The Power of Bookkeeping - Unlocking Success For Business Owners | B2B Vault | Episode 162

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the BART star of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman, and we'll be providing you educational information about fintech, small business payment processing, and the technology businesses are using in the world today. And in today's podcast, we'll be talking about the power of bookkeeping, unlocking success for business owners. Shout out to ChatGPT for the, uh, help on the, on the title. We were, you know, we were having some, uh, you know, just playing around, seeing how we can use it and help with the podcast. AI RPM. Yeah, it's a Chrome extension that, uh, interfaces— integrates with ChatGPT. Relax, brother.

Okay.

Anyway, uh, yeah, man, so I introduced that to Allen, and he just was, you know, he was all excited that it came up with the What's that? Slick little title.

Podcast titles.

Well, you— yeah, you know, there's a lot of prompts. So basically the extension gives you prompts without you having to think about the, you know, the exact prompt that you want to type in there, and you just put the keyword. Bomb. It's pretty cool.

Then it gave me like 5 titles. I picked this one, changed it around a bit.

I was gonna say, I hope you didn't just take it and No, I didn't take it word for word.

I just changed it around from a couple of them and made one up.

Should we put a poll on, on LinkedIn to see if everyone believes you? Anyway, hey man, what you got going on otherwise?

How many, how many people use, how many people use ChatGPT?

So people should be using ChatGPT, you know, embrace the technology.

I mean, you know, the one thing is, it's really funny, my brothers are both CPAs, you know, we're going to talk about bookkeeping. And so there was an article in the, in the news because they gave ChatGPT like various tests.

Oh, it failed miserably, the bar.

But it gave him the test for the CPA, for the accounting.

Yeah, failed.

Yeah, they failed the CPA exam.

Yes, it did.

The ChatGPT failed the CPA exam. So bookkeepers and CPAs, accountants, all still have jobs. Yep.

So, right, for right now, everyone still has jobs, man. I know, I know, I know. But like, people are taking that really to heart, man. Like, but I will say this, I heard that people in the music industry are like a little— they're a little shook because There was something. They're not good. Like, what are the— what's going to be the purpose of the A&R?

No, but there was something.

There's going to be— AI is going to be able to find out everything, like what's cool, where's the— like, the A&R is not going to be able to— the A&R, I don't know, man.

A&R stand for, for music?

Artist and artist development. I don't, I don't care.

Artist development. No, the thing is—

no, not a— it's not artist development, but the A&R finds new talent.

Oh, okay.

They go out and they're searching for new—

people that find the new talent.

Yeah, what are they going to be? Why would you need them?

I don't know.

The AI is going to be like, all right, give me the best artist in the Midwest, and it's going to be able to filter it out and be like, this guy's got 10 million views on YouTube, 5 million Instagram followers, 2 million YouTube listens per streams per single, blah blah blah. You aren't going to need that anymore, right?

I saw where somebody came out with a, a song and, uh, and then AI, they— AI did it. And I saw like a video.

It's crazy.

The AI— yeah, there's an AI song.

Oh no, the Biggie song that— well, it was a Nas song called Life's a B-word, and then it was the voice of Biggie Smalls That was trippy, man. I couldn't believe it when I heard it. I was like, yo, well, that's what we talked about, about fraud, right?

You can go on these websites now, they, they only need 2 minutes or less of your voice and then they can make your voice. Then you can make an avatar and then you can produce videos of some with some kind of avatar.

And don't think that they need 2 minutes like straight of your voice. That means they can clip together 2 minutes of your voice, like of you just talking. You know, separate videos, merge it to one, and then they— it did.

Uh, yeah, they were taking people's voice off of their, like, voicemail. Yeah. And then making a video, and it sounded like me saying, calling you up, hey, I'm in jail, I need you to, uh, Zelle me $500.

Right.

Here's the phone number to send it to. And then the stupid people were sending him money.

That's terrible. I mean, they can't call them stupid though, they didn't know.

I know, but I'm saying we got to be— well, you know, you should know because the phone number, you know, at least now Zelle, when you put in the phone number, it actually pops up who the person is.

True.

Now it wasn't doing that before. Now it pops up. Now it pops up who the bank account belongs.

Mine always had that in there.

Uh, Truist wasn't doing that in Zelle. No, now it pops up, it tells you whose bank account.

Oh yeah, no, when I was— I had mine connected to my PNC account and You— that's how you would— that's how I would know who I was sending it to, right? Not through the phone number. It would— their name and their address, all kinds of information popped up on PNC.

They just asked for the name. They just asked the name and the phone number, but now it's popping up what account it is, so you know that's the right account. You're not sending money to the wrong person.

Well, that's good. Yeah, shout out to Truist for being on a late bus.

Yeah, well, all the banks are updating their, their software for that.

So still, I still can't stand PNC, so whatever. What do you got, uh, what's, what's real? What's going on in Allen's world, man? What's, uh, what's new and new and improved?

Got a couple of, you know, we got, we're doing our trade show June the 2nd. When is that? June 2nd.

June 2nd.

June 2nd at the Signature Grand. Broward and Beyond. It's an all-day trade show. Businesses come there, count people from all over Broward County.

A lot of handshaking, kissing babies, you know, that type of stuff.

There's some presentations by the county about how to do business with them, although, you know, it is what it is.

But you see, you can't just go— this is when on the behind the scenes, Allen, you know, yeah, you just don't— you can't just stop that thought like that. But I get it, you can't, you can't throw everyone under the bus, or you can't throw them under the bus. See? Oh yeah, yeah, okay.

They put on different, um, this guy, what do you call, I guess, different, different speakers throughout the day, and you could find out about, you know, that somebody talking about social media how to do business with the county, how to do business with the government, you know, all different topics like that throughout the day. And then the county gets up and does their dog and pony show. You know, it's a— it's an event, all-day event. Yeah, great way to meet people that own different types of businesses.

That's the only— that's the good thing about it, the networking.

Yeah, great networking opportunity out there for local businesses here in Broward County.

For myself, man, it's going to be my birthday coming up. Thanks for asking what's new with me, Allen. I appreciate the thought. Yeah, you know you were going to hop right into podcast. I seen— yes, you were. I seen where you're going, buddy. It's all good. Anyway, uh, yeah, I turned 43, blah blah blah. Um, uh, yeah, so let's hop into the bookkeeping, sir. Let's get this going. Come on, we got to go.

Yeah, we're going to all sing Happy Birthday.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Listen, we're going to sing Happy Birthday to John.

No, we're not.

No, why not?

I'll end the podcast.

Okay, so we won't do that.

Flip the camera over.

No, we don't want that.

I'm just joking.

So let's talk about bookkeeping. So bookkeeping's probably, this probably got to be like, it's more boring than credit card processing.

Yeah, so we're going to get into it and we're going to be done in about 10 minutes.

Okay. It's probably the least favorite thing I have to do when it comes to business.

To any business owners, bookkeeping is a pain in the ass.

Yeah, it's horrible.

It's time-consuming, uh, it's stressful. Um, you realize how much money you didn't make. Uh, yeah, you know what I'm saying? It points out who owes you money. Uh, yeah. Yeah, man, bookkeeping is not fun, but you know, it's number one because you gotta do it.

If you don't do bookkeeping, you'll have a nightmare at the end of the year. You'll have a nightmare.

You have a nightmare. I feel like doing this. I feel like you have a nightmare 24/7 if you're not doing bookkeeping.

Oh yeah, you can create— if you're not keeping track of what you're doing, your sales, making up invoices, collecting money, making it easy for people to pay you, you're just going to dig yourself into a big hole.

Yep.

Real quick. And then you're going to go, wow, I'm owed $25,000. And now you're spending all your time trying to collect $25,000 instead of making new sales.

Or that $25,000. Now you can't, you know.

Well, you don't have money to pay your payroll.

That's what I was about to get into.

You don't have money to pay your bills.

Right.

That's why you got to set up a system, you know. Are you giving terms to your customers and what are you doing? But, you know, QuickBooks has gotten easier from then when I was doing it 20 years ago.

For sure.

Years ago, you had to go enter in every bank, everything was itemized.

Yeah, I know, that's what I'm saying.

Now you link up your, your bank, you link up your credit cards there, it all flows right in. To the system and you're ready to go.

Yeah, no, it's nice.

So that part's easy, although I, uh, QuickBooks started using some sort of AI in there and it starts filling in who they think the money went to, and that's about 90% wrong. Oh, it's pretty bad.

They should probably look into that.

Yeah, their AI is horrible. I actually got on there, was complaining. I was talking to customer service and I was like, you guys got to fix this because this is horrible. This stuff is all filled out completely wrong, not even guessing right. Even though there's AI, you still got to do a little bit of work. Yeah, but you're going to be able to have, you know, bookkeeping. What does it do for your business? So provides you a good financial snapshot. You're recording all your transactions. So So you're recording your banking, that's money coming in and going out, your credit cards, what you're paying, your bills. I mean, listen, you know, QuickBooks will tell you, hey, this business, if you're paying them with a check, it'll say that business also accepts credit cards. Sometimes it's easier to pay people with credit cards unless they have online ACH and you can do online ACH, you know.

Yeah, on a B2B type of deal.

Yeah, like you're doing a B2B, you're paying a bill, you know, you want to, you want to, you know, however they want you to pay, as long as it's electronic, it's easy. Um, you know, writing, you know, I don't— I mean, I can't even tell you the last time I wrote a check. So, you know, so, uh, credit card or ACH.

My mom sent me a birthday check for $15. Thanks, Mom.

Shout out to Mom. And then, uh, you know, so you're tracking everything. You can see your income, your spending. And then, you know, tools-wise, there's QuickBooks has a free version, Xero, FreshBooks, Zoho. There's a whole slew of them, you know, of, you know, and you just pick the one, you know, that, you know, you know, the best way to pick one is make sure you have an accountant You should have an accountant. If you have a business, have an accountant. If it's H&R Block, it's H&R Block.

If it's, you know, H&R Block isn't accounting. Well, they help you prepare your tax return, so you can't use H&R Block as an accountant, bro.

No, but some people do.

Yeah, and your business is trash, right?

So, you know, find a local CPA, you know. I mean, I don't know if he—

if you don't want to go that far, bro, there's a thing called YouTube and you can literally watch a tutorial on how to use QuickBooks, fam. There's free versions, right? Still, there's some free versions of QuickBooks for you for this, you know, the, the micro business you're starting at.

Exactly, start with the free.

I mean, if you're at the bare minimum, you can use PayPal when you're getting paid if you're gonna use that specifically only. Yeah, and use that as your accounting software because it does organize your stuff.

If it doesn't really organize your banking and do a P&L—

no, but I'm talking about getting paid in it. And link PayPal to QuickBooks, which will be even better. But I'm saying it— QuickBooks has free, and then signing up to PayPal is free, right? Yeah, so that's That's the number.

Merchant accounts are generally— there's no—

all merchant accounts are free, right?

But the thing is, is, you know, get a book— you know, like, I have a bookkeeper that helps me once a quarter, goes in there, reconciles the bank.

That's the smart— that's the best way to do it, you know?

And then this way you make sure they can't make any mistakes.

For people who don't know, what he's saying is quarterly. How many quarters are there in it? 4, right?

3 months. Every 3 months.

There's 4 quarters every 3 months. January, February, March. We just finished, right, first quarter, the first quarter in March. So I tell this to all the time to new businesses because a lot of times they don't know, right?

A bookkeeper is only going to charge you maybe $300 to $700 or $800 on the high side, depending how many transactions, right?

But I'm just saying like, yo, just So you got 3 months, right? If you figure out how much money you made that 3 months, pay your taxes right away.

That's, that's the other thing we're going to get into, like, oh, okay, payroll aspect. No, but you know, you got to use a tool, you know, hire— sometimes you can get a CPA, they have a bookkeeping staff, and then they'll, you'll, they'll tell you, oh, send us your bank statements and your credit card statement every month, and then they go in, they charge you monthly, and then at the end— because for them, then they don't have to do all that at the end of the year if they do it all throughout the year. And then you can file your taxes right away like I do. I mean, I file my— I'm ready to file taxes as soon as I get all my, you know, paperwork. Yeah, I'm ready to go. I'm the first one. My taxes are fine.

You don't— you don't pay your taxes quarterly?

Yeah, but we're going to get into that for payroll. When we talk about—

see, he's thinking of it— I'm just thinking of it as a way of making sure you don't screw yourself at the end of the year.

Yeah, well, you don't want to screw yourself with that. But also, when you're doing— when you're running your business, this is one thing people found out during the pandemic, and it was like a big stab in the heart, right? Because most people that own a business, they're just taking out distributions and not running payroll. You've got to pay yourself a salary. You, you know, use QuickBooks.

Yeah, this is—

this ADP, get paychecks, get somebody.

Because this reason right here, how many businesses, you know, couldn't get funded so they had folded?

Yeah, they went out of business because they couldn't get PP—

I know a bunch of businesses like that.

Yeah, because they had their whole family working there. Nobody got a paycheck. Yep. Everybody was on on the cash payout and the— and distribution, you know, because—

or maybe they were all right out the till, right out the till, man.

Rocky didn't like that. No, but I had like one friend of mine who was— had a business, and I was like— he goes, oh, what am I gonna do? And I go, dude, I told you not to do that.

You're—

he wasn't paying, you know, he wasn't paying himself, wasn't paying his wife. They were just taking distributions. They had like 2 employees. They hardly got any money from PPP. Wasn't enough. If they were paying themselves a decent amount of salary, then they would have got—

even a, a livable salary, like a—

whatever, even if it was $2,000 a month. Yeah, exactly. They would have got more money, way more, to help them make it through the pandemic instead of them having to do the, the loan. Yeah. Instead of getting a loan, they could have got free PPP money. And a lot of—

what's the other thing that there was? Uh, which was—

yeah, but then people found out they had to pay that back. They didn't understand. I was telling people, don't, man, disaster loan thing, because not all of it is forgivable.

Because I could— I got approved for both of them.

They sent me money for the disaster.

You said you sent it back?

I sent it back because I was like, I don't want this money. I don't need it, right? So I want to send it back, and it was a whole process to send it back.

I declined it, and boy oh boy, were they adamant about giving me that money, man.

They just sent it without me asking.

Yeah, that didn't happen to me because I probably would have kept it.

I'm that type of, you know, you send me some money, one of my friends got like $200 grand, but then all of a sudden he gets a bill and they're like, he's like, Bill, what's the bill for? They're like, oh, well, part of this, whatever it was, $10,000 or $20,000, was free. The other part you got to pay back. Now he's got a loan that he didn't know that he had.

No thank you.

You know, a lot of people, you know, that's part of bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is your banking, your payouts, which is your credit card, paying out your credit card, or you're paying ACH. To people, money going out of your business. Payroll is part of bookkeeping. Merchant account is part of bookkeeping. These, all of this makes up your—

the cost of running your business.

Yeah, this is, this is all the financial machine behind, behind your business, because if you have good accurate bookkeeping and you and your business starts growing and you're doing over $100,000 a month, writing credit card processing, your processor might say, let's say, especially if you're an internet business or you have a large ticket or you're a wholesaler, things like that, and say, hey, Justin, we'd like to see your P&L. We'd like to see your balance sheet.

Oh, shit. I don't know what you're talking about, buddy.

Yeah, I've had business owners tell me that. Young kids. And they're like looking at me like a deer in the headlights. For sure. How do you guys not have that? You're doing—

what's a P&L?

Profit and loss statement.

There you go.

And a balance sheet, and that shows, you know, what's like your cash on hand and everything like that. So it's important to have that. Like, we're in the middle of now of doing a travel agency, so, you know, we got to tell the guy, hey, we need like, you know, your P&L for 2022, your balance sheet, and then year to date, we need the same thing. So, you know, you know, you got to, you know, that's the importance of using these programs so that you can produce that. Because one day your business goes from doing $10 grand to $20 grand to $50 grand to $100 grand and you're growing your business. And do you want to pay? Like I was talking to these guys, Justin knows, we've probably mentioned this scenario on the podcast 3, 4, or 5 times already. They're paying 7% for credit card processing. If you had a P&L and a balance sheet, guess what? You're not paying 3%. You're not paying 7%. You're in the 3s.

Right.

So that's a 4% savings. And maybe, and maybe if your financial picture looks good, like you got $200,000, $300,000 in the bank, in your business bank account, maybe your reserve goes from 10% to 5%.

Right.

Yeah, it's reasonable. Makes sense. You know, so those are the things— that's why it's important to have that. You know, when you're going to apply, let's say you want to get a business credit card, right? Well, they're going to go, you know, now they use tricky stuff. They go, they have you log in with Plaid or a Plaid-type product which accesses your bank account, and then they get a snapshot of what your average daily balance is, right? And that's how they're going to determine how much credit they're going to give you for the credit card, you know. So when you're trying to get loans, you're trying to get credit cards so you can have revolving credit. So, you know, I put everything on a credit card and I just pay the bill. I might pay it 2 weeks later at the end of the month, but that's how I pay all my bills. Because a lot of times if you want to buy something, then it needs to get shipped, you know. Not every company is going giving you credit, right? And, you know, they're, you know, they can only check like your D&B report. There's another website called NAV. NAV.

Yeah.

And that gives a picture. But, you know, they don't—

for business credit.

For business credit. Yeah. But they don't give like Equifax and all that. Like, I'll look— I looked at my business credit recently and said D&B gave an A and Equifax gave a B. I don't know why they gave a B. They have no information, so I have no idea. And you don't know what their criteria is.

I heard it's really hard to get an A listing in Equifax for a business.

So that— yeah, but I'm just saying, like, because I think their criteria might go by income.

Yes.

So maybe we don't have, you know, that's another thing, the next income level to be an A-rated business from Equifax. The other thing you can do, you know, you have to consider with bookkeeping, you know, like I'm dealing with somebody now that has a retail store and they don't— they never use the point of sale system. They don't take—

what?

They have no inventory and they have no idea about anything about their inventory or anything like that and how long the stuff's sitting on the shelf. Nothing. And, uh, you know, the retail shop. Yeah, you know, you have to get a You know, like, like we're get— you know, we're working with some—

scratching my head on that one, man.

We're looking at a new—

how have they been getting paid?

Cash? No, they get paid by credit card, but they don't have a point of sale. They just use a credit card machine.

Oh, okay, okay.

But I'm just saying, like, you need— you know, when you want to grow your retail business, you need to put in a sales system so that way you can see, like, hey, I got these shirts, they've been here for 3 months, they're not selling so good. Okay, put them on the sale rack and start blowing them out. You know, but if you don't know, how do you— how can you make those decisions? Like, how is your— and, you know, because then you can see, oh, is my inventory aging?

Is it moving?

At least, yes, the inventory moving. Maybe I don't have the right price on it. Maybe I need to lower the price. What's my hottest item? You know, maybe if I— let's say I had a hot item, and, and the hot item is like this cup, right? And then I could go look and I can see like, oh, red sells better than blue, you know, or maybe the, the, the, the, the gray is the best seller. Okay, well, maybe we need to bring in more red cups.

Does that cup keep your water cold?

Yeah.

Is it aluminum on the inside?

Yes, it's very nice, this cup.

I shouldn't have gave mine away.

Yeah, it was a good cup. I don't know, I like it. No straw. I don't like a straw.

No. So I got the water. I'm the water. I don't— nothing. You gotta stop every— you gotta chill out on your plastic water bottle intake. Yes. And you're, you know, I fill it up from the big jug, filtered, which is already plastic, right? So calm down on the little water on the microplastics. Be a reusable, reusable bottle.

No, but you got, you know, having a point of sale system can help you track your inventory, give you better ideas of buying, to have you develop a buying plan, find out what your best-selling items are, what are the peak times, your peak days and times, right? So you can see during the day, if you have a point of sale system, you could go in and run a report and see, oh, I open at, you know, open at 10 o'clock in the morning, and from 10 to 12 How many customers do you have? Right. Well, to 2, how many? And you can see what I mean.

That's, that's why a lot of these boutiques that you see are only open from 4 to 8 PM because they've literally realized that they have one customer for if they was opening at 10 o'clock until 2.

Right.

It just wasn't economically smart to keep somebody sitting there all day. Waiting around for people to come in, or they just said to buy a t-shirt.

Oh, if you want to come in, let's say it's an upscale men's store and you want to have it where, oh, from this time to this time you have to set up an appointment.

That's big too.

Yeah, a lot of businesses started doing that. They set up an appointment thing online. Oh, you make an appointment, they call you, you have your appointment, you come in, they open up just for the appointment sometimes.

Yeah, if I was like huge into the fashion like that, I would— that would like— if, you know, if I was like mega rich, do that. Yeah, if I was mega rich, I would definitely be an appointment-only type of guy. Yeah, like I do not want to be in—

I hate clothes shopping.

Clothes shopping is— I just ran on lunch, I had to go run and get a pair of pants because I needed a pair of pants for it. So they got that Just for Sports thing over here, which is right up my alley. They have they had a pair of cargo pants. How's—

nice. All right.

Yep, $50, but whatever, um, you know. But yeah, man, that's how it goes.

So, you know, tracking— and even if you have a restaurant or a bar, it's a— you can track all your food sales. No, let— you can know like, oh, I have an item on the menu, uh, Justin's Spicy Broccoli, right? And because I know Justin—

Szechuan broccoli.

And then you could go see like, hey, how many broccolis do we sell every day? How many week— every week, every month? Then you know. And let's say you have another dish on there, buffalo cauliflower, and you go, well, nobody's buying this buffalo cauliflower.

You know, I'm not a fan of buffalo cauliflower at all. No, but I'm saying let's take that off the menu because I was making it all the time too.

And then, and then also like, you know, let's say you had on there Rocky's Chicken Fingers, right? And you had Rocky's Chicken Sandwich, and you notice like, hey, a lot of people are buying the grilled chicken sandwich, not the fried chicken sandwich. They're buying lots of, lots of, uh, chicken fingers. Chicken fingers. You know, you gotta— maybe you could raise the price a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, then you got the loyalty program with the point of sale system, loyalty program, gift cards, text and email receipts.

Sometimes you can add gift cards in, although I think gift cards have kind of played it out.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that the other day actually, because I don't see them like I used to.

Like, because now you can walk into the grocery store and preload it, or you can go on Amazon, right, buy a gift card, a Visa card, an Amazon card. People can go buy what they want.

I, I— because the reason I asked this, I was on a website the other day and I'm like, why is a gift card for sale on the website. And I get it because then you digitally, you'd send it to me and then I could use it, right? Right, exactly. But I was, my, I was wondering, that made sense like an internet type of deal because I'm like, how are people using gift cards? Because you don't, you know, like 20 electronic, let's just say even a decade ago for, you know, like For Christmas, for instance, you know, you'd get somebody a Best Buy gift card, right? Or whatever gift card.

But I mean, I can tell you, like, 17, 18 years ago, my point is you don't use gift cards anymore.

Who's using gift cards? I don't get gift cards.

You don't give them?

I don't get them. I don't give them either because you just, you just give a credit, you know, to— you got $50 of Roblox, you know, or The way that it's— the way that it's set up, you don't have to physically buy a gift card anymore. So how is that like— how is that business?

No, I'm saying like you go in Publix, they're selling tons of gift cards, and Walmart, they're selling tons of gift cards, but they're selling them for hundreds of different businesses. Yes, that's, you know, because people are given a present and they don't want to give money, so they just give a gift card. Oh, here's $50 to go to the Outback Steakhouse. I know, I'm trying to ask you, people are still going, but people are still buying the gift card though, but I think they're buying more of them in like the grocery store, Target, Walmart, and Target, where you can buy a plethora of—

because it— but I see like, like the only reason I see that happen is because you're standing in line, because otherwise you can do all of it without even— you don't need to go buy a gift card to get a gift card anymore.

I'm just saying like we're doing a giveaway, right?

Uh-huh.

When we do the shows, right? Yes, spin the wheel.

You give a $20 gift card, whatever.

You give them a $10 or $20 gift card, right? So you need, you know, in some respects you need that. Where let's say you're an owner of a business and you want to give everybody a $50 gift card. It's a little nicer to put them all in an envelope and hand it out to your employees versus, oh, they get an email, here's $50. Now, you know, it's somewhat, you know, some people are—

I could see that. I could see your point.

Okay. Like you want to be more personal.

That answers my question. That answers my question because I'm like, who in hell is buying these things?

A whole gift card mall online. You can go—

that's my, that's my point, brother.

You can just buy electronic ones. But I'm just saying, the physical gift card and electronic gift cards both have uses.

Because I remember— but I don't— never mind, I was just gonna say, like, I have so many kids, like, they would always come back. We'd go to Target, all of a sudden, you know, you'd empty the pockets of your kid's jacket and there'd be like 20 gift cards and shit. Like, dude, where did you get these from? Like, why do you have these? And then they just would, because you could grab them right there, you know, the kids, Costco, right?

And they have great deals. They'll have like a gift card for the movie theater, like $75 of whatever for $50. So there are, you know, some deals. There's sometimes there's a deal out there.

It's better deals if you go direct to the source. That, I mean, yeah, because if you go, if you go to Walgreens and get a $25 Roblox card that same $25 that you paid at Walgreens plus whatever tax and fee, you could go straight to roblox.com and pay them $25.

If you're the grandma and you're giving that—

no, I understand, I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's what I'm saying, there's an app.

I'm a grandpa and I know how to do it.

I know, but I'm saying there's an application for everything because, you know, it gets a little weird if me, 40—

I'm about to turn 43, man. I'm not playing Roblox.

Right. And the other, you know, the other thing is when you're at your business, you're getting a point of sale system, you want to make sure, you know, everybody— like, we're selling a retail point of sale, first thing they ask, oh, does it take Apple Pay? Yes. Uh, restaurant point of sale, what do they ask us? Oh, does it— do you have mobility? Yes, we have tablets, they come in a case, the waiter can take it to the table, take the order, and get the payment from the customer. Customer and with a text email receipt. This is what everybody wants today. You, you gotta move your business along. That's why bookkeeping is so important, have tracking your inventory, keep it, you know. And also when you're tracking your inventory on a point of sale, you're gonna be able to see what's been shoplifted out of your place too because you're going to do your inventory and then you're going to go, yeah, my belt's gone. Yeah, I had 50 belts, I sold 48 of them. There should be 2 left of this brown belt, and now there's 1. 1 got stolen.

No bueno.

Or the manager didn't wear a belt.

I have a question. Like, so what's the number 1, you know, reason why someone should be, you know, taking bookkeeping serious?

The number 1 reason, if you want to grow your business, you need to take bookkeeping seriously.

Seriously.

If you want to be a valid answer and get paid on time from your customers, take bookkeeping seriously.

Yeah, you heard it from Allen.

Yeah, because let me tell you, when, when Justin will tell you, I could have easily— I don't know the math on $300 grand, that's about $12,000 a month in merchant fees— these guys I met with could save if that a P&L statement. $12,000 a month, that's $144,000 a year. I can guarantee you that a CPA, accountant, bookkeeper, whatever you need to do to get all that—

so they definitely did not follow through with the plan?

No.

Oh, what a shame on you guys, man.

That would have probably— that would maybe cost them a few thousand bucks to hire somebody to get all that done because it's all importable.

They're still in college.

No, they're not in college. They're doing business.

They quit college.

Yeah, they quit college.

That's right.

But I'm just saying, and I've talked to tons of business owners, I talk— that, that don't do take bookkeeping seriously. I go, how do you prepare your tax return?

Because a lot of times, man, too, like, this goes back to like that mentality of like, well, and it's— I'm just one cat, right? No, that's what I'm talking about. Like, we just, you know, it's a We're cash-based. And unfortunately, man, you know, that, that, that lie that, you know, you'll be able to operate like this forever, that's just not true. I tried operating like that for a long time, like, you know, navigating under the wet water a little bit and, you know, the gray area of getting paid like this and, and all that. It just causes so much problem in the long term. Like, just, just trust me when I tell you to just do the, the way that people are telling you to run the business. Like, go set up a business bank account, get your EIN, file an LLC, you know, go to your local community, your whatever state, get registered within there. And then from— get signed up to your QuickBooks, get a merchant account. Like, those are like the steps that we're telling you to do are the most valid and the proper way of starting your business.

Because we— listen, I'll tell you a story. So when we started, um, in credit card processing, we came— all of a sudden we see like from the ATM company that we were working with, and we really had only done like one ATM. So then they said, hey, we now have the ability to cash load the ATMs through Brinks, and it costs you a dollar a transaction to do that. We got our first customer. Then we're like, okay, great, now we need to buy 4 ATM machines. They're $4,000 apiece, $16,000. And I put it on a credit card, and American Express let the transaction go through, then they bounced it and took it back from the company. I already had the ATMs delivered, so they call me on the phone. I call American Express, they go, oh, sorry, because this was during 2008, 2009. Sorry, we cut back your credit limit. So then the ATM company said, hey, you know, we want to see your last 3 months bank statements and P&L and balance sheet, and then we'll give you a line of credit.

There you go.

And if I didn't have that, guess what?

You wouldn't be in business right now.

I would have to probably dig into my personal money, call my mom blah, blah, blah, and scrounge up $16,000. And I didn't have— really have extra $16 grand laying around at the time. Yeah, you're in the growth, you know, right? You know, you're in, you know, you're not in the mode where you're just compiling cash. So, you know, that's why it's important when you want to grow, when you want to go buy a piece of equipment for your business, you got to have— you got to have all your financials ready so you can get the the lease done. Oh, I want to buy a truck for my business. You need the financials, right? Oh, I want to hire 3 guys. I need to buy 3 computers from Dell, and I need to get Dell credit. Well, you're not going to get any Dell credit because they're going to go check your personal credit and your business credit. Yeah. And if you don't have your act together, you're not going to get an account from Dell, right?

Bookkeeping, bookkeeping, bookkeeping, right?

Bookkeeping is is the backbone to growth for your business.

You said it, unlocking success for business owners. So yeah, man, that's Bookkeeping Podcast, bro. That's a good pod. I think it was very informative.

Yeah, even though it's a boring subject, it's not, not necessarily informative.

It's just like one of those, like, you're a lecture. Like, your dad walked into the room and was like, now son, I told you. Like, so It's one of those things where people hate hearing about it. They don't want to hear about it, but you just got to do it, right?

Yeah. Young people, listen up. Don't think like, boom, starting this business, money's coming in. You gotta have bookkeeping.

Yeah, he's right.

If you don't have it, it's not— you're—

I've been paying tax my, uh, yeah, man, you gotta have bookkeeping. That's it.

So check us out on YouTube, check us out on all the podcast networks. Where else can they follow?

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube. Follow the podcast, please, @B2BVaultPodcast on YouTube. Turn on the notifications so you'll never miss an episode. Every Monday and every Wednesday and Friday— pardon me, we might not have a podcast, uh, available today, uh, the every Friday, you know, there's— but every Wednesday for sure. Um, Yeah, that's all I got. Oh, b2bvault.info. If you're looking for being a guest on the podcast, or you know, you got any questions, or you're looking to sign up, you can head over there. You can apply for a merchant account. Do that. Yeah, and get back at us, man. You know, peace out.

Carpe diem. Everybody have a great day.

Peace.

This other one thing, I don't know if I didn't put marijuana on the list. Should we put marijuana on the list? Is another story.