192 Accountants: Let's Improve That Desk Setup

Other day, I got a new keyboard, and it reminded me of just how much your setup matters. I hadn't really messed with my setup in a few years, but, oh, there are. There are few things better than, than that sweet setup. Like, leave the house and you have to go work somewhere else. And then you get back to the office and you're like, oh, feels good to be back in that battle station again. Listen, this week we are talking office setups. And if you are a US Tax pro, can't come soon enough. I would argue that busy season is about treating yourself. You're working hard, you deserve something. And if you listen to this podcast this week, I'm just gonna tell you right now, you're gonna buy stuff. I'm sorry, but it's gonna be like, it's gonna be good stuff. Like, man, there's nothing better than, like, the perfect addition to your office setup. So today we're talking talk about desks, setups, stuff you need to have, how we can make them better. After all, desks are like the ledger of your office. They're the backbone of everything, right? Tuesday, we're talking computer hardware and monitors. Oh, boy. That may be an extended, like, two to three hour episode. Wednesday, we're talking peripherals, mouse, keyboard, and actually a whole bunch of other things. The ways that we interact with our tech. Thursday, everything else in your office from the chair, your Internet setup, furniture, plants, lights, how you set the vibe, because vibe matters. Then Friday, we'll do a Q and A and you can tell me how many things you bought. Come on in. Let's talk about desks. What I use today, my desk is a sit stand desk from Foley. And it's not huge. I think it's like five feet. I feel like at this stage, I've. I've done like every iteration of desk imaginable from the old accounting firm that bought desks in like the 1920s. And we spent a lot of money. We picked the nice ones back then so we don't have to replace them. And they weigh as much as like a Volkswagen Beetle. I did that. I did the more cheap, like, flat packed, like, modular stuff that you get from those places that sell professional office furniture. And now I'm onto something a little more basic. A sit stand from Foley. I'll be honest, I think this was last in the standing position when Eisenhower was in office. But it's nice to know I have it. You know, I used to think a cool desk was the big, chunky one. And if you had a return, like, if it was an L desk. If you had the side thing, were you moving on up in this world? I mean, you could put files there, you could put the phone there, you could put tanki there, put a printer. And now what can I say? I'm something of a minimalist now. And I was this way at the accounting firm. It's not just cause I'm. I don't run an accounting firm anymore. And I'm removed from the. The everyday strife of the everyman, the. The accountants in the trenches. But I feel like I went to the extreme and I've come back. So let me tell you, on my journey, eight things that I think your desk needs, and then a desk wish list. Things I think desks could do better. We'll see if we can just change the world a little bit. All right, okay, number one things your desk needs. Limits. Okay, Size is not the answer, people. It just. When it's too big, it just collects things. And you know it. Much the same as I feel about monitors. As soon as you go beyond a certain size threshold of what's actually required for like 90% of your work, you start losing efficiency. That extra space just becomes a spot to pile crap or a place for unnecessary trinkets that just clutter the work area. It's inefficient. It's much like the size of the batteries you put into an electric vehicle. Right now you could pack like 500 miles of batteries into an EV. The problem is you're gonna be lugging around like 2,000 pounds of battery weight when you only drive more than 300 miles three days a year. Same thing with your desk. Okay? You gotta know your limits. Think of all the. Think of the other things you could do with that space in your office. You could have so much more room for activities. Okay, number two things your desk needs. Wheels. Now this was a big one for me. Wheels. I've had wheels on every desk that I've had in the last like five or six years. And it really changes things for you. I. Gosh, I have a note in my notion here. So says we're stuck in the legacy paradigm of desks that can't move. What a dweeb. But it's true. For decades, desks, they weren't made to move. In fact, the under edge of a desk is. Was like this. Oof. This outrageously coarse, like sharp abomination of glued together wood particles. And your desk would sooner fold like a cheap suit than be like scooted across the ground. But you pop a couple wheels on the Bottom of that bad boy. You open yourself up to a world of possibilities. You don't have to call somebody in to help you move your desk. If you work in a shared space and you got a little project going with a buddy in that room, scoot your little desks together. I can tell you now. Cause I'm like shooting videos in this room all the time and moving stuff around. I am constantly moving my desk. But even in the accounting firm, everybody that was, especially the folks who were in shared spaces, all of their desks were on wheels and we would regularly move stuff around and folks would get to scooching if they were doing like projects with other people and all that. But even when I in my own office, I had a desk with wheels and that thing was getting moved in all sorts of different situations. Little sunshiny outside. You want to face the window today? Great. Squeak your way over. Okay, number three thing. Your desk needs to raise and lower. Everyone talks sit, stand. But I want to talk lean or high squat. Like a bar height. That's actually really nice. You may not have a chair that is capable of accommodating that. But if you've got a stool, bonus points. If you've got one of those leanie stools, like getting your lean on and like a half stand while you're working, that's actually really nice. I remember as soon as standing desks became a thing, everybody's like, what? Turns out standing all day is even worse than sitting all day. And it's like, well duh, who can stand all day? First of all, I'm not looking to run an ultra. I'm just trying to do some bookkeeping. But to me, the really nice in between is like that sort of stool height. And I can like cycle between the three, but people don't talk enough about that. Like bar height, desk height. This episode is sponsored in part by Relay. Did you know that Relay saves advisors three to five hours of work per client per month? Because collaboration between clients and advisors on Relay, it's easy and secure. Every client you invite to Relay gets added to your firm's partner portal. You may have seen we recently did a demo day on Relay on the main channel. Relay does a bunch of cool stuff. What gets me most excited is access. Not having to hack together like using your client's access or your team using your access. So every client gets added to your partner portal. This means a portal where firm staff can safely access and switch between client accounts from a single login. Their own login, role based permission levels direct bank feeds to QBO and Xero and statement syncs with Hubdoc and Dext. Ultra detailed transaction data that speeds up reconciliation. Built in receipt management accounts payable automation Plus Relay's new partner program introduces meaningful cash rewards for advisors, more partner perks, and an advisor directory to help clients find you the clients that are already banking with Relay. Head over to relayfi.com adjacentstats to learn more and book a demo or check out the link in the show Notes Disclaimer Voice Relay is a financial technology company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services and FDIC insurance are provided through Thread Bank Member FDIC. The Relay Visa debit card is issued by ThreadBank pursuant to a license from Visa USA Incorporated and may be used everywhere Visa debit cards are accepted. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud Accountant staffing. You'll know I'm a big advocate of hiring offshore. One of the biggest changes I made in my firm, we transitioned a Legacy firm from 100% onshore local hiring to 100% distributed US and then 100% distributed globally. Hiring and honestly is the best thing we did. It virtually alleviated all of our hiring pains, completely changed how we thought about staffing, process projects and the type of work that we wanted to bring on. Because you know what, the folks we hired offshore really freaking good. A lot of misconceptions around the type of people that you hire offshore because your enterprises will oftentimes use offshore folks for like menial work. Absolutely not the case. There are tens of thousands of people working for big four accounting firms, you know, offshore outside the U.S. you can get folks that can do anything from tax to junior level stuff to super senior level stuff. But try to do that yourself. Figure it all out yourself. That's going to be hard. It's going to be scary. Really good place to start Cloud accountant staffing. They will hold your hand through that process. Their story is super simple at accounting firm in the us Hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you. A big tipping point for me was when I was like I'm gonna stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked with other practitioners, I talked with some of the vendors that would like help you get into offshoring. That really opened things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and you start heading down that path. Consider cloud accountant staffing number four things your desk needs to not be Formica. Okay, 1993 called. You're now working in an apartment complex. Do better. You know how people say you should invest money in a mattress because you spend, I don't, 40 years of your life sleeping or something like that? Well, if you're an accountant, you're going to spend 60 years of your life sitting at a desk. It's okay to invest in like a nice like solid wood desktop or something like that. I had a glass desktop for a while. Interesting. In fact, there's some fancy metal desktops you can get too. They sound cool until you try to work on them early in the morning and you just freeze your little forearms off. It's just too cold. Not my thing. Oh, one other thought. On an adjustable height desk, the value of it is it's not always about going from the top to the bottom. It's about the micro adjustments of like different seated heights and the fact that not everybody is the same size. And so when you think about stuff like the little under desk attachment that you put your keyboard on, you know the one that Janice has, the lady with the gold frame glasses that she hangs around her neck with a golden chain, that lady, she's got the little under desk pull out keyboard thing. Right. That's because that's like more ergonomic or something for your hands to be lower. You've also got the benefit of more like surface area on top of your desk then. But the problem is traditionally desks couldn't go up and down, so you had to have that little keyboard tray. And it was made worse by the fact that your monitors couldn't go up and down either. These days, as we're going to get to tomorrow, monitor arms, they make it super easy to adjust that, that monitor height. In fact, most monitor stands now will go up and down. So if your monitor height can go up and down and your desk height can go up and down, it doesn't matter what size you are. You can reposition stuff to get to a place that will fit perfectly just for you. Okay. Number four was to not be Formica. Number five, a cord holder on the leading edge of your desk. So here's the thing. You can get these little, these little nubbins that are kind of rubbery and they have like a little slot in them where you can pop a cord into it and it'll just, it'll hang on to the end of that cord and usually adhesive on one side. The best cord management hack I can give you have one of these little strips that'll hold like, you know, four to eight different cords. You stick that thing to the leading edge of your desk. The end of the cord is sticking up out of them. So as I'm sitting at my desk now, if I look to the leading edge of my desk, sticking up is a USB C cord and a lightning cord end, a usb, a cord, and all of the cords that you could possibly need, and they're all just, they're hanging on there. And if I need to charge something with one of those cable types, I can just grab it off there and plug it in. It sits on my desk while it's charging and then I can unplug it and just like snap it back into that cord holder. I'll put a link in the show notes to the little cord holder that I have. But they're just these cheap little rubbery adhesive things. You stick them to the edge of your desk. Totally removes the needs for like having that coiled up cord sitting on your desk or in a drawer or something like that. See, I told you you would buy something this week. That didn't take long, did it? Number six, things your desk needs, not your monitor base. Buddy. This is more of a tomorrow one. How did this slip into today? But monitor arms, the thing that people miss about monitor arms, the sneaky benefit. You're freeing up desk space. If you look ahead of you right now, look at that monitor. Now look down. You got that big ugly monitor base sitting there. Now look to your left, look to your right. Two more monitor bases. Look at all of that space they're taking up on your desk as opposed to if those babies were suspended with monitor arms. You've got infinite free space under that monitor now for documents, snacks, tchotchkes, knickknacks, or even better, nothing at all. Because an empty desk is an empty mind. Hang on. A clear desk is a clear mind. Number seven. This was maybe the single biggest unlock for me. Number seven, things. Your desk needs things attached to the underside of it. Did you know that your desk has two sides? There's a top side, there's also an underside. And with various mounting hardware, you can defy gravity. So right now I, I have my ups, my battery backup that my computer and monitor and all that stuff are plugged into that is attached to the underside of my desk with a metal bracket. My computer, which is now a Mac studio. Oh gosh. I know. Don't cancel me. We'll talk about this more tomorrow. I used PCs all of my life until about 6 months ago. I was raised Republican. We'll talk about the Mac thing tomorrow. The computer is mounted to the underside of the desk on a bracket. I. I've got headsets hanging on the other underside of it. Here, here's the thing. This is like my benchmark for a desk that works for me. Now I have everything that I need attached to my desk and my desk is on wheels. The only two things that come off my desk is a power cord and an ethernet cord. And technically I probably don't even need the second one. And what does that mean for me? Infinite possibility. My computer's attached to the desk. The monitor is attached on monitor arms. It's not possible for the monitor to fall off cause it's got the monitor arm. Everything is literally bolte. And if I wanted to move my desk, all I gotta look out for is those two cords. And this is something I actually inherited from the way I set up the shared spaces in our office. Everybody had these sit stand desks. Everything was attached to the desks. Everybody had monitor arms. There's no risk of like monitors falling off when somebody tries to scoot computer around or something like that. There's no like towers littering the ground or sitting up on people's desks. It's all nicely teched up under the desk as things should be. So if you gotta, if you got to make a break for it, if it's a sunny day outside and you got to scooch that desk through the doorway, you could, you probably won't, but you could. Okay, that was number seven, last one. Number eight. A privacy shield. Let me finish with a kangaroo pouch. So when I say a privacy, privacy shield, it's that, that black thing that hangs down from the end of your desk. Originally I think it was like if you're wearing a skirt or a dress or something like that, it's so you can't see in if you were on the other side of the desk. But the best part of a privacy shield to me as a non skirt wearer is I have one that has like a mesh pouch that runs the whole length of it. So I've got a five foot desk and I've got a privacy panel that is 4ft long attached to the back underside of the desk, hangs down in front of the desk. But then on my side of that panel is like a mesh pouch. And in that mesh pouch, I can put anything and everything. I don't know if we're going to get into chord management this week, but the biggest problem with chord management is, and we've probably all been here. You spend two hours just, okay, we probably haven't all been here to this level. You spend too much time optimizing that. That cord setup. You're feeling ambitious. Everything's like all tightly wrapped and packed and zip tied. And then you realize, crap, I gotta change this one thing. And you now have to like undo this entire thing. And before you know it, you've totally ruined your whole cord management setup. Right. Here's the thing. This little kangaroo pouch on the privacy shield, it just like holds all that loose stuff. And so when you're plugging and unplugging something, all that loose cord, it can just go down into the privacy shield. You can't see it from in front of the desk because the privacy shield is showing it. Obviously it is not loose under the desk because it is all tucked up into that little kangaroo pouch. I'm gonna have to put a bunch of links in the show notes for this stuff. So if this doesn't make sense, you can look there. But it is the single best cord management solution I've been able to find. Because like little like Velcro straps around cords and trying to attach it to different things, it all breaks down as soon as you have to move something. But that kangaroo pouch, it can just hold all of the loose stuff and it keeps it up out of the way and you can't even see it because the whole privacy shield is black. And even if I was looking at it from my side. Hang on, let me look. Okay. I can kind of sort of see it, but I never look under my desk like that and it's not getting in the way of my tuttietes. It's all like tucked up behind the desk. Today's episode, gang. It's sponsored in part by the fine folks at Live Flow. Did you know Live Flow has over 100 spreadsheet templates that anyone can just go out and swipe these templates they've built out in Google sheets for all sorts of things. I'm looking at it right now. We got a four week rolling cash flow forecast, a 13 week cash flow forecast board reporting template, break even, analysis template budget, the actuals consolidated AP dashboard, business, KPI dashboard. All this stuff you can just go swipe on the Live Flow website. Literally just copy the template and if you want, you can just make use of those. But here's the problem. Those spreadsheets, they're not just going to magically update with the information from the accounting software, right? You're going to have to go, you gotta go look over there. You gotta get the thing, you gotta bring it over there next month, you gotta do the same thing. Something changes, you gotta do it again. So if you want, yeah, go swipe those spreadsheets and spend the rest of your days keying in figures manually. Or swipe the spreadsheet. Get started with Live Flow, which will automatically sync from QuickBooks Online that data into those templates. Works with the templates they'll give you works with regularly. Any old spreadsheet you use, if you already got one that you love, you can make it smart by connecting it to QuickBooks. They rolled out a bunch of stuff in the last year from budgeting. You can sync budgets in from qbo. Big thing they did a couple months back was launch consolidations. So you can roll up groupings in like a visual way whether those different companies have the same chart of accounts or not. So if you are ready to make some big brain auto updating spreadsheets or even if you just want to swipe some templates, get a taste of what it's all about. Check out Live Flow in the link in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by Team up, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between teamup and all the other offshoring options is that Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, Gals gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Zero, QBO and DeX. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just. Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky ol inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take Robert Half reference. We ever gonna get Robert Half to sponsor this pod? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know, I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about team up. So there you go. Eight things your desk needs. If you've made it this far without buying anything, drop a comment. Holding strong with some sort of emoji that makes sense. And I've got five desk wishlist items. Big desk if you're listening. These are things that we want from desks that we don't have or at least don't have in the right way today. Number one built in cable tracks. So there was a desk that got kickstarted a few years ago and then I don't think ever actually got made. And on the top it looked like a, like a regular old desk. And you may have seen these real fancy like new age desks with like screens built into the surface of the desk and stuff like that. And that just always feels to me like something that's going to not age very well. I don't know if we're still in the reality of a 20 year buy here when it comes to desks. That just doesn't seem to be how furniture works anymore. But even if I'm gonna use a desk for like eight years, a screen that's built into my desk feels like it's gonna be dated really quickly. And this was one of those sort of new agey desks. It didn't have any screens in it, but on the underside of it it had. I don't know if it was like molded plastic or whatever it was, but it had all of these different tracks running through it. So tuck cords up into these tracks and. Oh my gosh, just the thought of doing that was so satisfying. The entire underside of the desk was all of these little tracks that could hold your chords and keep them up out of the way. I'm into that, man. And that actually seems like a nice balance between like it will hold it up out of the way, but then it's not going to be a giant pain to redo it all if you have to pull something out and like add something or remove something. A number two desk wishlist item for me. Power as standard. The little plugs on the top of the desk, those things are clutch. They come in super, super handy. Not a super great aesthetic if you have to like vertically plug in. Think of Like a cell phone charger into the top of your desk to charge something. Not a great like long term look, but in a pinch, having that power plug on your desk, super nice. Cause what's the alternative? You're like looking around, around the baseboards in the room, like what's the nearest power plug? Or what's the nearest power strip that I ran to a power plug. And there is no aesthetically pleasing way to like put a power strip, leave it sitting on a desk or something like that. So it's always ugly. I think the built in power plugs on the top of the desk that is the least ugly of all the options. And with a sit stand desk you already have to plug it into power anyways. So you're gonna have an additional thing you gotta plug into power then. But that's not a big deal for me. Number three wish list lighter. Goodness sakes. We come a long ways from Omega desk and how furniture used to be, but gosh, they are just still bloody heavy. And for a guy like me, that's, that's on the move that matters. I have a scar on the top of my foot from moving. This was early in my career from moving the desk of the managing partner. He had the biggest and heaviest desk. Wasn't afraid to tell you how long it's been around and how impressive it is. Was moving it with I think there were 12 other men. And at one point we had to set it down in the corner of it. Got set down on the top of my foot. Not sure how it happened, but it's one of those things where as soon as soon as it starts happening you realize this isn't going to be good. And then it was much too heavy to get my foot out from under. And then it kind of takes your breath away. And you, you want to make the noises that will help to make this stop, but you can't. It's one of those situations. I still have a scar on the top of my foot from that. That's a whole story. That whole. I don't know if I should tell that we moved offices. This firm had been in a building for over 60 years. This was early in my career. And you've got like you probably got 30 professionals working there. And in order to save money on movers, we didn't hire movers. And I think we were down and out of commission for like two weeks. You got like 30 professionals that are all billing out 150 plus bucks an hour. But to save money to not have to hire movies, we Got our own truck. And these are not. This is not an office of crossfitters. I don't mean to be indelicate. It is a wonder that nobody was killed hand trucking a file cabinet of 40 year old paper files down a flight of stairs. I digress. A number four on the wish list. Bigger casters, man. Okay, wheels are step one. But don't give me these itty bitty baby casters. You try to move this thing across the floor and there's like a tiny USB cable there. You'd think you're like a suburban driving into a concrete median. That desk will not like. There's nothing you can do to jump that cord when you have these little tiny casters. Just give me some bigger wheels that can roll over something. And then number five. This is a little more ambitious because I really enjoy mounting things to the underside of my desk. There's got to be like a more. Somebody could totally build a modular system. Ikea, listen and give me like a modular desk system that has like threaded mounts under my desk with a whole system of things that like thread into that. Oh my gosh, the platform lock in you could sell. I mean like under desk. Like computer mounts, like mounts for your battery backup. A whole system of things that can be mounted under your desk. One problem with mounting things under your desk is this desk is solid wood. It's bamboo, but screwing into it, it's a little dodgy. I'm not a carpenter, but you want to be careful not to then screw through the top of the desk right when you're like mounting a metal bracket to the underside of it. So that bit of. It's a little touch and go. But if somebody built like a system where this stuff was modular, you already had like these threaded mounting points under the desk. That would be nice. If anybody from IKEA is listening, slide on into these DMs. We'll do a brand partnership. Okay, listen, I linked a bunch of stuff in the show notes. This week's going to be a great detox of me shouting at you about posting on social media. But I also want to hear from you. Give me your best desk wisdom. A lot of people have been sharing pics of their setups on social media after Twitter's hottest influencer, Mike Sylvester, shared his setup. Man. If you aren't experiencing this on Twitter, it's absolutely incredible. Give me your hottest desk takes and tomorrow we're going to dive into computer hardware and monitors. What do accountants like talking about more than monitors? Very divisive subject though. We'll get into that tomorrow and I'll see you there.