and that way people have some ideas to run with and then we'll just see where it goes from there. So. Thank you. So yeah, like what is, I guess, take it wherever you want to go. If you want to start with what your system is or some some question that you get constantly and we can start there. Yeah. So I think one thing I want to preface that I find is a really big issue in the industry is that a lot of people think that their onboarding is also their cleanup. And so because of that, a lot of people get stuck on wanting to be able to outsource the onboarding aspect, which as you know, if you separate your processes out from like your process for onboarding is one thing, and then you have a whole nother project and a whole nother process for cleanup, it allows you to actually bring on an assistant or easily hand that off to someone like a VA on the team. But I think a lot of people in the industry try to mix the two and that's what creates a lot of overwhelming confusion of like, there's no way I can outsource this. Cause I also have to have a cleanup person. And it's like, Let's just pause, take a step back. Onboarding is one thing, your cleanup is another. So I really wanted to start with that because we clarified that a lot last week during our bootcamp when people were like, Oh yeah, I just can't do it. So start with that piece. Yeah, as far as what we do with how we try to organize our onboarding is we try to do our best to have everything manually laid out. We use Asana for this, and I know that you're very similar in this capacity too, but we do have things automated. We have other systems that we're using through our onboarding, but we don't even think about the cleanup until the client's onboarded. So for us, like we, we strive. As we all know, this is not usually how it works. We strive for a two week onboarding period, and we will not start any work in any capacity. We won't even sign them up on QuickBooks online until they're at a certain stage in their onboarding part to be able to start doing the cleanup or start doing the monthly maintenance, whatever that looks like. So I just wanted to preface that because I feel like a lot of people get lost and they think it's. And one thing I want to add to that too, is I have faced this myself just this last week is I brought on a new client and we're starting with a cleanup and then after the cleanup we're going to talk about monthly engagement, but for right now it's just the cleanup and she has a tight deadline because it's almost September 15th at the time of this recording and she needs to get her 2022 cleaned up so she can complete her taxes and so one of the things that I had to make sure to communicate multiple times during discovery and during the onboarding process is you have a deadline of September 15th. I'm not starting anything until that intake form is complete. So this is very contingent upon you completing those tasks before I can start any work. And it really comes down to a lot of people, because I get I, I started to get kind of caught up in this as well of like trying to help move the process along. So I was like, well, what can I do before she finishes this? And then I was like, wait a second, you know, like you really, but you really have to communicate that to the client. You can't make it seem like you're going to be willing to just piece things together. So you have to decide like if you are willing to piece things together and, take that on on your shoulders and help move the process along more quickly. Number one, it's, that's a precedent. But number two, you're kind of, you're creating your own trap, so if you don't want it to be that way, and if you don't want to feel that way, you have to communicate clearly to the client what the expectation is. Yeah, and like you said, it's all about being like that up front, because if you let your client just say, no, we just don't need that right now, like keep moving forward, you're just pretty much allowing them to walk all over you and you're allowing them to dictate your process. And for me, unfortunately, we just don't let our clients dictator process and. I do recommend that somewhere in your contracts, if you want to talk to a lawyer or somehow put this drafted in your contract, that if after X number of weeks, you still have not onboarded, we have the right to disengage and keep X number of fee. I think for us, we landed on like a 250 fee that like, we'll just refund them. So we're just not going to deal with this because to me, you're already setting a certain tone with my company and my team. And I'm just not desperate enough to sway these things because then that will change your whole process. And to me, my process is more important than someone's feelings. It sounded so bad when it came out, but I swear I care about people. It's business though, and you're making a really, you make a really good point, and I love having that as a caveat of like, this is our onboarding timeframe, and if you exceed this, and to a certain extent, we're just going to disengage because it's just an, you're just giving an idea of how the rest of the engagement's going to go, that you don't really respect our time and what we're putting into it. The other thing is, I know someone's going to be like, well, What do you, what can you do to help move that process along where you aren't like getting in the weeds? And I think that's where it comes into the systems that we use. So should we go there now? Yeah, absolutely. 100%. I think for us, how we're able to actually execute something within that two week time period is. The client experience that we give when people do like start the onboarding process. So how we know the process is done with the sales is when they have signed that first contract and they have paid the first invoice. That means the sales process is done. We have now moved on to the onboarding aspect of things and that's when we're starting to get like for us, it's like content snare. It's getting the request sent out to our clients, getting Plooto ready. Cause we use Plooto for like our ACH. So it essentially can send the ACH form to them. And within Plooto, it just allows us to like, like spit out the right information. And we do that alongside the content snare request. We send everything over to the client. And once we get the clients like that information, we have a, this is why I love content snare. Content Center allows for like a, like a like a follow up sequence and you can customize it. So we have a follow up sequence that's specific to onboarding that just says, re reminding them, Hey, per our contract, like, and it's a nice warning, obviously you have to get this done by X number of days. And we literally put a deadline on the content request for like two weeks out, or I think it might be. I want to say it actually might be a week and a half out because then we need, we want to complete the onboarding as a team by the end of two weeks. And so for us, that's kind of helps a lot because those, the onboarding email sequence, a lot of people struggle with getting the clients to do things because they're manually sending emails or trying to remember that they need to nudge them. So content is doing that. It's already set up for us, so then as long as it's initiating everything 1 new thing that we're trying to add in, which I was trying to avoid for quite some time was trying to do onboarding calls because. I don't want to be stuck in doing it and I just don't have someone yet on the team that can like take over those types of calls right now, but we are striving towards that right now, but I'm starting to add in a new layer of offering an onboarding call. We do technically inside of our contents and requests. It's like the last question. It says, if you struggle or you're getting stuck, please book a call. It's not like book your call. Let's do it together. So now we've swapped it. In the welcome email to say, Hey, book your call. You're going to receive a separate this, you're going to receive a separate this. And this is how you move forward. Because we do have like a new client that we just signed on, who is like, realistically, I'm so busy. I could not like fill this out by myself. I just need someone to be on a call with me and hold me accountable and hold my hand. And so that's why we recently switched it over. So that's kind of like what we do. And I think that just allows for us to have follow ups and the ability to have Actually having to do the touch points, because I got this last week during like our bootcamp, someone kept saying how are you creating a positive client experience? If everything is mostly automated, as you know, my lovely, what is it? 45 step zap for onboarding that I shared with you is insane. Like our, almost our whole entire onboarding is fully automated. And I'm like, Everything that you do, you're still manually, probably copying, pasting an email that you're probably retyping. I just have it ready to go. It's still personalized. It's still exciting. Like it's still the personality. You can still create good client experience systems alongside automating. And I think that that's where people get stuck too, in the onboarding process. Yeah, I recently onboarded a new client that he was raving about my onboarding system. He was like, your drip sequence, your everything was so like. Lockstep like he was like it was amazing as soon as I completed one thing I got an email and I was ready for the next thing and it wasn't overwhelming he was like I just commend you for your onboarding and he knew it was automated, but he's still like they'll know it's automated and can also still appreciate it because that's that still makes it a good client experience because they're not waiting either. So like they're getting things immediately as soon as they complete one thing, they get a new thing and yeah, so you use content snare for your intake form. I used Dubsado, so I used Dubsado for my whole onboarding process and it can do the same thing where it's kicking off automated emails when they complete one thing. And we do also do the onboarding call and we have it. We have. An email that goes out once they've completed their intake form. We say, okay, give us like a couple of days to get all this, you know, set up and get into your system. And in the meantime, schedule an onboarding call because hopefully That gives them a few days to look at our calendar and, and get something on the books within the next two weeks. And then we also, that also holds us accountable to moving it along the process because then we'll get as much done as we can before that call. And then on that call is where we tie up the loose ends, like, Connecting their bank feeds together or going over questions that we have come across so far in the onboarding. Like for example, with this one client we just onboarded it was, he already had his Xero set up and we kind of did a little cleanup, but there was some things that we noticed during the cleanup. of the setup that we were like, okay, let's talk to him about this, this, and this on the onboarding call. And then ask him the questions about the transactions we, we couldn't figure out. And one of the things was that we look at is their invoice settings. So if they're invoicing through Xero or QuickBooks, we look to see if they are, they have their logo on there. We look to make sure that the address is on there and all that kind of stuff, their invoice terms. And we also make sure that there's reminders. automatically going out so that they don't have to chase their customers for money. Little things like that. And then the other thing too was he's a sole proprietor. And we noticed that he had his social security number in, in zero as his EIN. And so my recommendation on that call was go get yourself an EIN, don't use your social security anymore. It's, it's okay. Like, even LLC yet, still get an EIN, little things like that that you're going to have that touch point to just talk through those things. So yes, I highly recommend the onboarding call. It doesn't need to be longer than 30 minutes. It doesn't have to be crazy. Your meetings don't need to be a whole hour all the time. Yeah. And you'll fill the time with, what is that Parkinson's? It is Parkinson's law. Is it right? Yeah. I was like, I don't know if I'm saying the wrong thing because I'm notorious for this. It's sad. Um, or like the amount of time that you give it, you will fill it with that amount of time. But so if you do an hour, it's going to fill its time with an hour. Like, so just, I dare anybody to like cut your meetings by like 15 minutes, 10 minutes, you will see a difference and people will get things done faster. So I have a question for you actually. So it sounds like. It's really interesting to see like the way that different people, even me and you, we talk so often and we go through processes together. It's crazy how even we still have such different things because in our onboarding, we actually, the only thing that we do that has to do with the QBO aspect of things, if like we have to set up a brand new account is we barely just sign them up and use whatever data we have, like from the sales process to do the initial setup, to then send the invite to them. But our actual setup phase of QBO, that's like the invoicing terms, like you were saying, like the logo and everything like that actually happens in our cleanup phase. Yeah. Because even if a client technically is in a cleanup, they're like, the cleanup is the aspect of getting them ready to go to get started. It's so interesting. Like, it sounds like you. You take those in the onboarding, but for me, I've separated those out. So we don't do any work at all. Like we don't even ask them questions because our questions come as we do the cleanup, we send them content requests for the cleanup questions. Or one example is we actually just recently created a custom template inside of content snare that's for accounts receivable, because a lot of the times, like our clients are going to hire us to go do it, but then they like maybe aren't setting it up correctly. So in the content snare requests, we essentially like say. For your invoicing, like, do you prefer this term, this term, this term? Do you prefer to pay by, and this is why I don't use Dubsado, just so that to preface why we don't do the intake forms. So inside a content snare, we can ask them a question that says, do you want to take payments through QuickBooks online? If they say yes, it will then spit out another question. It's like a setting inside of there that says. Yeah, it'll say, okay, cool. Here's a link to go check out the QBO payment fees and what you would be feed. And then here's a loom video. It's like an SOP that they click on. It goes to notion that like has the embedded video, like the step by step process of like how to go set up. Like that's because we can't do the setup of the payments for them. Like they have to authorize that. And we don't want that burden. We could technically, but I don't want that burden on our plate. But it spits out additional questions based off certain criteria, which is great. And so that's how we do it, but that's also in our cleanup phase. So it's really interesting to hear like the differences. Technically, he was onboarded at that point. So I would say we call it an onboarding call, but it's more of a kickoff call. So it's like whatever we couldn't complete through the onboarding process, like. For him, it was, he already had the zero set up, so we weren't connecting bank feeds, but for a new setup client, we would still get as much as we could done, we would set up their zero, do all the things, and then that would be the last step of linking their bank accounts. And we always have the client on the phone for that. For him, it really was more of a kickoff the engagement call. We've, we've done as much as we can for the cleanup. We just. Yeah, we didn't have to have really an onboarding call because he had gotten us everything we needed. Yeah. So that's where you can kind of adjust and I can adjust when that email goes out to it's like it has to be approved by me or whoever is completing the tasks in Dubsado to kick off those emails so that it doesn't kick off too early if you haven't finished setting up their account or if you haven't finished cleaning up their account, they won't get that email to book an onboarding call or whatever. You can decide the timing of when that goes out to yeah. So for him it really, like, They usually are more of like a kickoff call where it's like, okay, we're going to tie up loose ends and then make sure we're set up for going forward. But yeah, I like how content snare has the conditional questions. That's, that's something that I continue to kind of like go back and forth about, like, do we need a convenience? Like, honestly, it's so convenient, even in like the onboarding, like form, like questionnaire that we have, like the request even has questions like, do you have payroll? Like, yes, then it spits out all the questions that we need. Do you have a sales CRM? No. Then it's like, why bother asking all these questions? And like, the reason why people get so overwhelmed and onboarding is because there's so many questions. Like, I can't tell you how many times I've been onboarded recently. I'll just give you an example. I got onboarded by our social media management company because we switched over and people think you think it's fun when you have two companies and then when you have to onboard with a company with both companies, it's not fun people. Okay. So that was my life and it was so, so rough, like trying to fill out this thing that had so many questions. And also they go through things like branding, like your voice, your, you know, your brand voice. Granted, I had a lot of this stuff inside of notion, like documented, but I just remember looking at it. Like, I can't imagine people who aren't organized like me trying to fill this out and just being able to have like those questions that spit as needed is just really a great feature in my opinion. Yeah, yeah, I would agree, especially if you do get to that point where you have so many different options or whatever for clients, like if you're doing, if you are doing payroll for clients or if you are doing sales tax, each one of those adds a service that you need to know about. And there's always going, there's the other thing too, is that another area people get hung up on is. there's always going to be information that you forgot to ask for, or the client didn't even realize how to answer the question, so they didn't tell you that they had a certain thing. There's always going to be that, no matter what, no matter how good your systems are. And you're not going to know until you go and look at the balance sheet or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where in the cleanup, that's why we're doing like the follow up. Like we have, I think it's called like QBO cleanup tasks. And then we like assign it to the client. And that's like in the request inside a content snare. And it has a different follow up sequence that has to do with like, we can't finalize your cleanup and you don't get your **** together. We don't say that to them people. I probably do actually. Um, so anyways. You got to find your people, people. Um, so like we kick off like certain types of requests, depending on, and like, that's where we go through our cleanup task list to say, Hey, you know, we're missing this, we're missing that, like, as we're going through, because that's pretty normal, that that's going to happen. You know what I mean? Like people just, I think everybody gets tripped up on even like the onboarding. When you're talking about how. If you're offering different levels of service for your client, like, obviously you're going to need certain questions to be asked a lot of things of the reason why most people can't outsource the onboarding is because they feel like every time they talk to the client, the client's going to tell them what they want. Right? So maybe it's budgeting. Maybe it's cashflow projections. Maybe it's this, maybe it's that they're so hung up on. Like, I have to customize the form for each person to like, go be sent out to them. And I call BS on that because like, that's why if you use something like this is why content Sarah, even. I think it's better than the onboarding inside of keeper. And a lot of these other platforms is because I can act as if the client is always going to be full service and it spits certain questions as needed. However, if we are doing something like budgeting or cashflow projections, like they won't get that in their onboarding because we don't start that setup until they get into the cleanup phase, because we first just need them on board. We can't get the data to that without the QBO being set up without the information that we need. So then we're spitting out different requests that are customized for. The things we need to then do the next thing. But onboarding is just getting the company into your world, not getting their services driven towards them already. Delivered. Yeah, that makes so much sense. Well, you basically sold me on switching my intake form to content snare. And it's funny cause I emailed them the other day and I was like, can we please get like a send later feature for the, the content snares? Cause a lot of my team likes to work on the weekend and that's fine. I don't care when you work. But I don't want us to be emailing our clients at four in the morning or like wherever they're at. And so I emailed him and he's like, that's like the third thing that's on the list of like going down an order. And I'm like, I can't wait. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So we have a few minutes left. So for your onboarding systems, you do use Dubsado for proposals. Yep. Engagement letter and first invoice. First invoice, yes, goes through Dubsado. Okay, and then I'm assuming you have a ZAP that sends the information into ContentSnare to kick that, that off or no? Yeah, so the ZAP is essentially, they've signed the first contract, it then like creates a Slack channel for that client, and then it Add certain team members to that Slack channel if needed. And then from there, it then moves it into, man, I wish I would've just pulled up my Zap because it was such a beast to build, as you know. And then it sets up, oh, it creates a client inside of ContentSnare first is one of the steps. And then it creates the draft. So this is really important. We do not automatically have the Zap send the first ContentSnare thing. Because the questions do not change, but only one question that's in the request has to add a certain link because we have the zap also automatically creating the Google drive folder for the clients. Not only just one folder, but every single sub folder and also the external folder with the clients. And we even have the zap set up to turn on certain permissions on certain documents that they're going to need, which is really freaking cool. Um, I did not know that they were capable of doing that until I did it. From that step. What we're doing is in the process, it's also creating a database line inside of notion for that client. And we have like a database called all master client database creates the client in there, but it also takes from the prior step, the Google drive link that they need for the client specifically, and adds it to that thing inside of notion. So that way, when the onboarder will then have a task inside of Asana, which is initiated from the zap, it sets up the onboarding project and the cleanup project. So, 2 different projects at 1 time, it spits them both out and sets them up, which are already pre assigned to everybody. And then from there, they just have a task that says, go take the Google drive link and add it to the contents and request and just hit send. But it already presets the due date. It sets up everything based off certain conditions spits out the data and then. From there, we also have to make sure that simultaneously this is why it's that part's a little bit manual. We have the Plooto set up because that cannot be zapped because most banking things cannot be zapped in any capacity. So we have like the team member going in creating the Plooto set up for the recurring payment that we need to receive, whether it's a cleanup fee, because we do payment plans for cleanups. Or just a regular recurring, so they set it up and then that way they send the contents their request because somewhere in the contents their request, it says you should have received a separate email from Plooto. Please make sure to go set up the ACH and then click done. So that way we're, they're pretty much acknowledging that they did what they said they were going to do. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of like where it goes from there, but then there's obviously way more things that happened. Yeah. So you have You have separate projects in Asana for each, like you have an onboarding project and then you have the cleanup project and then if they're going to be doing monthly accounting with you, is that a third project that it sets up or do you wait until the cleanups done? Like, how do you, cause I know that's another question for people is when, if we're going to engage monthly too, at what point do we roll them into monthly? And some people have opinions on that where it's like, you should be doing as much as you can monthly as well. While you're doing the cleanup or like, do you wait until the cleanup is done? How do you handle that? Yeah. So if I, I don't remember exactly if I would have had my zap up, I could tell you, but it could possibly be shooting off an onboarding project, cleanup project, and the monthly project. Cause our monthly is also our quarterly because the volume we just have to set up, like, is we just use a full service. Like, we just assume every client's full service in our monthly, like, client project in Asana, and then we just delete what's not needed and then go based off volume. So, I don't remember if it spits out all, all three. I wish I had that answer, but I do know one for, for sure. It's the onboarding project and cleanup, and we don't move them into monthly maintenance until they're fully cleaned up. And a lot of the times, it's not even because we haven't done our work. It's basically. The client hasn't given us what we need and to finalize this. And we tell, I'm very straightforward and very upfront with them. And we give them a weekly email that lets them know through the cleanup process. What's going on. And you know, the update, yeah, the status, it's not telling them like, here's what we did. It's just like the status overall, like we're stalled because we can't move you into maintenance, but we're still going to charge you your fee. Cause we still have to cover those months because you're refusing to get us info. And so that's kind of how we've decided to maneuver that piece. I don't do monthly maintenance. Yeah. Until it's ready. I'm the same, but I've seen other cases where it might make sense to start monthly maintenance as you're doing cleanup so that things don't fall so far behind. But me personally, I don't have such complex clients that we really do that. And, and generally if you can't, if you don't have the stuff to do the catch up cleanup, you're probably not Also getting the stuff that you're going to need for monthly maintenance. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, okay. So I'm, as we were talking, I'm writing down all the systems that we've mentioned. I'm going to drop links to the, in the show notes. If, if someone is like, Oh my gosh, cause I know we're going to get this question. Someone's going to DM one of us and be like, can I have, like, where do you sell that zap that you created? The monthly or the onboarding, the beast of an onboarding Zapier automation is there somewhere that you teach that process or like, what should, cause I know the question's going to come up, so I'm just going to ask it for you because we just assume we know this. So right now it's not sold in any capacity. However I did promise my Breakthrough students that after we sign like at least a couple more clients, because we did just sign one and two things broke because I don't want to share something that's going to break. So two things broke. I was able to fix it, but we're waiting on the next contract to be signed. We are doing like a special session for our Breakthrough students in September that will be like. Let's go through Alyssa's onboarding process, aka I'm my own guest expert in my own program. So we're going to go through the onboarding and I did promise them that I'd give them like the zap, but I tell people all the time, even if someone just hands you a zap, your system's different. It's more important to understand how it all works versus trying to like. Work it based off my system. And so that's the session that we're going to do in all of our guests, expert sessions, which even if they're from me, like are recorded and uploaded into the program and any assets and resources. So at this time, that's the only place other than kickoff with Asana is a place to get like our onboarding project, but that's not automated and stuff and. You know, I'm hoping a Zapier course one day, but I don't think it's going to happen. If anything, it's going to stay inside a breakthrough for Zapier because you just need to be so, you need to understand the manual process before you try to zap. And too many people try to zap before understanding how to do it manually. Like that's to me is the most important thing is like understanding and knowing how to process map to understand what you can even automate in the first place. And you cover process mapping inside of breakthrough too. So we will drop the link to that. It's always enrolling. Yeah. Amazing program. I also am a guest teacher in that. And you were at the modules. So yes, definitely check that out. If you're looking to really implement systems and automate things and remove yourself from doing the day to day breakthrough is going to be your program. I have a question for you. One thing I know we're about to be at the end, but what happens if someone really wants to set up their Dubsado and they really would just love a seamless setup for Dubsado. What would be your recommendation, Serena? Yeah. Funny you asked. So I recently partnered with Kendra Courtney. I retired the onboarding on autopilot course that I had created and partnered with a Dubsado a certified Dubsado specialist to build out a program showing you exactly how to set up your Dubsado to set up your own services, your own workflows, and all those automations with Kendra. And that is called Dubsado Decoded. I will drop the link in the show notes as well. You can also go to ambitiousbookkeeper. com slash decoded and that should take you there as well. But yeah, a lot of Dubsado is a very robust program and it can get confusing, but once you figure it out and you learn how to customize it and everything, I get so many compliments from clients that how like, Seamless. Yeah, how seamless it is and how branded it is. That's the other thing. Like, there's other things out there, obviously, that are built for accountants, like Ignition or GoProposal and things like that, but you can't really customize the branding and the look and the feel of it. So, if you do work, especially if you work with, like, creative businesses, they will You gotta be creative. Yes. Yes. Yeah. We both know that one. Yeah. So. Yeah, so we'll drop links to all of these resources in the show notes. And do you have any other recommendations or pieces of advice for someone who is, you know, building a bookkeeping business and wants to get better with their systems implementations? Yeah, if we're talking about any systems in general, I think the biggest thing that you can do for yourself is first learn how to do something manually before you try to get it automated was my biggest tip earlier. And to kind of piggyback on top of that is just making sure that don't try to perfect all your systems up front. It is not possible. And as your business progresses, your systems will grow too. Even my systems that I share and sell to people. Still change for myself as well, because the industry is evolving. Our client base is evolving. You might pick a different niche that will change your systems. So just give yourself grace to know that like your systems will always ever be evolving, but having a foundation and a base is the best thing you can do for yourself to really get yourself set up. So perfectionism. Don't even try it because I've tried to perfect perfectionism. I've tried to make perfectionism. Perfect. Typical accountant. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Alyssa, for your time today as always. It's a pleasure. It's so fun to chat with you and yeah, we will link some prior episodes in the show notes as well. So you can get to know kind of our background and we'll talk to you soon. Yay. Thank you. Bye!

Podcasts we love

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

Accounting High Artwork

Accounting High

Accounting High