A bookkeeper and yoga teacher shares five strategies for tax season: automate payments with Gusto or QuickBooks, write tasks on paper and rank them, use time-tracking tools like Harvest to improve pricing, organize projects in Asana, and plan each day the night before. She also emphasizes breaks, breathing, and magnesium supplements to sustain energy without burning out.
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This week I'm going to give you some top— my top 5 management tips as a bookkeeper to be able to have— help you to manage and maximize your efficiency and get your work done and have some time to yourself. The number 1 tip, and I have to say that just coming through crazy season, right, our quote-unquote busy season, it's important to Prioritize yourself. And I'm just as guilty, you especially 1099 month. It's just crazy. You got everybody reaching out to you, whether they're asking questions about 1099s, they're sending you the details in places that you didn't ask for. And you can go through my 1099 video and try to— no matter how much you try to prepare for the season, it never really lands well. Which is why all the tax people said, let the bookkeeper do it, right? They gave it all that job to us. Staying on top of it, educating your client about why they should be like using service using QuickBooks, the contractor paid through the contractor tab. Now you don't have to do anything when it comes time to do that. That's all part of it. Use— if you're in Gusto, use Gusto's contractor payments. Don't take yourself out of that though. Make sure all the payments are made through that system. That's number 1. When you start to look at your tasks, write them down on a piece of paper, because sometimes I look up in January and I'm sitting here and there's like pink sticky notes everywhere, and I wanna scream out loud like, oh my God, why did I do this? But you can take them all and kind of put them on a pad and then write out what you need to get done and then prioritize that list. You can take that list and dump it into, into like the AI, the ChatGPT, and tell it to prioritize it, or just by looking at it, you know which things you can do rather quickly to get them off the list. I'm one of those people that likes to tackle— if you've got 20 things on the list, and let's just say 7 of them can be done within 15 minutes, I go through the 7 because it's very satisfying to cross off the list. And having a piece of paper list is just— I don't know, there's something cathartic about scratching off the list. So I highly recommend that. You can prioritize what needs to be done most important, but you can also tackle the little things just to feel better about your list. Use some time tracking tools. I forgot, I, I read a study somewhere where it actually talked about in our head what we think how long things are gonna take and actually how long things take. So if you use a tool like we use Financial Sense, if you put a task into Financial Sense, Give it a deadline, give it a time amount you think it's gonna take and start to notice. It's kinda like counting calories. You just start to notice, oh, that took a lot longer, or that was a lot more calories than I expected to have eaten in a day. It's the same thing. So it takes— tasks take longer so that way you can judge. It'll help you with pricing too. It'll help you judge what it takes to, to get some of these things done in, in your life. So use time tracking tools. Like I said, we use Financial Cents, but there's plenty out there. There's Harvest, there's free ones out there. So if you don't have the budget for it yet, just Pick up a free one and go with it. Actually, this rolls right into my next one, using project management software. If you have it, use it, implement it. Asana, great tool, free, has almost everything you ever needed in the free version. Like, we use Financial Sense because it's more robust. It fits our firm. Our firm's quite a bit larger than it was when we first started. Totally would recommend Asana if you're just starting out. Oh, actually would recommend Financial Sense if you want to, if you know you're going to grow and you really want to start and have everything there. I recommend that instead of doing what we did, was we had to shift over into it and then had to backbuild it. But being in practice management software, you're gonna give that task a job, you're gonna give it a deadline, it's gonna remind you, and it makes you more efficient going forward. So as you start to add these tasks into the jobs and even your staff, especially the year-end ones that you just do once a year, it's hard to remember what each tax person wanted. Build up a robust section in there so that it makes the season easier. And then you're also looking pretty— Pretty pretty darn good when you hand everything over the tax person, because this one may want a GL plotted out one way, and this one might want all the tax, you know, the tax returns separate and downloaded. And there's just so many tasks. Having that list and really creating that chunk of tasks for year-end, or even during the monthly, is going to save you a lot of time. It's just going to help you, and you'll have reminders to remind you to do things. There's tracking tools. It's just really— It really works well. And if you have staff, it's really helpful to have it, have it for staff. Plan each day. And when you plan each day, at the end of the day before, plan out for the next day, so that way you have an idea of what you're gonna be doing. And it really will help you to not have to think about what you're gonna accomplish in that day. Try to keep a good list of accomplishments that you can get done in a day. Try not to overload, then you feel like you didn't get it done. But that few minutes of prep each night for the next day is really gonna set you up to be focused for the entire day. And then create standardized SOPs. So standard operating procedures, having that in place, even if you don't have staff yet. But if you— once you start to grow, having that in place— I wish I had. It takes time to implement. But once you have that in place, everybody's gonna be knowing where they're supposed to be and on the same page, and there won't be any questions there on how to get the work done. I think these 5 strategies will really help you boost your efficiency and help you achieve a balanced workflow, which is really important. Try not to get overwhelmed. And if you feel like you just can't, it's just like everything, everybody's hitting you at once, which we all have those days, shut it down. Take the stuff off the computer, stop all the notifications, all the things sliding by your face, which distract. Turn that off. Sit back in your chair and take 5 5 minutes just to breathe. I highly recommend that. As a yoga teacher, that's one of my biggest tips. Just take a few moments to breathe. It's gonna set you up for a very happy day, refreshing day. Oh, I have another tip too. I really like Element. It's a supplement that you can take. Has some magnesium in it. It's, for some reason in the afternoon, instead of going for that extra cup of coffee, which is gonna disrupt your sleep, Grab some Element, put it in some water, stir it up and put it in the fridge so it's ready for that 4 o'clock time when you feel like your energy's crashing. I can't tell you, I've tell a lot of people about this. It really helps you to kind of keep it going. Get up outta your chair every hour or so, walk around. Don't stay in that chair sitting. Don't ignore your watch when it tells you to get up. So there's a lot more tips in here than 5. I hope this helps. And if you have any tips you'd like to share, please share them. And until next week, bye now. Bye.
