Finding Data Entry Mistakes

Once you've been a consultant for awhile, you will hopefully pick up my favorite kind of client. These are the clients that want you to visit monthly (usually) and "find mistakes" or "clean up". I like these clients because it is indeed a challenge to simply walk in and find mistakes. By this time I pretty well know the business, but of course don't have time to go through every transaction. So this is my routine.

I first pull up a YTD P&L to see if 1) there are any account names followed by "-Other" and 2) if there are any negative numbers where there shouldn't be. The first problem means that the proper subaccount is not being used for allocation. The second problem could mean a lot of things including but in no way limited to income being allocated to expense or vice versa, a large refund check from a previous year, some dang journal entry from the accountant, items in the Item List set up incorrectly, etc. If there is too much for me to clean up in my 2-hour visit, I show the client where to go and how to clean.

I next look at the P&L by Class (if the company uses Classes), collapse the report, and look for any headings followed by "-Other". If they appear, subclasses are not being used correctly. I also look again for inappropriate negative numbers within each class's P&L.

Finally, I look at the Balance Sheet. Again, I look for inappropriate negative numbers and this is a long discussion in itself. Is A/R negative? It shouldn't be on Accrual, but may be on a Cash Basis. Same for A/P. Does the Payroll Liabilities balance match the balance appearing in the Pay Payroll Liabilities window? And the Sales Tax Liability balance with the Pay Sales Tax window?

Do you have a different routine to share? I'd love to know.

Handling Cancellations

We just got a cold blast from the north, and my schedule has suffered. No, there was no snow, but a client called to cancel and another was running 15 minutes late. Which brings me to the question: do you charge for cancellations? Usually I don't charge for cancellations made in advance of the appointment. They don't happen often and usually there's a good excuse (isn't there always?). When I get to a client's office, I start my clock at the agreed upon hour. If they are late, they pay for the time I waited. If they don't show within 15 minutes, I leave and charge them a half hour for my time. How do you handle cancellations?

QuickBooks 2006 is Here

QuickBooks 2006 is on the market and one of our responsibilities is to decide which of our clients should upgrade and help them obtain the software. If you're certified, you already have a copy of 2006 and know what the benefits are. I recommend the upgrade to clients that make heavy use of customer and/or vendor reporting since the new Customer and Vendor Centers are really awesome. Any of your clients with payroll must upgrade if they're using version 2003. You alone know your clients' needs and should keep their best interests in mind. The best prices that I've seen out there are via Intuit Affiliates like myself (www.realitycheckonline.com) or through Amazon.com using an Intuit $20 promo certificate (mailed to some clients to encourage upgrading). Happy QuickBooks New Year!

Holiday Thanks

It's that time of year and a really good time to thank all your clients for their business. You don't have to do anything fancy. A simple card with a simple thank you is really the best gift for the season. Try to avoid religious cards mentioning Christmas, Hanukkah, etc. since your clients probably vary in their religious beliefs. One year I was running late so I sent out a Happy New Year card. My clients said it was the only one they received specifically for the new year. The rule is NO ADVERTISING. No pushing your biz or services or products. However, every year I send out a simple card and get many old clients calling for an appointment, so the card does act as a type of reminder. I must admit that I don't send a card to clients I don't want to see again, however I do send them to old clients that I may not have seen in a year or two. Happy Thanksgiving!

QuickBooks Consultant's Conference

I just returned from Las Vegas and the Sleeter Group's QuickBooks Consultant's Conference. If you are already a successful consultant or are just starting out, this is a conference you don't want to miss. This year's offerings covered the new features for QuickBooks 2006, tips and tricks for industry versions, navigating the jungle of broadband and wireless connectivity, exhibits from companies that make QuickBooks compatible software, and a lot more that I didn't see. We also had a lot of face-to-face time with core Intuit personnel. Everyone I spoke to was a QuickBooks addict like myself - it's nice to know we're not alone. Next year don't miss it!

Free QuickBooks Manuals!

You and your clients are now welcome to download our QuickBooks manuals for free. We've decided not to change our manuals every time a screenshot changes in QuickBooks, and it would be unfair of us to charge you or your clients for manuals that are not written specifically for your QuickBooks version. So, go to www.realitycheckonline.com and click on the 'FREE Manuals' button and download one or all six of our manuals - no strings attached. We think you and your clients will find them very helpful.

Send Feedback to Intuit

As a QuickBooks Consultant, your business life is inextricably connected to the success or failure of QuickBooks software. Consider yourself a partner of Intuit, the makers of QuickBooks. As a partner, it is up to you to make your experience and concerns that you've learned from working with your clients known to Intuit. Intuit has come to realize that such feedback from its "field users" is extremely important in determining the future of the software. So use their feedback form to make yourself heard. The easiest way to find Intuit's feedback forms is to go to our website at www.realitycheckonline.com, click on Support, and click on "Free Customer Care Support from Intuit". In the left sidebar, you'll see three feedback form options. Use them so we can all stay in business!

What Next?

Over the past several months, I've posted general info covering pricing, scheduling, professional education, tech gadgets, QB troubleshooting, etc. Now it's time to go in-depth. Who's out there and what specifically do you want to read about? How old is your QuickBooks consulting business? How many clients do you have? Let me know what direction you want to go...

Pricing for Optimization

This is the last of my pricing suggestions. Once you've become somewhat of an expert in QuickBooks and you've specialized in a certain aspect of QB or a certain type of business, you should be getting more business than you can handle. It's time to adjust your prices to weed out some unwanted clients and optimize your dollar return on time spent. Calculate your desired (be reasonable) annual salary and divide that by 52 and the total number of billable hours you will schedule every week. For example, if you want to make $65,000 a year and schedule 16 billable hours a week, then you should charge $78 per hour. Remember that you will be working more than 16 hours a week, however your main income comes from billable hours. Of course, this depends on making sure you meet those 16 billable hours a week. $78/hr is not an unreasonable price to charge and your serious clients will realize this (general computer consultants usually charge more than this per hour). You may want to gradually increase your price to your target price so you don't lose some of your favorite clients by giving them a 1-yr discount as a thank you for their past business.

Rebuild Failure

I had a client this morning whose data file was corrupted (i.e. Verify Integrity failed). QuickBooks recommends that you Rebuild the data file. However, sometimes rebuilds don't work. If you want to look like a pro, you need to learn to use the built in diagnostic tools for QuickBooks - secret keystrokes that let you know what's going on behind the QuickBooks scenes. These are:
F2: to see what version and updates are installed and other numerical info on the file.
F2-Ctrl2-Open File, QBWinlog: shows the results of the last Verify Integrity check.
Usually when a rebuild fails, it's only due to one or two errant transactions. The Winlog helps you find those transactions. Then you can delete the corrupted transactions and re-enter them. Then run another integrity check and viola!

Empower Your Clients

You may find that you have clients that depend on you to tell them everything to do in QuickBooks. They are afraid to try anything themselves for fear of making some irreparable error. Hopefully, you are good enough to clean-up errors that your clients may make, so you should assure them that it is safe for them to practice and experiment while you're not there. An important part of being a consultant is empowering your clients.
To do this, you should space your visits to give the client time to practice data entry. Encourage them to enter data while you're gone, with the understanding that everybody makes mistakes but you can fix them. Then, when you return, you can see the types of errors being made and clearly show the client what they're doing wrong and how it should be done with real life examples. This applies to phone calls too. Yesterday a client phoned me and left a message to the effect that her accounting world was coming to an end unless she knew right then how to enter a certain transaction (in this case, an in-kind contribution). I could've called back immediately and told her what to do, however, it is often best to let them try to figure things out. By the time I called back, she had figured it out and just needed me to confirm and praise.
The downside of empowering your clients is that they are slowly weaned away from you, and you have to find new clients to keep making money. This blog isn't about being selfish though - it's about being a good QB consultant. How do you empower your clients?

Learn and Get New Clients

I'm looking forward to spending tomorrow at a full-day seminar learning about stress management. Okay, so I'm not particularly stressed, but I know that I will enjoy learning new things and will pick up a few new clients while I'm there. Conferences and local seminars are great ways to pick up clients even if you're not the one giving the seminar. People are there to learn and are happy to learn about QuickBooks as well as the topic at hand. I highly recommend you go to any QuickBooks seminar in your area offered by "outsiders" such as Real World Training. Not only will you pick up some QuickBooks tips, but you should get A LOT of clients since the seminar just whets their appetite for more QB knowledge, and Real World Training can't follow up on a personal basis. When I went to a Real World Training two-day workshop, they let me leave my business cards (those precious little advertisements) on their table so people could take them with their workshop materials. Give lots of free advice while you're there!

Pricing for Stability

Once you've gotten your consulting biz up and running and have a good number of clients, you want to start making more money and maintain your client base. It's time to hone in on your specialty. By now you should be competent and have a fair amount of experience with different types of businesses and what their QuickBooks needs are. Think about specializing in a specific area and raising your prices for being a "specialist". You could work only with QuickBooks POS and become specially certified for that. You could specialize in construction companies, legal firms or nonprofits (as I do). Get the word out you are specializing and raise your rates for everybody. A 10-20% raise is reasonable. Now you know what you are doing most of the time and should be able to handle your competitors. Your specialty will now set you apart from them. Keep working at it, but keep those other clients not in your specialty to further gain experience (and cash flow!). Eventually you will move to the next level when you Price for Optimization (coming soon...).

Working Holidays

Happy Labor Day! I have two clients today which brings me to my next point. It would definitely help your clients and help grow your business if you opt to work irregular hours sometimes. Several of my clients have showrooms and/or multiple people using QuickBooks at once. Therefore it's difficult to schedule time to be in single-user mode to make alterations to their QuickBooks file. Or it's simply difficult for them to get time off to work with me on their QuickBooks file. In these cases, it's good to be flexible and work before their business opens(6-8a), after their business closes (5-7p), maybe some weekends and holidays. This is good added-value to your clients and will separate you from more rigid competitors. Gotta go to work...

Growing Your Client Base

Now that you've priced for growth, you need to get the word out. There is the expensive route: put ads in papers, print and mail fancy fliers, etc. Then there's the cheap route which I prefer. You can't beat word-of-mouth. Hand out business cards to everybody you know, leave them at banks, post them on free bulletin boards. I even drop some periodically at the QuickBooks displays at Office Depot, etc.
Of course, this means you'd better have some advertising on your business card. Aside from my biz name, my name and contact info, my cards say "We make QuickBooks work for you!" and "Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor" and "QuickBooks discounts and help guides at www.realitycheckonline.com". Go to VistaPrint.com, find a card you like and then customize it. Their quality is great and you can't beat the prices.
If you have the time, you can offer a free seminar or teach at your local community college. I did and got lots of clients and got paid for teaching! You can get an article written about you and a friend in the local paper's business section (mine was "Business Mentors Help Start-Ups"). I could go on forever, but you get the idea. There's lots of free advertising out there - Go get it!

Pricing for Growth

When you're first starting out as a consultant, your two main priorities are to grow your client base and to gain experience. Even if you've been using QuickBooks for years as I did, you'll find that every client has different needs and it's a huge learning curve. So I recommend keeping prices low to start. A good starting point is to price yourself as a very good bookkeeper. That's about $30-$45 per hour in my small town (population less than 100,000). If you're in a bigger city, go for $40-$50 per hour. In any case, you want your pricing to come in under your competitors'. I also made a point of telling prospective clients that if I didn't know an answer, I would research it for them and not charge them for my time. Clients like that because they get the answer they need at no charge, and you get the learning experience you need.
If your business is already up and running, and you're ready to expand your client base, you can offer money-back incentives for referrals or discounted package deals as a way to lower your prices indirectly and grow your client base.

Pricing as a Tool

Somebody out there is worried about pricing. We're all worried about pricing. When I started my business, I asked business advisors, read magazine articles, and did research online. The most common advice was to "price competitively". Well, that wasn't very helpful to me. And so this is the first part in a four part series on my experience on setting prices. The main goal of this first blog is to make you think differently about pricing. Short-term vision makes you want to price to make enough money to live on. Don't go there. Think of pricing as a tool to move your business in the direction you want it to go. In my opinion (so far), there are three pricing stages that take effect and not necessarily sequentially:
1. Pricing for Growth
2. Pricing for Stability
3. Pricing for Optimization
I will describe these different pricing strategies in future blogs (coming during the next month - stay tuned...). For now, consider pricing as a tool that fluctuates (up AND down) as your business needs change. Back soon with more.

Get Yourself Certified

I've been emailing some QuickBooks support to a person in Indonesia that's volunteering with the tsunami relief work. They're using QuickBooks and tracking many of the nonprofits involved as subsidiaries. I won't go into the details, but this brings me to the importance of getting yourself listed on Intuit's QuickBooks Referral database. Certification is not cheap, especially for those starting out in consulting, however you get your money back in software, support, visibility and credibility so it's well worth the effort. I'm thrilled to be doing at least a little part for the tsunami relief work and am sure they would not have found me if it weren't for Intuit's database. I can't tell you how many new clients just check in the database to see how credible I am. It gives you that one step up over your competition. Good Luck with the tests!

Maximum Client Hours

Friday was a 6 hour day, and that means 6 billable hours which I spent working with clients. When you're just starting out and don't have too many voice- and e-mails to answer, you might be able to handle 6 hour days. Remember that a 6-billable-hours-day really turns into an 8 hour day when you include travel time to and from clients. And then you still have office work to do. A more reasonable schedule for consultants includes an average of 4 billable hours per day. That turns into a 5 hour day including travel time and you still have time to do office work.

A Day in the Office

This was a highly unusual day since I remained in my office the entire day. I spent a lot of time on the phone with an accountant I am particularly comfortable with going over our common client issues (common clients and common issues). We have such different takes on handling people and issues that we always both come out ahead after our conversations. If you're going to be a QuickBooks ProAdvisor and not an accountant, I strongly suggest you get to know some CPAs who you like working with. These types of partnerships bring many rewards both financially and educationally.

Treo becomes laptop

If you're going to be an efficient consultant, you need to be able to track time and consulting notes. The Treo 600 is the most awesome smartphone out there. A long time ago, I actually lugged a paper calendar around with me and wrote in my client times for billing and made appointments. Once in awhile I double-booked myself. I graduated to a Personal Palm Pilot (remember those?) and a cell phone and literally had my hands full. The day I got my Treo 600 was a day of beautiful synchronization. Find the number, and press it to call. A typical day of data flow is so easy: park at client, open QBMobile (now PocketBooks at www.pgsoftinc.com) and enter client name, start timer, serve client, get back into car, stop timer, enter notes of visit to be poured into invoice, go to next client and repeat, get back to office, hot sync Treo to desktop, import QBMobile info into QB, pour info into invoice, print and mail. The beauty of single data entry at its ultimate.

Discipline Day

Today I met with my employees for a pseudo-regular staff lunch. What arose from the lunch meeting was that one client was interfering with our bookkeeping schedule with an auditor (it's that time of year for nonprofits, which we have A LOT of). So after meeting with the auditor to make sure all was going swimmingly, my role was to politely tell the client that things are under control and to butt out. Sometimes clients can be hurting themselves without realizing it and need a little help in the discipline area. That's my idea anyway. I consider myself not so much as a consultant but a partner to my clients. However, it helps to be the consultant so I don't worry too much about being fired for bringing bad news - or disciplining as the case may be.

So You Want To Be a QuickBooks Consultant

I decided a blog might be just the thing to help those up-and-coming QuickBooks consultants learn what they're in for. Some good, some bad, some great, some really exhausting. Been a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor since 2002 and started as a regular (read "no fee") QB Advisor in 2000. Really started my biz with QB in 1997. I'm not a CPA and don't do this stuff "on-the-side". It's my bread and butter. Your's too? Great - what do you want to talk about?