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?