"We Reduced 90+ Hours of Bookkeeping to 8 Hours” — Donna Bordeaux, CPA Testimonial

Hey, this is Isaac from Outsourcer Co. And this video is an interview from an existing client who runs a small bookkeeping firm. She was struggling with trying to hire and having to rely on team members who sometimes made some preventable mistakes, and she felt like she was spending a lot of the time undoing and fixing some of her books for her clients. There was a lot of other headaches around, around that, and she had tried onshore, she had tried offshore, And she decided to go into the route of trying to automate some of these tasks that she was trying to delegate and making sure she had a process that was routine and predictable. She started on that path on her own, sometimes burning entire days trying to DIY automations and not getting that far, trying to learn through YouTube and so on. And she knew and saw the potential that automation had but didn't really have the time or skills to make And she engaged with us, and now effectively after working with us, as you'll discover in a bit, she actually took— it was 90 hours, was effectively a full-time role— and shrunk it down to 1 day a month of her time that now she doesn't need a bookkeeper anymore in her firm to effectively maintain about 45 clients' worth of work. And now she feels like she has a repeatable, reliable process that requires a little— as little human input as possible, and that person her or effectively has allowed her to build the systems to scale from here and add more clients without adding more people. At the time of the recording, I believe she was on 45 clients at the time we had that conversation. Today, at least at the time of this recording, I believe she's closer to 60 clients. She's probably increased 34, 35% of her roster without adding more people. People in that time frame. So if you want similar results or options to work with us, I'll leave a link at the bottom so you can apply for an audit, an efficiency audit, talk to our team and see if we can replicate these outcomes for you. And with that, I want you to listen to Donna's story and get inspired.

Donna Bordeaux, forward-thinking accountant who likes to automate things and do as little as possible on manual work so that I have more time to spend doing the true good work for my clients.

Could you take me back to when you started looking for a solution like ours? Like, what kind of led to that at the time?

Initially, I got in over my head, I guess, is what led me there. Um, I could see that things were possible, but I didn't quite have the scope to be able to dedicate first a lot of time to researching it and learning it. That would have taken me a lot longer time than having you guys do it. And secondly, to again, take it to the next level. Um, we bit off all kind of the, the low level, the, the low hanging fruit, so to speak, of projects we could do, but I could see there was more up the tree. That I wanted to achieve, but, um, I could probably just spin my wheels a lot, or I could watch you guys build and then learn from that and expand what we can do.

Do you remember how much you actually spin your wheels? Like how much time you kind of decided or stayed in that zone of, hey, just let me try to do it on my own?

I don't, but I could easily burn through a whole day and just be diving deeper and deeper trying things and. And it, it's something I enjoy. So it's not something I will typically set aside real easily because I like to do it. I like the challenge of doing it. But at some point, yeah, you get the frustration level to say, okay, wait, I don't think I know how to do this. Mostly when, when it would come to where solutions would try to tell me to use scripting for something or JSON, those like felt like behemoths and webhooks used to feel like a behemoth. I understand those better now and I can. confidently use those and understand what they're for. But back in the days when we first started working together, I probably didn't know what that was.

Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. What else did you try before reaching out to us, if anything? Um, I know you've mentioned multiple times there are coming some potential other, I don't know, agencies or collaborators you engage with. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Most of my tries were Uh, watching videos, um, trying to learn from that or bugging Chad Davis occasionally here and there. Um, and, and that was it. I believe I talked to one other person through RealEyes who did like a free consultation piece. It was helpful, but it wasn't the like pathway to say, okay, let's do more.

Did, did, do you remember that they ever did? Any kind of work for you or not quite?

No, we just did that free hour and looked at some things and we looked at one little thing and she gave me an— it was a girl. I don't even remember her name. She gave me an idea of something that she'd run across and then I used that thought process to kind of further along where I was there. But, um, there was no real kind of prep to say, let's work together long-term.

Okay. When you say bad things, was more of a timing thing? Um, help me with timelines. At the time, were you also exploring working with us? Was this like simultaneously or was it like far apart?

Um, I'm not sure if I was aware of you yet. It was around that same time, but I'm not sure if I knew you existed when I talked to them.

Okay. Anything else around like why you didn't move forward that you, that you can recall?

No, I mean, initially, well, initially we didn't just purely based on cost because we were kind of at that first page looking at one task and didn't have a lineup of what the future projects were that we wanted to do. So it would have been a heavy lift just to do one task, but then you guys actually helped us do a one task and that gave us the feel for it. And we were able to then leverage that in to say, okay, there's a lot more to this. Let's pursue that.

Yeah. Okay. That's fair. That's something we hear a lot as well. Like people don't have a, um, you know, a path forward and it can be challenging to commit to, especially like an ongoing engagement to when you don't see what's next. Right.

Right.

Um, perfect. I'd be curious to ask at this point too. I know you are in the Automation Town community. Frankly, you're familiar with effectively like all the, all of our competitors in a way. So is there any particular reason like why us? Um, anything comes to mind there?

Just your magnetic personality. Um, I don't know. I, I don't recall back to what Led, uh, led the charge towards you. Um, but, okay.

Um, when you reach out, were you aware of some of the other people that kind of do similar work for accounting firms?

Yeah. And I think at that point, uh, I'm a little foggy, but at that point I don't think, um, they were focused on the same things. Like I know there's a, uh, Wesley does RPA type stuff.

Right.

Well, that doesn't work if you're on a Mac for the most part. There's some more opportunities now than there were initially. But that didn't interest me at all. And this other girl, I can't remember, but she had some different focus level too. Maybe it was more on Google Scripts or something like that to where it didn't align with Zapier and Make. And Zapier I was already aware of and knew how to use. Make, not so much. I was kind of still dabbling, and I— that's where I'd seen Chad do some work in there, and I'd try it, and then I'd throw it aside because I couldn't figure it out, and then I'd come back and look at it again. So I don't think anybody else at that point was looking at specifically Zapier or Make.

Okay. So it looks like you saw like a tool fit.

Yeah.

And would you say for you, what's important that, um, the other tools as well? So for example, I know you're working with Airtable, Xero. Is that something you think you would also kind of like?

Yeah, I think that could also, that obviously added to, um, the process to know that you guys were familiar with those same tools and already had some extended knowledge there that We did not have.

Yeah, that's fair. Cool. Right. Perfect. So that gives me a little bit more context on, I guess, the before phase.

Right.

In the process of making the decision, which I would probably categorize as both the first project we did and probably the time that elapsed between that and starting our ongoing engagement, like what made you confident that Now we're aware of—

Well, I knew from working with you on the first project that we kind of had that same style and you got what I was doing. We had a good connection from a communication standpoint. Um, when we started working together, um, on the ongoing basis after that, honestly, I would have moved quicker. Um, but I was working with Marjorie at the time. And she's Miss Cost-Conscious Person. And I can understand from her side because I was the one doing most of the automation stuff. So I saw the benefit faster than she would.

Yeah.

But that's, that's really kind of my role. When I see that something's gonna have a long-term benefit, I'm all in. You know, I won't say cost doesn't matter, but The, the cost versus the benefit of doing it made good sense.

Okay.

And also for me, this is a solution to deal with staffing. Staffing is always an issue. I don't care whether you're offshoring, onshoring, whatever. Staffing is always an issue and dealing with humans is always an issue. So this allowed us to chip away at the part. That had to deal with all the problems of people and automate the process so that we could be more efficient ultimately and not have to deal with those problems.

Okay. That makes sense. We hear that a lot, right? Like, how can we make the robots do the robotic and the humans everything else?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Perfect.

Um, I guess anything you can talk about, like what's changed for the better? Since we started working together?

I, well, I've shared this with you, I think. Um, I currently don't have any bookkeeping staff. Um, my only staff is my mom who's been with us for 20-some years now. She handles mostly lightweight bookkeeping type stuff. Um, but in the past we have had other bookkeepers hands-on doing all the monthly reconciliations. And I realized that Through automating a lot of the process, a lot of our time was wasteful because they would misstep, screw something up. They're human, but they're also not highly motivated like I am, so they make a lot more mistakes. And most of our time was then spent undoing mistakes and fixing problems that could have been avoided if a routine process was applied across the board. Like running depreciation. If we're running that automated, it always works. It doesn't just say, oh, I forgot, or I got interrupted because I got a phone call.

Got sick.

It just works. So nobody has to go fix. If there's a fix, we know exactly why it happened and it's easy to fix. It's not a matter of investigating.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Could you elaborate on the fact that you don't have a bookkeeping staff? Just give, give me a sense of— How many books you're still able to reconcile without a bookkeeping staff and who's doing the work? Because I assume there's still some manual elements.

The before and after. Okay. The before was we allocated about 2 hours per account per month. So that was usually about an hour and a half of bookkeeping and a half hour of review time, generally by me. I actually did have somebody doing some review at one point where a secondary person was reviewing all the financials and I was completely hands-off. But I was completely hands-off until some point where I had to unscrew things, which happened every 6 to 12 months on every account. I had to go through and be a, a once-a-year reviewer, like a cleanup pro. So that process went from paying people to manage that process taking 2 hours a month. And we were probably at that time working on 40 to 45 clients a month. That now has been eliminated. And now through automation, I spend 10 to 15 hours or 10 to 15 minutes per month per client. It generally takes me one 8-hour day, um, to maybe a half of another day if I find some kind of rabbit hole that I need to go down of fixing or investigating. Um, to—

That's of your time specifically?

Of my time specifically. to process our entire client base per month.

Okay. What about the other hour and a half that used to be?

It's all automated.

So you went from 2 hours per account to effectively 10 to 15 minutes.

Correct. And that I've initially, I thought, well, I'll, I'll do the fixing until I hire. And then once I figure out all the automation stuff, I'll hire another person to Go back into that role. I'm not so sure I want to do that, um, because that one day a month that I do that also gives me all the updates mentally that I need to know what's going on with the clients, which I would have had to do anyhow.

Yeah.

And it makes sure I, I trust myself a whole lot more than I trust somebody else.

Yeah. Like, I think it isn't worth Yeah, like it isn't worth trading for somebody else. There'll still be time that you would want to allocate for that anyway.

Right.

And I mean, 1 hour a month to keep like a 45-client roster is pretty good, right? Like you have time for everything else that needs to happen, any advisory work, any sales, any marketing, any, any, any other thing you want to do. There's a lot to do with that. And of course, any other trips around the world and the US, which I know you're known for. Cool. Just a couple of other questions here. I guess if a colleague was considering working with us, anything you would tell them about their decision? Let's say they're on the fence, they're considering working with us.

Yeah, I would say definitely do it. You've got to look at addressing problems. And the other automation benefit is to automate a process, you must have a process. And in most cases where people are on that fence, they're not doing it because they don't understand their process enough to tell you how to fix it. So it's a double, um, double benefit because you're actually building a process and then it's a repeatable process that is documented so that anybody else can do it.

Yeah.

And I've definitely seen like firms that don't have a process. is a heavier lift for us, but they get kind of like the best of both worlds because now they're building a process with, you know, the automation in mind to make it repeatable and as effective as possible.

Yeah.

Okay, uh, I guess any feedback on anything we could have done better?

No, I mean, I'm, I'm quite—

All right, so I hope you enjoyed that conversation. As I said earlier, I'll leave a link below to our website for you to apply for an efficiency audit, see if we can help you out. And for more content tutorials or case studies like this, if you're not at the point where you are willing or able to have a conversation, if you want more content like this, just feel free to click on that subscribe button and subscribe to the channel. With that, I'll see you on the next one, and until then, stay efficient.