254 The Doc Mgmt Services We’re Giving Away FOR FREE

Your clients, they are not organized, and oftentimes we pay the price for it. We end up getting tasked with getting their crap together because they just can't do it. And I'm going to share today a number of examples where we tried to roll out a service that just didn't work because our clients were not organized enough. And then eventually we started offering organization as a service. Some examples both on the accounting side and on the tax side, where it's stuff that we're probably giving away for free and not charging for, it's making the delivery of our services harder. And it experience when we like rolled out a service and said, hey, what if we just did this for you? Most of the time, clients were like, oh, that's great, because I was actually wasting a ton of time on that, or this person on my team was trying to do it and not doing it particularly well. So running through our progression through this, what those services actually looked like, they ended up being pretty profitable because there were things that lived kind of at the intersection of stuff that we could either automate or offshore. So come on in, let's talk about document management. My background was in running a tax firm, but then I kicked off a cast practice or an accounting practice in our firm for the first time. And as soon as we started wading into things like supporting clients on payroll or bill pay or anything that required them to send us documents on a recurring basis or to like pass along something that they got from somebody else, like an invoice or a notice from a tax agency, anything like that. Boy, they, they always seem to find ways to screw it up that you just weren't expecting. And the more embedded we got in these people's businesses, the more that became a problem. And there would oftentimes be breakdowns in communications and finger pointing when somebody was supposed to send you something and they didn't. And when you start pulling in members of their team as well, it gets even worse because you've got like some, several people playing telephone. In my experience. Also when other members of their team are involved, it is sometimes easier for that member of the team to convince your client of their position than it is yours, because they're working close together kind of all the time, or at least closer than you are working with them. And so you end up with this like he said, she said sort of thing. And it's just really frustrating. The most glaring example of this that we ran into on the accounting side, and I'll show you how we bumped up against it on the Tax side as well. On the accounting side, this came up in a really like the most hairy way when we rolled out a bill pay service, which for us was actually really good and really profitable. I can make more money doing that than I could doing the actual bookkeeping. A good example of a thing adjacent to bookkeeping that nobody will ever ask you to do unless you do the bookkeeping first. And so we're like, well, how, how hard can this be, by the way? If you're thinking about this? In the past we've done a full episode on like all the nitty gritty about introducing a bill pay service. It's one of those things where you're like, well, we pay bills, we know how to do that, we'll just do it for people. And then you start wading into it and you're like, oh, geez, okay, we gotta make sure we got the internal controls sorted out and kind of all these different things. But all of that could be figured out. The most frustrating thing, hands down, was just getting the freaking bills from them, like on a timely basis, not a pile of stuff every three weeks. And half of them are already late. And then the client blames you for the bills being late. And so when you start having this conversation with the client, they're very much anchored in, well, what is the process today? And oftentimes that process is, well, somebody opens in the mail and then they put it into a basket. And unfortunately, a lot of times it's every week I go through all the bills and then I write checks and they get mailed out. But it's amazing, everybody seems to do this differently. If they had a bookkeeper before, sometimes they'll stuff all the bills into an envelope and then like a bookkeeper will come and pick them up and print all the checks and then they sign them. Like, people have all these wildly different awful manual ways of managing these things because for some reason a huge volume of bills are just still sent via paper. And that's really annoying. But the lack of standardization, even around bills that are sent digitally also creates a ton of headaches. Because some of them will go to one person, some will go to a different person, some of them go to a generic email address. And centralizing all that stuff and changing the process so that they all have to come to a single place for one person to be in charge of getting them paid can be a real headache. And it's not only like a one time headache, it is an ongoing headache. And so you have a. If you have a business that gets, be it 10 bills or a hundred bills every single month, you're relying on every single other person that's part of that process to properly pass that thing along and waste a little bit of time in the process every single time they have to do it. And it got so bad for us, the finger pointing and people not handing that stuff along or waiting a week and then handing it along. And then it's like, oh, oh, we missed a, we missed a discount on this invoice because the person sat on it for a week and then the client's mad and you're like, well, let's try to figure out when did they get it and how many days did they sit on it and then when did we get it and how many days did we sit on it. It's just a mess. And it got so bad that we actually went as far as in some cases building out lists of the bills that a client should have every single month and when they usually come in so that we would actually like proactively follow up with all these different people in a company to be like, hey, Tina, just, just a reminder, I need the regents bill should have gotten there a couple of days ago, and it ended up being just such a massive waste. And everybody in the process is annoyed because they don't want to stop what they're doing to just pass that bill along. And I'm like, how do people manage this stuff? This is a mess. And some people will say like, oh, you just set the email address to go to like a bill pay software. And maybe that's better than having no plan. But it's also a nightmare when you gotta change bill pay softwares. Like, if something just goes directly from the vendor to that bill pay platform. What about when I kill my subscription? Like, I still need copies of the invoices and all that stuff. So this is where we actually decided, no, this is something that I think that we can manage for people and ultimately landed on like, the only true solution to this is us managing all of this flow of paper for you. And this is an issue on the tax side as well, because even if you get, what is it, 8821 or power, power of attorney, Even if you get something that should ensure that you get copies of notices and that sort of thing from, say, the irs, the IRS is far from the only agency. And in my experience that can also be like a far from reliable way of ensuring that you actually do get everything. And I have actually talked with a growing number of tax firms now who, interestingly, will use virtual mail addresses. This is services. There's a whole bunch of these services now. Services like Earth. ClassMail was kind of one of the first ones to do it. Basically, they give you an address and all of your mail goes there and they scan your mail. They can do other stuff, like if checks get sent there, they can actually deposit those payments for you. But basically it's almost like an email inbox where you can just visually see all the mail there. If you actually need them to send you the hard copies, you can like click a button and they will mail you the actual thing. But particularly as more companies are distributed, you know, if you travel a lot, the flexibility of having an inbox, that is your mail inbox that anybody can access and you can give, like granular kind of access to according to roles and all that, that's really handy. It's like handling physical mail the same way that you would handle email. And I'm seeing a growing number of tax firms with their clients actually setting up virtual mailboxes for clients and using the address of that on tax filings. And in the case of, you know, the irs, for example, they're just looking for the mailing address. It may get a little more sticky when it has to be a physical address. Although many of these virtual mailbox services say they will give you a quote, unquote, physical address. And like, what's okay there and what's not okay there, I don't really know. But I can tell you having your client set this up and having them use that address on all of their tax filings gives you, in my opinion, a much more clear, complete record of correspondence when everything is going to that address. And obviously it takes time for the address to change over and all that. Now, there's some obvious things you gotta look out for here. Like, this tool would have to go through the same kind of security due diligence process that you would do with any other cloud app that you use. The client would have to probably opt into this. Like, I don't know how other firms set it up. The way that I would probably do it is explain to the client kind of how the service works and have them set it up and then get us access. So we have shared access to this inbox. So the client is opting into this. And anytime something comes in from any agency, because we're using this on all of our business and personal filings, presumably anytime something comes in from any agency, we both get notified. And so at the very least, it eliminates the issue of something coming in and them not notifying you, right? Or maybe the bigger issue for a lot of our business clients. They get it and then they sit on it for 30 days and then they send it to you like 48 hours before the deadline. For some reason that always happens. This episode sponsored in part by the folks at Forwardly. Are you sick of ACH transfers that stick to bank hours or checks that get caught in the mail? Of course you are. That's disgusting. Stop being stuck with slow and expensive payment options and say hello to the future of money with Forwardly's award winning cash flow management platform. Tell you what, I moved some money around this morning and nobody involved in that exchange has won awards. I can tell you that. 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Sign up for free@fordlee.com or check out the link in the show notes to learn more. 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 Xerocubio 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 old 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 were going to get Robert Half to sponsor this, but 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. And so in the case of like the tax side, there's probably a service to roll out here. I don't know that you would want to do this for free unless it's just like the default package of what you do for everybody. There's probably a service there where you're a little more hands on with any sort of correspondence that they get to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. And the vast majority of people I think will really appreciate this even if they're relatively on top of things. The idea of like a standalone inbox for all of your like business compliance agency correspondence, that actually sounds really nice because it is a entirely separate sort of bucket to all of the junk mail and everything else that comes through that makes you deprioritize physical mail. I bumped into an increasing number of firms doing this. Thought that was interesting, some due diligence that you would definitely want to do on it before rolling out kind of your own version of that. But all that is to say, even on the tax side, there's almost like a managed version of this that you can help clients with. And even if that client goes away to another firm, they still have ownership of that, that virtual mailbox. They would just have to remove you from the account the same way that they would remove you from a QuickBooks account or something. Something else. But a little more about how we went really deep on this for our accounting clients. Ultimately the solution that we landed on for the problem of when I set up an account with a new vendor, how do I want them to send me invoices? I don't want them to mail them to me. But whose email address should they go to? They shouldn't go to the email address for the inbox of the BillPay platform, in my opinion, because I still want that thing to come hit my servers and then ultimately go to the destination. And I could still set up an email routing rule so that they automatically went to that bill pay service. But I don't want it going directly from the vendor to the bill pay service. Because if something happens with the bill pay service, if we change to a different one, I want like the old record of how everything came in. I just want it to come to me first. And so what we landed on that worked really well, honestly, is just creating a standalone, like accounting.com, the client's domain or invoices or something like that. And this could be in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. This is usually what they call a shared mailbox. So it's not an alias of someone else's address. It is a standalone shared mailbox that any members in the organization can have access to. But then also for that shared mailbox, you can also set up aliases for it. So for example, Jim's Car Wash, everybody has their own email addresses there. But we're going to create a shared inbox that is accountingimscarwash.com and the very basic level, like the basic version of this is with all of your vendors, the email address that you're going to use that you want invoices to come to is accountingimscarwash.com now the service that we would offer is we would be responsible for everything that came into that inbox. We would monitor the inbox for the client and think about all of the work that this removed. Particularly for companies with a big volume of bills and stuff coming through that was touching so many different people. It's eliminating all of that risk of something slipping through the cracks and all of those touch points from all those different people that oftentimes were only touch points that serve to get the thing to you. So we're genuinely taking work off of people's plate at this point and cutting out a whole bunch of the finger pointing and a whole bunch of the time delay that it just takes for somebody to scan in a paper invoice that they got or get caught up on their email and send you that thing or find it in their junk mail a week later. And so the way we would communicate this to clients is basically this inbox becomes the hub of all of that type of information for your business. It may take you a bit of time, but we want to get things switched over to this. It'll just keep you Much more organized. And then we manage that inbox for you. And clients will pay well for this because it is a job that a human is otherwise going to have to do. And in the case of most small businesses, most of them are separate staffing constrained. Like, finding the next right person for them is hard. And if I can shave 10 hours a week off of a couple members of their team, like, if I can save them that time, that's a huge win for them. They will happily have that person spend their time doing something else, not like shuffling papers. So we would come in and we had sort of spitball, like, how much time are they wasting on this right now? And this would gauge sort of how we set the fee. And this is advantageous for us because we're framing the fee in terms of like FTEs, like relative to how many people were working on this and how big of a problem was it. And I don't know, some accountants feel like scandalized by doing this. Like, if you had the equivalent of half an FTE working on this and you're paying these people 70 grand a year. A lot of accountants, I think, balk at the idea of coming in and say, okay, we'll do this for 35 a year. The reality is, for the client, that is a screaming deal because you're taking all that stuff on for them. They're not having to manage you the same way that they would manage a team member. They don't have all the other overhead that comes with an actual employee besides the payroll cost. Like, that is a great opportunity for you to run a super high margin service. So we would explain it that way to the client. But then on the back end, we are doing this in a massively more automated way than the client ever did it. And so step one is get everything pointing to that email address. Step two is setting up routing rules for how to handle all those different things. And you're going to have a mix of receipts, a mix of bills, a mix of bills that have already been paid because they're on a credit card, auto pay, all of these kind of different scenarios. And depending on that logic, all of those things may have a different home. And this is where, like email inbox rules are gold. And you can set these up for every type of document that is being sent to you. So if the monthly health insurance invoice is something that has to get paid, I can set up an inbox rule to handle that email that comes through every single month. I can set that inbox rule up once. And going forward, it's always going to auto route into, you know, for example, the bill pay system or maybe a couple of different places. So we're setting up like rails for every single thing that comes in there so it doesn't have to be managed at all going forward and it just goes automatically to the place that it needs to go to. Now remember, we came into the service charging, you know, what it was costing them to pay humans to do this stuff manually. And we're now setting it up to like be processed automatically until the end of time. We get that stuff set up, we set up the rules once and we no longer have to fiddle with that until it breaks. Like something changes in a couple of years with how they send out the bills or something like that. Meanwhile, the actual like for example bill pay service in the past half of the time that we spent on that bill pay service was trying to get them to give us the information. That service is now twice as profitable because we have better access to information than we've ever had before. So we've got a new super profitable document management service. But then the existing service just got way more profitable also because we have easy access to that information. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Accountant staffing. The people who find you awesome hires in the Philippines to make your wildest getting stuff done dreams come true. I've shared many times. I hired a bunch of folks in the Philippines, completely changed our approach to fulfillment in our firm. I got a resume in front of me that is an actual person. Cloud accountant staffing placed into a firm. You actually get both a resume and a video intro. Based on that, you can decide if you want to do an interview with them or not. Let me just run you through this. This person got their bachelor's in accounting in 2019. Ever since then they've worked with US based public accounting firms. How's this sound? Daily recording of bank transactions, monthly reconciliations, preparing financials, posted payroll journal entries, clean up work for new projects, 1099 filing work directly with clients and even became the trainer for their colleagues on QBO practices. Experience with qbo Xero Gusto QBO Certified. I mean you run an accounting firm, you get a resume like this. You're like yes, please. Right? This person's actually got experience. Not an accountant that's just like gone and work for a company, but somebody with a bunch of public accounting experience working with US companies. That's what I'm looking for. They know what like volume, getting the books done looks like. Again, this is a real person A Real Resume when you work with Cloud Accountant Staffing, basically all you do, you hop on a call with them, you say, here's my needs. They have recruiters on the ground in the Philippines who will go find great applicants for you, bring all that info back to you. Resumes, intro, videos, all that. You decide whether you want to interview them and only ever cut a check to Cloud Accountant Staffing. If you make a hire, what do you have to lose? Huh? Huh? Learn more at the link in the show Notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow Pop Quiz look to your left. Look to your right. You're in Excel or Google Sheets, if you're into that kind of thing. How long is it going to take you to pull QuickBooks data from any of your clients? Any report into that spreadsheet that you're in right now? The answer to this pop quiz? It'll take you a little bit, little while, decent amount of time. But imagine if your Excel or your Google Sheets just had a button you could push a magic button that would pull in any old data from QuickBooks from any of your clients that you have access to in qbo. Let's talk about this magic button a little more. Here's what would happen. You click on it, a little side panel would come out. It would greet you. It'd say, hello Keith, how's your day going? It'd give you a drop down that was every single QBO file you have access to, and then a second dropdown of all of the QuickBooks reports you could possibly want to pull out of it. And then various other buttons and knobs for adjusting settings, filters, and all that stuff. Just to be super clear, this button exists and it's called Live Flow. Anytime you are hustling spreadsheets, you are a mere few clicks away from dumping out some data from an accounting file. Not just once. You can set it to update like ongoing. You can set the date ranges of the reports to be like rolling, like relative to today. So like you know, an AP report that is always up to date or something like that. Because you know where you oftentimes need your QuickBooks data not in QuickBooks. And you know who I oftentimes don't want to be in my client's QuickBooks file, the only place that data is almost anyone. Oftentimes I don't even want my client in that QuickBooks file. That's live Flow basically sticks a button right in your spreadsheet app that let you pull anything from any of your clients. Quick QuickBooks files. Learn more about that one link in the show notes. Now where this gets really wild is in more complex business situations where you have company groups and maybe some bills are built to a holding company and split across like several subsidiaries or just more messy things like that. Probably the biggest and sweatiest version that we had of this was when we would do work with, you know, groups of 20 plus dental clinics. And we would serve as kind of like the centralized back office for all this. You take the same concept of a shared mailbox, but then you use a bunch of different aliases for that shared mailbox that you could build routing rules around. So we basically had an alias for every single location, but then we also had like a sub alias for different types of things for that location. So we basically had a three letter shorthand for each different location. And then we had invoices or receipts, I think there's one other one. But we would use all these different email addresses to basically automatically map where everything needed to go. So anytime that something came into XYZ location receipts, it would go to the receipt management location, like software for that specific location. And this got to the point where, I mean, I think we're managing, I don't know, there was a massive volume of things coming into that every single day. And the vast majority of it, the flow of it was totally automated. And it's something that we know how to do that our clients just don't know how to do. And so that is, that's one client. And for a group of, you know, 20 plus locations of a dental clinic, for example, this is like a role that you hire someone for and plunk them in some sort of centralized or virtual office to do this job. So we could charge very, very well for managing this stuff. I mean, I think that group, we basically had like two people working full time on it. And this service alone pays for one of those people. So that's just one company group. You stumble into a service like this and you're like, dang, how do we find more of this? And so we were kind of looking at, boy, should we start doing some work with other large groups? Because this sort of centralized back office thing at a larger scale we're finding that we can do really profitably. So what are some other contexts where we could use this same skill set to remove a whole bunch of manual work for people? And the only reason we ever even started down that path was we tried to start a bill pay service and just found that like the process of getting those documents from clients was a real headache. And rather than letting them dictate that process and be annoyed with us, we said no. We actually think the better thing here is if you just get out of the way and we manage this inbox of yours. And it was, it created less friction for everybody else. The clients really liked us. So they were basically like, man, anything that my team is managing that you can do for us, please let us know and we will happily hand it over because I have more other things I would love for my team to do and I'd rather not just have to keep hiring. So they happily jumped out of the way for this. And we were adding services that were not subject to the biggest constraints in my business. Those being hiring tax talent and really like high level advisory people managing this stuff day to day. It was actually both automatable and offshore. And those were the things that I got really excited about was was there a really annoying pain for my client? That is something that we could systematize and either entirely automate or automate with the support of our offshore team. And so every single day we had folks that would be in the inboxes handling any of the exceptions we teach in best practices for setting up and managing those rules. And they were just kind of playing like air traffic controller, making sure everything was coming through fine. Not unlike, you know, somebody that's doing like help desk support, but for like a big volume of clients to make sure that everything was going where it needed to go automatically. And in the end this actually worked in support of all of the other services that we did. Solving some really painful problems like not being able to get stuff from clients timely the tax one. Admittedly, I know less about the notion of using a virtual mailbox address on your tax filings. Some people are sketched out by that. I've used virtual mailbox services for a really long time, never had any problems. They've been around for decades. I would actually encourage you if you can find a way to experiment with, with two things. One, set up a virtual mailbox. It's just a like if you still get physical mail, it's just a fundamentally better way of getting physical mail. I have never had any consistency issues myself. You can get certified mail or you can get virtual mail services that are like hipaa compliant and SoC2 type 2 compliant, like more secure than most of the apps in our space. So I'm not too worried about security here. But also do your own due diligence. So give a virtual mailbox service a try. Doesn't mean you have to move your entire business to it, but maybe try it on a small scale and then second create accounting at your domain. Like just try this workflow of centralizing all of this stuff. And once you've kind of got your head around how to do that for your own business, you end up being pretty convicted as you're talking with your clients about what is the right way to manage this. And when you have that conversation, you could say like, here's how we do it. This is like how you can save a ton of time or if you want, we can just do it for you. And that's a good example of a service that just makes you into like such an indispensable part of their business. Like you're super embedded in the day to day. It makes what you do for them like very sticky. And once they've tasted that rainbow and they don't have to fuss with any of that stuff, like at that point they can't imagine going back and doing it any other way. I get jazzed about this kind of stuff. We talked about this last week. I really like the kind of off the traditional menu types of services from accounting firms that are solving very specific problems. Because frankly, I think that's where you make the best money is on the, like the stuff where there isn't a market set price and isn't subject to having to find, like really hard to find technical people that are capable of doing that stuff. We'd love to hear if you have much experience with any of these things, if you ever did like a document management service. A huge. I didn't even get to this. Another huge thing here is when you're doing bookkeeping services, what is the expectation for receipt management in certain countries? Receipt management, like in Canada is massively important. And admittedly in the US I think most entrepreneurs overlook it. I had two audits where a client got completely smoked for not being able to present receipts for most of their things. Like they basically went down the list and said, unless you can provide a receipt for this, we're not going to let you deduct it. And when a client comes to you to do bookkeeping, they may be coming with the assumption that you're going to be tracking down people to get a receipt for every single transaction or they may not think that's the case. Those are two wildly different scopes. Tracking down receipts for everything is a huge amount of work. But that's not to say it's not something that should be being done by someone. The problem is when you have a client that's never done it before and they come to you. Oftentimes they aren't willing to pay for the amount of effort that takes to get that done. But receipts like just like bills are another great example here where how do we create a centralized home for receipts? And is that something that I can manage for my clients, particularly if they've had somebody try to do this before and fallen on their face or it was astronomically time consuming? Those are great opportunities because they are intimately aware of the pain that it is and will have a different level of appreciation for your ability to make that pain go away. But if they're like most. In my experience, if they're like most business owners who have never really paid hardly any attention to receipt management, then it can be a hard thing to charge for because they just, they don't assign any value to it. That's why document management for bill pay was much easier for our clients to get behind than receipt management, unfortunately. Which is not to say it should be that way and that receipt management is not very important. But that was the case with our clients. Different markets, though, where there's a different level of importance assigned to receipt management. Totally different. But if there's a way that you can take that work off of their hands, man, folks will just jump out of your way. You got any experience with that sort of stuff? Drop in the comments. I'll see you tomorrow.