123 ⎸ Are you Ready for Year End?

Feelin’ a little worried/nervous about year end? Well, in this episode I’m sharing what we do for all of our clients at year end!

In this episode you’ll hear:

• 3 things we provide ALL of our clients at year end
• When to start and finish these processes
• How to get your hands on the resources to learn & implement these processes

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• ambitiousbookkeeper.com/subscribe - get on the email list so you don’t miss out on the Black Friday Special!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:04 Black Friday Deal
• 4:57 The Way Of Course Bookkeeping Does Year End
• 17:50 Conclusion

Transcript

0:52

You're listening to the ambitious bookkeeper podcast. I'm your host Serina Shupe and it's been a bit since I've recorded a solo episode. I have been dropping the mini episodes every other Monday. So hopefully you're catching those. If you've been liking those, I would love if you rated and reviewed the podcast or send me a DM on Instagram, I'm at ambitious bookkeeper. But yeah, here I am with another solo episode, this one may or may not be longer than the mini episodes. But I've had a lot of people kind of have questions around this and want support around it. So I figured I would do an episode all about. Your end. So let's get into today's episode. alright, before we jump in, we are approaching year end. And I wanted drop in a little announcement. If you're listening to this, when it goes live. You still have time to get on my email list. I'm going to explain why in a minute. So please head over to ambitious bookkeeper.com/subscribe to get on our email list because here's the deal. I am going to be sending one email for black Friday. I've never done a black Friday special before. I'm going to send one email for black Friday. With a lot of information and resources inside of it. And in that email, you're going to get a code for 20% off. All of my self paced courses, many courses workshops in our store. So when you go to ambitious bookkeeper.com/store, You will see all of the things that are going to be 20% off with the exception of Elevate as this is already at a discount. We are going to be raising the price for Elevate come December 1st. So the code is not going to give you an additional 20% off that price is as is, but everything else that is self paced, including the bookkeeping business accelerator is 20% off starting November 20th through November 30th. So you have just 10 days, but I wanted to give you all a heads up because. You're planning for your end. You're looking hopefully at your own numbers. Like we preach to our clients and seeing, okay, do I need to you know, move some expenses into this year or whatever the case may be. I'm not a proponent of spending extra money just to have a tax write-off. But if it's something that you have been wanting. Needing or how'd your eye on any way? This is the time to grab it before the end of the year and get that as a 2023 expense. Okay. So. in that email, there's also going to be some affiliate deals. And I want to preface this episode with one of the things that I'm offering in some of the affiliate links that you can click in that email that will be coming again. Go to ambitious bookkeeper.com/subscribe to get on my email list, because if you're not on my email list, you're not going to get those email. But there's a few affiliate things that I'm promoting, which means if you purchase through the link in that email. I will get a small commission, but as a thank you to you. For using my link to buy those programs or softwares or whatever the case may be. I am going to be giving you my confident compliance bonus, which essentially is going to walk you through and give you the tools. For all of the things that I'm going to talk about today in today's episode. So all right, so without further ado, there's my spiel on my black Friday special. I've never done this before, but. I'm always willing to try new things and see how it goes. So let's talk about year end. Year-end. For us in our firm kind of begins right now in November. There's three things that I'm going to talk about that we do in our firm near year end and for our clients and you may or may not include any of this in your regular services, you might charge extra for some of this stuff, but I like to just share how we have or how I have things structured. Inside of my firm and how I package things together too. Number one show you that there's multiple ways of doing things. You don't have to do things the way that I do them. You are, more than welcome to obviously take inspiration from what I'm doing and make it fit your business model. But number two, give you permission to do things differently as well. Like we don't have to, to nickel and dime our clients at year end for 1099s. Although that that model may work for you, it may not work for you. So I'm just presenting you with some options. So. Three things that we provide every single one of our clients in every package that we offer, even our minimum lowest level package 1099's, tax package, which essentially is Just everything that the tax pro is going to need to file taxes and it's all organized in a very nice manner. So it, it makes the transition very easy to just hand it over. And we also do a year end financial presentation with a slide deck. Where Canva presentation. Showing our clients, their numbers in. Visual format. And we also compare to industry. So that's something that we can do since we have that information at our fingertips among the rest of our client base, because we're in a niche. If you're not in a niche, you could still provide those insights, but you might have to purchase something, a software or a report or something to be able to get those KPIs that are industry specific. Okay, so I'm going to go through these three things. That we do at your end. And as you're listening, if there's something that you're like, oh, I would really love to know how exactly she does that or what exactly she says to the clients. You're going to have the opportunity to get that basically for free. If you purchase something. Through the black Friday email that we're going to send out on November 20th. So. the other option is this. Isn't something that I sell by itself. It's called the competent compliance bonus. I don't sell this on its own. It is part of elevate. It is part of the bookkeeping business accelerator as bonuses. And this is the first time I will be offering it as a bonus. For someone using my affiliate link. All right. So number 1, 1099s this process we begin in November, we start going through all of our clients vendor transactions and making sure that anything that's not purchased or paid through on a credit card or PayPal or Stripe, we are collecting W-9s for. So we will start compiling the list of missing W-9s for our clients this month. And then we will send them an email that asks them to either. Like we, we give our clients an approach like, or a choice on the approach that we take. We can say, here's the email that you want to send this, this and this person, because you need their W-9 or we can send it on your behalf. Or we can ask for their W-9 through our, 1099 software. So there's multiple ways you can do this again. Like I said, you decide how you want to run your business and, what works for your business model. We do include this service in all of our packages, like I said, but we do price our general bookkeeping higher than I would say the market. Average is maybe. And this is one of the reasons why, because we want our clients to have peace of mind at year end and not worry about an extra bill. Yes, our workload is going to be heavier at year end, but there's so many months during the year that our workload is really light with some of these clients and it's highly profitable. So it's just a matter of like, you have to wrap your head around that aspect of when you charge somebody a monthly subscription or a flat rate for a service that they may not use until one time of the year. And then everybody's using it at the same time. You're going to have that influx of work. So you just have to make sure you manage it. The other reason why we are able to do that is because of the industry that we work with. I don't work with a lot of clients who pay people by check or ACH or, or cash. And so we're not issuing a ton of 1099s. I think I have one client. That we issued maybe 20 to 30, 1099s last year. Maybe it wasn't even that much. because she paid a bunch of people through Zelle. And, Since we did all the legwork last year for collecting all those W-9s. And throughout the year, we incorporate it into our monthly process to make sure we're getting W-9s for new people through Zelle on that client. We're probably going to be all right. Like it's not going to be much extra work this year. but that's the most volume we have and it's just one client and she's a higher paying client anyways. So. We're able to do that because of the industry you work with. We don't have a lot of like I said, check payments and things like that. Most of our clients pay most of their vendors either through Gusto, as a contractor or through Stripe or PayPal or a credit card. And in those cases, those payment processors are the ones issuing the 1099s. So as part of the confident compliance bonus, I do give you our 1099 process, our standard operating procedures, our email templates that we send to our clients. and my 1099 training is included in that as well, which you can also purchase separately with the black Friday coupon that you'll be getting when you subscribe to my email list. So that is included in the confident complainants bonus number two, the year end tax package. We provide. This is something that is definitely going to set you apart from other bookkeepers and hopefully give you referrals from those CPAs or tax pros that you're giving the information to, because you're going to hand it over in a pretty little package, tied with a bow. And they're hardly going to have any questions, if any. About what happened in those books for the year, because you're going to be prepared with all of the things that they will be expecting or needing detail on. And, you're going to just, wow. Your clients, CPAs and tax pros. And, hopefully, like I said, gain referrals. And even if not that, like you're facilitating a better relationship between that client and their tax pro as well. So in the tax package, we basically compile everything into an Excel workbook. We put a cover page on it with our contact information and some key information that the tax pro is going to need. About that file. so for instance, if the client has 1099s, we list out how many, 1099s we issued. We also put all of this into a folder with the 1099s with W2 copies and all those things. So everything is in one. Folder for the client to access. And it's very well organized and easy to get to. And then each tab is something different in that Excel workbook. So there's the cover page with all the information. And then there's a trial balance. There's a P and L balance sheet. Other detailed information that usually tax pros want like the owner's draws detail. Charitable contributions, fixed assets, all of those things. So we do have a checklist also as part of this confident compliance bonus of what's included in that tax package. I give you a template. Example of it. And then I also give you my work clothes for year end, where I show you step-by-step basically what needs to be, or what could be included in that tax package, depending on the client. And we just modify it. For each client as the year goes, goes on. If something comes up and it's like, oh, this client for the very first time ever. How to charitable contribution. We didn't have to include this last year, but we did this year. So I will like notate that in the task or maybe there's something else that was. Different that happened that year. And I'll put that in that task as well. So we know to bring it up to the tax pro or we tell the client, this is something you're going to need to address with your tax preparer. So that's the tax package. We try to have this. Completed by the 31st of January. Of course, that is widely dependent on the client. Getting us everything to close out your end. 1099s. Obviously those are due by the end of January as well. So that's the deadline on that? And then the third piece of this is the year end financial presentation. And again, like I said, all of this is included on every level of our clients, even our lowest package. Because even the clients that are in the lowest package, that aren't getting a monthly overview of their financials, they're still getting their financials monthly. That's something we give to all of our clients, but some of our clients don't get a loom video or a meeting. But at year end, we do want to be able to present that information to them in a visual way. And it just adds so much value. We've gotten so many. Rave reviews from our clients around this. And we just do a loom video. Some clients prefer a meeting, so we'll do that. But I put together a canvas presentation based on their numbers and we compare them to the prior year and we compare some things to industry. And I just talk through it on camera. Or screen-sharing. This is even something that you don't have to necessarily show your face on. You can just screen, share the slides and talk through them. And in that slide presentation, we also try to have that done by the 31st. And one of the questions that came up last time I presented. on this topic was. What if you haven't closed out the books yet by January 31st, do you still create the financial presentation? And I say, yeah. If you've done the tax package, you should be able to do the financial presentation, but we try to get these out of the way in January, even the numbers are not a hundred percent finalized. Because for one, we can use that as an opportunity to let the client know before we get into this presentation, we're still missing X, Y, Z. So these numbers are preliminary. And we're still waiting on this and that in order to close out your tax package so that you can file taxes. So it gives you another opportunity to remind them. And then when you start putting together the numbers, if there's like $20,000 in suspense or ask my accountant, it's going to show up on a pie chart and you're going to call it out and be like, this is why these are preliminary. We don't have information for all of these transactions in this account. So once that's in there, these numbers are obviously going to change, but the bottom line shouldn't change drastically. Unless some of those transactions are like fixed assets or something like that. Right. So those are the three things that we do at year end. Again, all of this is included in the confident compliance bonus. I give you your in checklists, I give you email templates. I give you the Canva templates for the slide presentation. And I go through an example, client. And walk you through that whole process. So this is such a valuable training. I can't, I honestly am like talking about this. I'm like, why am I giving this away? That's a bonus, but Alas. I just, I want you guys to have the tools. To be successful at year-end. And to not have to stress out about how have I missed something or am I doing something correctly or any of those things. So. Definitely go to the show notes, click the link to subscribe to our email newsletter or go to ambitious bookkeeper.com /subscribe. Make sure you are subscribed to the email list so that you get this email for black Friday, because like I said, I'm only gonna send it. Once on the 20th. And that we'll have the code to get 20% off all of our self paced courses, mini courses workshops with the exception of elevate, as I said and if you have been eyeballing Dubsado Decoded, the program I collaborated with Kendra Courtney on that one, we'll also be having a black Friday special. So the link for that will be in the email as well. Just as a little teaser. there's a few affiliate things that I'm adding into that email. I could end up adding more, but for sure Liz Wilcox's email marketing membership, annual pass. she's doing a black Friday special, which is really amazing. And coaches and company contract templates. So if you're in need of an independent contractor agreement, coaching contracts, group program contracts. You can use that link, and take advantage of her black Friday special and also get my bonus for all of this year-end goodness. All right. Once again, thank you so much for listening every week to the podcast. I'm just over here assuming you listen weekly. If you're not listening weekly, please follow the show, subscribe to it, make sure you get them downloaded. Every week. And I would love it. Love, love, love it. If you would please go rate and review the podcast. It helps other bookkeepers and accountants find it more easily when there's more five star reviews. I guess you don't have to do a five star review, but I would love it. And if you do have a question you would love to have answered on the podcast. That's a great place to put it. So when I read the reviews, I will grab that question and answer it on a future episode. All right. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving season. Holiday season coming up and, we'll catch you in the next episode.