The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

177 | Crafting Deliverables that Matter

• Serena Shoup, CPA • Episode 177

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By popular request, we’ve decided to air a summit presentation I did with Josie Parr, at her Profitable Lifestyle Firm Summit. I’m talking about crafting deliverables that matter for your clients. If you’d like to see the presentation slides, head over to my YouTube Channel!

In this episode you’ll hear how to:

  • Maximize your value
  • Shift your positioning
  • Add value


Resources mentioned in this episode:


Meet Josie

After putting in years of hard work at top 100 firms, Josie realized there was an opportunity to create a better way. She took a leap of faith and founded Josie Parr CPA LLC, a niche practice that is specifically focused on tax strategy clients.

In her first year, she tripled her revenue goals, reduced her work hours to a part-time schedule, and spends every day doing what she loves: working in tax strategy.

And now, her mission is to empower other tax professionals to transform into tax strategists by elevating their current skills and knowledge using the same proven systems and methods that brought her success.


Connect with Josie

🌐 solotaxcoach.com


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Serena:

Welcome to the ambitious bookkeeper podcast. In this episode, I am airing my presentation from the profitable lifestyle firms summit put on by Josie par this past summer. I actually sourced this topic from my audience on Instagram. because I was having difficulty figuring out what topic people wanted to learn about that wasn't already taken in the summit. And so we settled on this and I think it, blends beautifully with year-end and getting things together for your clients. wowing your clients and possibly upselling them into some higher level services. If that's something that you're interested in. So I'm in this presentation, I talk about. Uh, some KPIs that are beneficial to monitor and present to pretty much every client. I talk about how to add value to the services that you're providing. And, I dive a little deeper on the financial reports that we provide all of our clients at a bare minimum. So even if you're not planning on. diving into advisory and taking things a little deeper with clients. This is something that's going to help you set yourself apart and position yourself in the marketplace with all the other bookkeepers out there and do things a little bit differently. So I hope you enjoy this episode. If you'd like to watch the presentation, it'll be on my YouTube channel. If you want to dive deeper on. Learning how to put these things together and how to, analyze things more deeply for your clients. I highly recommend jumping into elevate, which is always open. And by the time this episode goes live, it'll be right before our black Friday specials. So make sure you're on my email list to be the first, to know what that special looks like and elevate will be included in that. So. If you've been eyeballing, elevate, this is your opportunity to jump in and, get in there and start adding value, more value to your clients. this episode, like I said, is a recording of a summit. So you're going to hear, Josee introduce me, if you'd like to connect with her and follow along for next year summit, I will link all that in the show notes so that you can get on the list and be alerted when her summit opens again. And so she's going to be introducing me. I'm going to be giving a presentation. And at the end I do a little bit of a Q and a, and I may be. Talking about some resources that are not available to the public. They were just available to the, the summit participants. But if you are interested in. Diving deeper. Like I said, I highly recommend jumping into elevate and you can grab that or find more information on that@ambitiousbookkeeper.com slash elevate. All right. Without further ado, let's jump into today's episode crafting deliverables that matter.

Josie:

Hi, I'm Josie Parr, and I'm your host for the Profitable Lifestyle Firm Summit. I'm here with Serena Shoup. Serena is a CPA who has a successful accounting practice called Of Course Bookkeeping, but you've probably heard of her before from her podcast, The Ambitious Bookkeeper. She has a program by the same name. where she helps experienced accountants start and grow their own virtual bookkeeping firms. Thank you so much for being here today, Serena. Thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this, uh, this summit. I'm super excited to share and talk about crafting your bookkeeping deliverables that matter. So thank you so much for having me. So there's a lot of fear in the bookkeeping industry about being replaced by AI or being a commodity. So I'm here today to help you easily set yourself apart. If you'll be providing bookkeeping or client accounting services in your firm and to begin to position yourself in more of the consultant or advisor role, and if nothing else, a more valuable part of your client's business. And we're going to do that today by crafting deliverables that matter to your clients. But before we get into that, you may want to know who the heck I am and why I'm here today. I'm Serena. I'm a mom of three, a musician, and I'm the founder of The Ambitious Bookkeeper, an education and mentoring company, as Josie explained, for bookkeepers. And I'm also the host of The Ambitious Bookkeeper podcast and owner of, of course, bookkeeping, an accounting firm for online businesses. I started my business as a side hustle to motherhood in 2017. I had left my corporate controller position to have my second daughter. And when she was almost a year old, I started getting a little bit of an itch to do something for myself and my brain. So I started freelance accounting on Upwork and taking CPEs to reactivate my CPA license. And then I found out I was pregnant again. So, I took a little bit of a hiatus. And once he was About a year old, I started ramping up my bookkeeping a little bit more, my freelancing a little bit more. So I started developing more of these service packages for my clients and presenting them with what I could offer rather than just doing what clients thought they needed. And I refined these offerings over multiple years of trial and error and research and feedback from clients, which I now teach inside of my mentoring programs and on my podcast, Who, to bookkeepers and accountants who want to build their businesses as well. From the beginning, like I mentioned, my business was a side hustle to motherhood and life. And now seven years later, although the business has grown, my involvement is still only part time, which is why I was so thrilled to be a part of this, profitable lifestyle firm summit. I'm a firm believer of learning from people who are doing the thing that you want to experience or achieve. So if you're ready to either add bookkeeping to your tax practice or hone in on your bookkeeping as your main service offering, let's talk about how you can make this the most profitable part of your business by crafting the deliverables that matter. This session is for you if you're like me and you've sat through countless webinars and classes that have told you that you need to add value but haven't exactly told you how besides getting better at selling. Or if you know you want to set yourself apart and truly help your clients. And of course, if you want to be able to charge more for your bookkeeping. When I started analyzing my packages and figuring out what mattered to my clients, like I said, I tested a lot of things out, got feedback from current clients, talked to other business owners. about their pain points and what they'd actually want to see from their bookkeepers and I came up with this simple list of four deliverables and I decided that every client needed this in addition to just the transactional bookkeeping. We have communication, we have key reports, Summarized information, a few KPIs, and a meeting or a financial overview to go over them. And we'll get into that more in a minute. Now, of course, many clients need additional services like sales tax, payroll, etc. But those are compliance, which I still offer. But here I want to focus on maximizing the value that I was giving each of my clients in addition to compliance. And even the smallest ones. My base package. gets all of these things too. So any client coming into my firm knows that they're getting a truly standout service. By doing this, I've set myself apart, I was able to shift my positioning and ultimately charge more to match the value that I was providing. And this was the missing piece that I so patiently waited for to hear about in all of those webinars that told me to add value, except no one really ever spelled it out so clearly, so I had to hunt for it and test things out with my clients. And what it also did was set me up for that coveted advisory, that the gurus kept pushing us towards, which I now teach as the first step of advisory, getting comfortable with these four pieces. So once you've mastered these, you can then turn up the dial and offer more, like budgeting or strategy. But only if you want to. The best part about this is that I don't actually have to be the one delivering on these, and I don't in my firm, and neither do you if you have a team. My most profitable engagements are the ones where I'm actually not involved because to me, my time is the most valuable currency, and my profit margins are 50 percent before paying myself. I'm a firm believer in transparency on pricing and things like that, so we'll talk about that a little bit. You might wonder how much you can actually charge. Our base level package starts at 450 because we include some of these things. So yes, when you compare to some of the other bookkeeping services out there, it can seem high, but that's where your positioning comes in and educating your market on the value you're providing through your marketing and on discovery calls. So if these are areas that you're stuck on, make sure you check out the other sessions on sales and marketing. But today we're gonna dive in to these four deliverables. Number one is communication. If you don't provide any of these other deliverables, at least deliver on communication and don't just deliver on it over deliver. We've all heard the stats, right? The number one complaint and reason that people leave their accounting is their accountant is poor communication, so be proactive. If you receive an email question from a client, let them know that you've received it. if you're missing documents from clients, follow up. If you're behind or at risk of not hitting a deadline, communicate that. And check in on your clients if you haven't heard from them in a while. Go a step further and have them tell you during onboarding what their preferred communication method is and if you decide to build a team, make sure that your team understands the communication expectations as well with each client. I personally include unlimited communication in my packages and none of my clients have taken advantage of it. We want them to be proactive and communicate to us when things are changing in their business so we don't penalize them for that. After communication, I believe that the best deliverable is these five key financial reports up on the screen, which you can add in and do nothing else, but your client will still feel like they're really getting more from you than the typical bookkeeper. Some industries won't have all five of these reports, , if you Can build out a standard reporting package in your software for all the clients that begins with these and then add on individual reports or details based on the needs of that specific client. This is a really great start, so I'm going to start off with first. We have our profit and loss, which. Everyone here should understand. and then we have the balance sheet and the statement of cash flows. These two get missed out a lot on when we're talking with clients because a lot of us bookkeepers I've found and the people that I've mentored have a hard time explaining these reports. So, If that's you, make sure that you practice on yourself before you're presenting to a client and dig into these reports. There's valuable information on here for the business owner, especially if they're dealing with debt and owner's draws or investing in equipment. And this closes the gap between the profits and the actual cash in the bank, and it helps tell the full story of what's happening for your clients. And then we have our accounts receivable aging and accounts payable aging. These are really valuable because pointing out for your client that they're still owed a certain number of, Dollars from one of their customers can really help their business. They might not be aware that they're owed the money and you can help get that cash back into their business. And also accounts payable aging. They might not be aware that they still owe one of their vendors. And being able to help them see these things is really, really valuable. As a side note on reports, as you can see I have this little tip in the corner. please don't just provide year to date totals. Add in the percentage columns with gross profit margin and net profit margin. Show their percent of revenue and show these month over month. This is what makes the reports more meaningful as well. you know how I was able to tell you earlier what my profit margin is? 50%. Your clients also need to know what their typical profit margin is and if things are changing for better or for worse throughout the year. You cannot measure something that isn't tracked. So this brings us to our third deliverable and that's KPIs, key performance indicators. Talking about financial ones here, there's lots of other KPIs that clients could be looking at that you might not even have the data or access to the data to provide. So what we do is focus on the financial KPIs because we have access to this data in our bookkeeping software. These don't have to be complicated. In fact, they may simple to some of you. In fact, as a thank you for attending this session, you have access to the four here on screen, how to calculate them, how to explain them to clients, as well as a few other details and ideas around each of these. and we'll link those below the video. But we provide each of these to all of our clients as a baseline starter. Don't overdo it if you add to these. Tracking too many KPIs becomes overwhelming for the client and time consuming for you. And again, these aren't valuable unless you're giving them context and comparing to prior periods or trends. The first KPI that we go over is revenue by product, and that's a dollar figure. And this is where it matters how you've set up the bookkeeping and the chart of accounts for your clients. If you don't separate things by different revenue streams, you can't really provide this level of value. So it really does start with the detail of the bookkeeping that you're providing. And then we give them the profit in dollars each month compared to last month. And that just shows them that dollar figure of the profit in their business. this is where those five reports really come into play because there's going to be a disconnect between profit and their actual cash in the bank. And you have to be able to bridge that gap for them and explain to them why, why is my profit 10, 000, but I have zero in the bank. and the cashflow statement is going to eliminate Those differences. Then we have our operating expenses. This is a percentage of revenue. We show this as a percentage of revenue so they understand of the amount of revenue that they're making, X percent is going to operating. if they have a physical product, you also want to include their cost of goods, as another KPI. But I'm just providing Four KPIs for a simple service based business here as an example. then we have the net profit margin, and that's just your net income divided by your revenue to provide a percentage. And that's, like I said, my profit margin is 50%. And I look at that every month. I look at it year to date to see how we're tracking against that. And then you can, you know, offer pointers and dig out details for your clients on why things are changing if you want to take it a step deeper. And lastly, to provide context and offer that next level of value coupled with, again, communication, I recommend some sort of summary or overview or maybe even a meeting for the client to explain or tell the story of what's going on with their numbers and point out those areas of concerns or questions for the client to start reflecting on. And you can do this with an email. You can bullet point out the KPIs. This is really easy to digest. This is something that we provide all of our clients, no matter what package they're on, on a monthly basis with those five reports. And as a CEO myself, I like summarized information. So that's just my little tip there for you. Don't give them paragraphs and paragraphs of words. Give them the key points. Tell them this was your revenue. This is your profit. These are your expenses. This last month versus year to date. And then attach those reports so that they can dig into the details if they want to. You can also offer a video overview. We use Loom to record these and some of our clients get them monthly and our base package actually gets this quarterly. And then lastly, you can provide a meeting. We offer this to our highest level packages. Not every client gets a meeting and again, you can decide whether you want to do that monthly or quarterly. It's really up to you and your capacity. For our video overview, we start with the business snapshot. All of our clients are on Xero. So, Xero comes with this feature called Business Snapshot. It shows things in graphs and visuals, and that's what we start with in the video overview, and then we delve into the five reports and point out more details that are important to their numbers or possibly important to the client And like I said, we provide the email summary along with the financials every month to every client. and also in addition to this level of service on the monthly and quarterly basis, every single one of our clients gets a special year end presentation done in a particular way. Beautiful Canva slide deck like I have here on screen. I'm a big fan of Canva, along with the tax package that they can just send right over to their tax preparer. And I teach all of these processes inside of my programs. So if you're interested in learning more, you can, Connect with me on my website or online and I'm happy to chat with you. This is basically the four key deliverables that we provide each of our clients. And like I said, you don't have to add all of them in at once. You can slowly trickle them in as you get more comfortable and just start with that communication level that's going to provide a ton of value and really, Increase the number of clients that you end up getting because your clients are going to be raving about you. And I would love to connect with you on Instagram. I love empowering and elevating bookkeepers to just go a tad bit deeper with clients and really provide that additional value. It doesn't have to be complicated. You can slowly add in each of these four deliverables to increase your profits and have more impact on your clients. Thank you so much. What a great presentation. I love every bit of information that's in there, Serena. And I've got some questions. Do you mind if I ask them? Yeah, let's dive in. So the, so the first thing I'm thinking, um, and you know, I'm on the tax side, right? You know, you're over here doing the accounting and bookkeeping. I work mostly in tax and there certainly is crossover. I do have some smaller bookkeeping clients, but one of my thoughts is, Time. How much time do you think this adds to an engagement? Absolutely can see the value with that, but like you said, capacity is important to recognize. So do you have an estimate or a guide people could use if they're thinking of adding this in? Yeah, so if we Completely remove these processes from the actual bookkeeping. And it really does depend on, you know, how complex your clients are. But if the bookkeeping is already done and you already have figured out your capacity for that, this really should only add about an hour of work per month per client. So, if even that, if you're just providing the communication and an email summary, maybe 15, 20 minutes. That's really all it takes. That's awesome. And then you mentioned that you have a team. So is your team recording these videos? Is that easy process to delegate? Yeah. So I have developed a process and this, like I said, part of it is these, just these four KPIs and, The videos are completely done by someone else on my team. I don't handle the videos anymore. I only handle meeting with clients. And so, yeah, he just follows the process every single month. We have a templated email that we send and we plug in the numbers for the clients, which you just get right off the financial statements and yeah, he just handles everything. He also reviews the bookkeeping work. So that's another layer of this. Just to ensure that things are done appropriately and categorized appropriately before we start giving these KPIs. So there is that whole process of reviewing the work and that is part of the premium access that if you're I don't know if you want to explain it. I'm like, I'm, I'm going to botch the words of how you have it lined out in this summit, but that's the premium offer is, learning how to analyze the financial statements to review your bookkeeper's work, or even your own work, if you're the one doing it before you start sending financial statements. So that whole process, we've developed in house and I've handed it off to, my account manager and, and yeah. That's great. That's great. And you mentioned review and. I have not seen it yet, but I really, really want to get your take on this. I know how I review tax returns, I know how I delegate that, but your, All Access Pass bonus, , so for those of you that already have it, or those thinking about buying it, you'll be able to get a mini course where you actually teach reviewing how to review, rather, your team's bookkeeping work. And it does not involve a different software. I've tried, this is maybe an unpopular opinion, but I've tried the quality control softwares, some of them that are out there, , and I've had my account manager also try them. So it's not just me, but we've both decided that the internal quote unquote manual process that we have for analyzing and reviewing is still more effective and more efficient for us as a team than using an outside software. So I teach you that process, in that little mini course on how to review and analyze the financials for accuracy and to prep for these summaries that you're going to provide your clients. You can kind of do it at the same time. That's great. And this is all really wonderful information, , a little bit unrelated to the presentation you have today, but you mentioned that you use Xero, and we all know that QuickBooks is the leader. So any, , tips or information for someone who's thinking about starting to use Xero? Like, why have you used Xero? Chosen to use that platform versus the, you know, the standard. Yeah, this is one of my favorite topics to tackle and share with people because I get that question a lot and it really stems from my experience in corporate. Like I said, at the top of this presentation, I was a corporate controller and In corporate, we use totally different systems than small businesses use. We call, they're called ERP systems, and they are locked down. The controls are locked down. You cannot delete transactions. You have to void them. There's an audit trail for everything, and that's one of the huge draws that I had towards Xero, because I didn't start out just offering Xero when I started my firm. I was using QuickBooks online as well. But I would have so many clients coming to me with just a disaster on their hands because something got messed up in QuickBooks and it was, and it's so easy to mess it up. I've messed up QuickBooks and I'm an accountant. So I was like, there has to be a better software that doesn't allow you to delete things and post a prior periods and all of these things that we have these controls available to us in these ERP systems. And audit trails and approval levels and things like that. So that was the main, the main reason. The other reason too is, like I mentioned before, is we have, since we use Xero, we have the ability to create firm level report packages that we can just push down to all of our clients once we've created them. They're standardized. It doesn't matter what their chart of accounts is, if they have different names or whatever, as long as when you've set up the chart of accounts, you've correctly categorized them as assets, liabilities, all of those things, right? Then they show up correctly in these, these reports. So, that has created a lot of efficiency and why we're able to do this for all of our clients so easily. If I had to do this in QuickBooks for all of my clients, it would take me more than an hour every month because I'd be exporting these reports from QuickBooks into Excel and reformatting them and making them the way that I want them to look. I don't have to do that in with Xero because they're already, they come out the way that we want them to look. that was a big draw as well. So I know there's other programs that you can use like Fathom or Spotlight on top of QuickBooks if that's your tool of choice and that's a great option as well to be able to customize the reports and push them out to all of your clients pretty easily. That's great. I'm really glad I asked that question, because that's really helpful to know and, quite frankly, my question about how long it takes, I was thinking about that, like, what would that process look like to have every single KPI in every report? It seems very manual to me when I think of it in the QuickBooks Online world or that. Right. Right, because one of the things that we're able to do in those firm level reports is to create that line that says gross profit margin and net income margin and have the column for a percentage of income so it's already in the report we just have to pull it out and put it in the email. And I do have one client on QuickBooks Online still, and I do this process manually, and it does take the whole entire hour to put those reports into an Excel file, format it so that in case they print it, it's not printing across 50 million pages, and all of those percentages and everything. You teach how to do this in Xero in your program too, right? I do, I actually teach it in both Xero and QuickBooks, so don't let that deter you. The process of reviewing your team's work is the same no matter what. Program you're using. You could be using something completely different than Xero or QuickBooks as well. It's all the same because, it's the income statement. Makes perfect sense. So well, thank you so much for just sharing all of your knowledge, all of your experience with us and being here at the summit. I'm gonna, take a hard look at all of the information you have. I encourage anyone that is interested, you know, connect with Serena. She's great with questions. She always answers any question that I have and she really is knowledgeable in all of these subjects. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me.

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