499 Accounting Firm Service Breakdown: Bookkeeping

Today we're kicking off the Service Delivery summer series. How to put all the services in your accounting firm on rails, make them more systematized and profitable than ever before to deliver, but also how to sell each of those things for every single service. How do we make this service feel more premium? Create the gold, silver and bronze version so that when it comes time to renew this service, the people you're serving today will see an even juicier life. Like more premium version, where they're like, oh, dang, I think I need that. And while that premium version costs quite a bit more behind the scenes, it's not a huge amount of heavy lifting for you. So we're starting today with just the bookkeeping service. A big one, obviously. But my goal is, in every single one of these episodes, you're gonna learn how to deliver this service in a more efficient way, but also come away with some ideas for how to do so in a way that commands greater fees than you've ever been able to before. Let's get into. Okay. If you're familiar with Jason on Firms lore, one of the. One of the biggest assets we've ever put out is our service library. And the whole notion of the service library is it's like every single service that most accounting firms offer, or the most common ones, but importantly, how those services differ. Like what aspects of service delivery are different from client to client? Because the biggest problem in accounting firm workflows is you got a whole bunch of experts just doing the work the way that they want to do the work. So how do you reign in all the work happening in your accounting firm to ensure that, well, anytime we're doing bookkeeping, it's done this way, tax prep is done this way, bill pays done that way. On the surface, that seems just fundamentally impossible, right? There's too many unique things about our clients and their needs and the ways that we service them. How could you ever possibly reign that stuff in? I'm here to tell you, buddy, it is possible. My background at an 80 year old firm, I didn't start it, believe it or not. But it's the same process that I used to reign in all the vastly different things we're doing on different engagements. And the result was what we call the service library, basically an internal vernacular, like naming labels that we can put on all the things that we do for clients. Because once you have a language for the things that we're willing to do for our clients, you find that for the first time, those projects start trending to be more similar Rather than what they normally do, which is they just become more different. Different every. Every month. Right. This client's asking for that. That client's asking for this. Got all these engagements going in different directions. The service library, this is how we start reeling them in to be more similar. Down in the show notes, I'll have a link to the entire service library resource along with, like, how to implement this, how to get buy in from your team. It's a pretty deep guide, but included in it is how to do it across 17 service lines. So let's get into what we're talking about today, which is specifically bookkeeping. What are all the different ways that we deliver bookkeeping to our clients? Can we explicitly call out what's different from engagement to get engagement and try to simplify this with the ultimate goal of this being. And this is like, you know, everybody always says, I just want to run a more systematized firm without really being clear about what exactly that means. Here's the North Star. As you have a lead come in the door, have some conversations, you want to work with them, you then put a proposal in front of them. And that proposal very clearly outlines all the things we're going to do for them. And the moment that proposal is accepted, if we've done this right, the service library, everything we're talking about here, once that proposal has been accepted, it could then be pushed to your task management system, where a set of tasks is populated based on what was in the proposal. And everybody on your team knows exactly what those tasks mean and how to do them. So that the person handling sales has only promised things that my fulfillment team knows how to do. Rather than stumbling into an engagement and being like, yeah, we could probably do this, probably do that, we do some other similar stuff. It's like, no, we've got a super clear internal language for what we're going to do for that client. That internal language, it might be different than the like sales language we use or what we call it when we talk with the client. But on the inside it's like, oh, no, we're doing bookkeeping two for this client, we're doing payroll three, we're doing 1040 prep one and our team, we know what bookkeeping two means, the client doesn't. But we've defined exactly what's included in that so that the people doing the work know exactly what they're supposed to execute on to fulfill the promises that we've made to the client. So let's get into the bookkeeping service. Specifically, what are all the ways that people do bookkeeping differently, we're not getting into like how it's done, like how you do a month end close. We're getting into what all the different ways that we do it for different clients so we can develop a language that kind of like nails down those expectations. Engagement over engagement. So the way I think about this is if I'm going to deliver a bookkeeping service, there's a collection of like service items that need to be nailed down that kind of define how we deliver that service. So first one is probably the biggest one. Frequency. How often are we doing it? Historically, the default for this has been monthly, right? This is something that obviously we would define in our practice management system. Wherever those tasks live. If I have a hundred bookkeeping projects, every single one of them has to have a frequency property so the people on my team know how often we're doing the books. Now I can tell you my practice. I built, I built a CAST practice, a bookkeeping practice to about one and a half million. And we built that from scratch. And we got everything wrong along the way that you would expect. Learned a lot of these lessons kind of the hard way. And one lesson we learned was we, we actually took on a number of books that we would do on a quarterly basis, usually because the client was kind of fee averse and didn't want to pay for what we would charge for monthly. And we're like, okay, we'll just do it quarterly, then update it less frequently. I think I ultimately decided that was just a bad idea. Whether you're a tax shop or a bookkeeping shop, like running a profitable practice kind of boils down to what's your busiest time of the month or of the year and how much work can you get through that bottleneck? And for a bookkeeping practice, your crunch is inevitably the month end close. The fact that everybody wants their books as early in the month as possible, but you can really only get them done so quickly. I mean, somebody can get done on the first of the month, but if you get everything done by the 10th of the month, what do you do the rest of the month? And as I sold some clients quarterly bookkeeping, we ended up with the same problem on a quarterly basis. So then we got creative and some of those people we would like shift off the normal calendar quarter and we're like, oh, what quarterly really means is we'll update it four times a year. And so we do some on like off months. And it was just dancing around the problem that was we were just Trading one constraint for another one that I don't know was necessarily better. So in the end we actually ended up pretty much doing monthly bookkeeping for everyone. But increasingly people are now doing weekly bookkeeping and trying to mitigate that like monthly crunch as much as possible. So that when you get to the end of the month, the books are actually pretty much already caught up because you were in there every single week. But this is a very important thing to define for any one of your client engagements. What is the frequency going to be? Is it going to be annual, Is it going to be quarterly, Is it going to be monthly, going to be weekly? Could it even be, you know, quote unquote, real time? However you define that and without getting like too far down the rabbit hole of sort of optimizing your, your bookkeeping practice workflow, this is maybe the biggest trend right now is actually moving the focus away from the month end close to instead give clients the real time information that they need pretty much immediately after month end or even week over week. Because everything kind of builds to like that month end close date. And somebody will be like, I really need this on the 10th of the month. And so you get all that stuff over to them by the 10th and what do they do? They flip to page six and go down and there's like two or three numbers that they really, really want to see. And that's the entire reason that they wanted the full report. The whole rest of the reports they don't understand. But we've now done all of this work just so they could pull like two or three numbers. But what if instead we knew what two or three numbers they wanted and we could give them those numbers on like a pretty much real time basis? If we can do that, we've then like depressurize the entire month end close. They feel like they're getting a much faster delivery of that information and we've got more space to do like the formal close when we've got time. So there is right now a bit of a trend towards more of like this kind of real time reporting approach because it solves for some of the frustrations around everybody wanting their month end close at the same time. So first service item that has to be defined in any bookkeeping engagement. It's your frequency. The others we're going to cruise through here, reporting platform accounting method, the report package, what gets delivered, the delivery method, the close speed, and what financial statements are included. Those are kind of my main seven service items. We'll cruise through here quickly. There's a few other potential service items that you may consider. But then last, I want to show you a whole bunch of ways that you can set up quote, bookkeeping work on a three tier proposal that will make it feel like very premium, like a gold package sort of option versus a more base level, like bronze package sort of option. With the goal of the gold package being 2-3x as much as bronze, but not a ton more work. Okay, second service item here, platform. What accounting software are we using to get the books done? Is usually QuickBooks Online, Xero, QuickBooks Desktop, maybe intact NetSuite, maybe even Excel. But again, the North Star here is like we have a language for how this project gets pushed into our task management system that defines every aspect of how my team's going to do the work and so what accounting platform they choose. It definitely impacts how and where the work gets done, but may also impact like your price and whether you're willing to take on the project. If my like bookkeeping 2 package is kind of our default, like monthly, we're delivering it by the 15th of the month, they just get PDFs of the financials. Like if bookkeeping 2 is my chicken parm bookkeeping package, then I probably have a preferred platform to do that work in, right? For most firms, US Firms these days, that's qbo. Elsewhere, zero is probably more most common. This episode is brought to you in part by Stanford Tax, one of my favorite new tax like AI tax workflow tools. Stanford Tax actually heard from a big number of you very happy users. Stanford continues to evolve and one of the big shifts in 2025 is that it is now not just a tool for like serving as a portal for your clients to submit information into, but it's also just an internal tool for your firm now because it does so many useful things with those source docs. So basically you pile in all that info that the client gave you and it will compare those items against the pro forma checklist that it generated and tell you, okay, what do we have now? What do we still need? But it will also bookmark those documents. It will rename the documents, it will warn you about stuff like it being the wrong tax year. It will split bundled documents so they give it to you in a single PDF. It'll figure out how that ought to be broken out. The number of years I was putting like divider pages in and sitting in front of that scanner, if you know, you know. And Stanford now rolls all that up into a binder in the cloud where you can do Your PDF annotations right there inside of Stanford Tax. Okay. Down with Adobe Acrobat. The world doesn't need us drawing more red squares in Adobe Acrobat. Okay. This excites me because it's pulling all this stuff into the cloud where every new AI model makes this whole workflo better. That's super exciting. To learn more about Stanford Tax, check out the link down in the. In the. In the. In the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing. Here's the thing about client billing. You can't bill for the time you spend billing. You can't, you can't. It is pure waste. And we're bad at billing because it's, it's icky. You let things slide, you don't get paid, you waste time. Waste time chasing people for money. That's not what I did. I would just, I didn't want to waste time chasing them and so I would just. I just eat it. Don't do that. This is where Ignition comes in. The leading revenue generation platform for accounts and professional services. When I was running my firm, Ignition wiped out our ar, it's true. And significantly reduced the time spent billing clients saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first year because they didn't have to bill all that stuff manually. Man with the condition. We want more business with improvements, impressive online proposals. No more hustling, hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pull payment up front or at the end of a job when it was done. No more dialing for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better managed scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more money and genuinely made us more profitable. Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignition app.com. but link in the show notes. Third service item here, accounting method. Is it cash, is it accrual? Or is it some sort of hybrid that's like custom to that client? Again, your base level bookkeeping stuff, probably going to be cash basis, right? And this is where if a client comes in with more complex needs and they actually need accrual based books, this is probably a higher service level. Maybe that's bookkeeping three. Bookkeeping. For that vernacular, say bookkeeping three. That is just a collection of service items to simplify the language of how your team talks about getting this work done. Because absent this language, every single project's different. We can't build task templates and then you build SOPs like processes for the entire client engagement rather than service level SOPs like a process document for here's how we do every Bookkeeping 3 and then those 10 engagements you have that fall under Bookkeeping 3, you can use that Bookkeeping 3 SOP for all those 10 engagements rather than building completely custom SOPs for all 10 of those engagements. Now, reality is, every engagement, it's going to have some special, you know, something slightly different about it. The goal of this approach, the service library, this language, is to make as much of that common as possible so that only the last 20% is defined as like custom to that engagement. Right? So rather than the whole thing being custom and every engagement being bespoke, we want to get as much of it to be the same as possible. So we're not doing different things for different clients. Okay. Service items we covered so far, frequency, platform and accounting method. Fourth one report package. Folks deliver financials in wildly different ways. Some will use most. Most common is probably just the PDF report from the accounting software. Sometimes you will send them nothing. We had some clients like this don't know that I recommend it. Others will use reporting platforms like a Fathom or a Reach or something like that to generate more fancy reports. But report package exactly what gets delivered. That needs to be defined as part of the engagement. Now, fifth service item here, delivery method. This is how we send that information to the client. It could be not delivered at all, could be emailed, could be sent with like a loom video. You could do a live meeting with the client like on Zoom. You can do an in office meeting. You do a meeting at the client's office. These are all different delivery methods. Can you tell yet in my firm, like what a big hot mess of different things we did for different people? Like, that's the idea. Here is how do we create a system that's as flexible as possible? Because I'm super convicted that once you have a system, the things that your teams and your partners recommend, they are the things from the system. Rather than like letting the clients choose their own adventure and ask for some random thing, you can be like, oh no, actually, like we do this. Like, let's do it this way. Okay. Six bookkeeping service item. You got to define the close speed. How many business days to complete the close after period end. Pick a number. This is across the board from three days to, you know, 25 days. This is something internally that we need to define in order to help the team understand how to prioritize this. A different way of Doing this would be like having sort of priority groups. So you have group one, group two, group three. All that means is clients all belong to a group and that's the order that they get worked on in. We used dates like number of days. I don't know if it really makes that much of a difference. Now we don't necessarily communicate this externally. Again, everything here, these service items, how we talk about our bookkeeping service, this is the internal language that we use. And then externally what we put in, like our marketing materials and proposals and stuff like that, that could be something more client oriented, you know, like named, kind of along the lines of what they do. Like if I'm working with pest control companies, I probably name these things in a way that's going to feel more comfortable to them. Like what do they call it? The naming is probably going to look more like that. But then on the back end internally, that stuff all maps to our language for the work that we're going to do for them. Number seven, last service item I've got here is financial statements. What statements are included in the deliverable? Usually the only variable here is whether or not you deliver a statement of cash flows. Definitely worth calling out here because it's something you can charge more for. Not everybody necessarily wants it, but some clients, it's almost like all they want to see, right? So somewhere in your task management system that property has to be defined. What financial statements are we going to include now some other potential service items you might have. These are some that we toyed with in my firm info intake method. So we had some clients where we could self service and get all the stuff that we needed to get the work done. Other clients where it was like pulling teeth and required all these jumping through hoops in order to gather all the information we needed from different places. For a time we actually tracked this as a separate service item because we found this was a very big driver in how profitable that project could be month over month. So this might be worth tracking separately, maybe not. Another potential service item is number of stakeholders for uncategorized transactions. We had some clients where he had 20 plus people in a business that may have to provide some context around their purchasing. If this is very core to the bookkeeping services you deliver, it might actually be worth including this as a service item class or location tracking. If that's a big one for you, that can cause a lot more headaches in the bookkeeping process. Last two potential ones to include transaction volume and account volume. Some folks will price projects this way we never did actually found that transaction volume and account volume didn't always necessarily represent how hard it was to do a project. We had some very high volume stuff that was easy to do, some very low volume stuff that was very hard to do. So we didn't use that in our setup. So a very basic example of how a bookkeeping project could look or a bookkeeping service could look in your firm. You know, bookkeeping one may be the most basic version, maybe that's quarterly books in QuickBooks, desktop, cash basis and all you do is you email them PDF statements, maybe bookkeeping 2 is monthly and QBO. And you use, you know, reach reporting, generate some cool looking reports and you send a loom delivery video, maybe bookkeeping three, maybe that's monthly but accrual basis. And you do, you know, a live meeting or something like that. The first time you roll out this sort of regime of having a more rigid vernacular around the stuff that you do, it's going to be hard to shoehorn it all into something that specific. And I've got a video on this if you grab the service library template in the show notes. But basically step one to this exercise with your team is like throwing up on a board. What are all the things we do for everyone? What are all the ways we do bookkeeping? Engagements across all of our projects and we first just throw all that spaghetti on the wall to see what they all have in common. Because when you first start thinking this way, it may be that like 25% of those engagements have overlap because, you know, maybe almost all of them we're doing in the same accounting platform or something like that. But the goal is to get you from 25% to 30% to 50%. The goal is to over time build like a flexible structure for how we talk about the work that we do so that over time when we're having conversations with clients, what we recommend is something from the menu. Because as long as the menu doesn't exist, every engagement takes on a life of its own. Now last to run you through some ideas for how you present a bookkeeping service on a three tier proposal. If you've been around for long, you know what a huge advocate I am of three tier proposals. Because only giving one price is costing you money every single time that you do it. The reality is every client has a different willingness and ability to pay. So the value that you assign to something, if that's the price you put in front of different clients, we're leaving money on the table. So our bronze option I Recommend to most folks, if you haven't done three tier proposals before, think about what you do today as the bronze option and start from there. And most people set up the bronze, silver and gold option like based on scope. So if bronze is very basic, silver is us trying harder and gold is us doing everything under the sun. And the problem with that is that that's not necessarily better work, that's just more work. And so I think of bronze, silver, gold options being more not on like tied to the scope of how much work we're doing, but on how premium the delivery is. So think of it as like the main cabin, business class and first class. In an airplane, you may pay 2 or 3x for first class, but the airline's only spending like 1.5x on those passengers. So gold is capturing the special snowflakes in our, in our client base that like want to be at the front of the line and will oftentimes pay for options without even using them because that's they identify as being that person that needs those things. But oftentimes because we aren't that way, we're maybe more frugal, we don't sell the services we offer that way. But man, when, when you're working with entrepreneurs who can kind of be special snowflakes and value their time and are like driving the Mercedes while I'm driving the Camry, we gotta put an option on that three tier proposal. That's the Mercedes option. And I've heard from so many firms in the last year that have done three tier proposals for the first time. And it is genuinely like a huge boost to the bottom line straight away. Like we're talking like 20% boost, immediate stat boost to the firm's profit. So some ideas for how to make a three tier proposal that has bookkeeping in it feel more premium. And the best, like the best way to do this is not the way that creates a bunch more work, but it feels more like a perk, like they have access because access isn't something that usually takes me a bunch more time, but it's something that people will pay for. All right, some ideas for how to make this more premium when it comes to bookkeeping. The most obvious one is like month end close priority. Are they the client that you begin work on on day one after, after the closing date or they the one at the end of the line? So as we're presenting like the bronze silver gold options, another thing we can do is say there's only 12 seats available at the gold tier. So we're creating real sort of scarcity around how many people can opt up into that most premium tier. And this scarcity, like it's real, like it's reflective of our capacity and too often we fall behind and over commit and we run out of capacity and we apologize when the reality is we're in demand, man. And like folks ought to be paying top dollar to be on that list because we are so in demand. So if you know the premium tiers get them access to kind of the being the higher priority people at month end close and you'll only allow, you know, 10 people in the Admirals club come up with some sort of fun name for like what is, what is the VIP tier. Then there's people who honestly like even if they don't need the month end close right away, they will see that and they'll be like, no, I'm an admiral, I'm an admiral club type of person. So I'm going to buy the gold one whether I use it or not. And hey, that, that may feel scummy to you, the fact that you're giving them that option. The reality is that's how the world works, man. That's why the car is as like a cheap base level cost and then all the add ons are super expensive. That's why at Starbucks the white hot chocolate costs more than the normal hot chocolate. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Okay, today's episode is brought to you in part by Team Up. Who helps you hire talented accountants in the Philippines? Did you know you can just hire someone in the Philippines? That's the thing that you can do similar to hiring cross country. Like most of us run distributed teams these days. You can hire somebody that's in the Philippines. Now oftentimes big question if you haven't done this before is security. What about security? To which I'd say what do you do for security for your onshore team? If I hire somebody in North Carolina or for goodness sakes Florida, what do we do for them? Well, probably ought to give them a small specific work device, have like on device encryption, the ability to disable the machine remotely. All of those things. Important things to do for any hire. Exact same things you do when you hire somebody in the Philippines. Only real difference for US firms is you have 7216 disclosures if you do tax work. Actually if this person will do tax work and for most firms that is, that's two disclosures that you got to put in front of the client. Not a big deal. Team Up. They've let loads of or they've worked with loads of firms that have navigated all this. Can give you the verbiage recommendations. I did it myself and my firm disclosures and everything. Wasn't as big of a thing as I built it up to be. And I went 4 for 4 on my Philippines hiring and I had never gone 4 for 4 with onshore hiring. Maybe I got lucky. I didn't get lucky. There's like a different attitude towards work with folks in the Philippines. Literally three days ago, somebody at an event, we're talking about their team and they're like man it's, it's like refreshing. Anyways, if it's something you've ever considered, chat with the folks at Team up as I think this person had. They actually hired those folks through Team up as well. It's one of those things that seems more spooky until you actually do it. Learn more about Team Up Check out the link down in the show Notes this episode is brought to you in part by Client Hub, the practice management system. If you are considering a new practice management system, there's no way that you're not overwhelmed. Let me give you the TLDR on who are the people that need to be exploring Client Hub. Specifically, Client Hub started out as a really good sort of two sided task management system for bookkeeping firms. So you've got your own tasks to manage. But we also push tasks to clients when they're holding this up and we need information from them to get that stuff done right. CloudHub is one of the kind of the client portal first PMs that makes that as as smooth as possible for your clients. But increasingly they're getting into all things workflow, specifically your bookkeeping workflows. And so if there's one thing it does really will, it is for folks that don't want to have a standalone like month end close automation platform, but then a totally separate PM over here, Client Hub might be the best marriage of those two things in a single place. So if you want more like power user month and close automation stuff, but a version of that that is like inside of your practice management system worth giving Client Hub a look. Check out the link down in the show notes. All right. Other ideas for how to make bookkeeping how to frame it as like a premium thing on like a gold tier early access to renewals. So I just gave you that example. Say there's only 10 seats in the Admirals Club. Well next year you get, you know, say you can renew two Weeks earlier or something like that. Get early access to those things that there may be a scarce supply of. Another big way that we can make this feel more premium is the expertise of the person that the client has access to. Do they have access to a staff level person, a senior, a manager? Is it based on credentials? Are they a cpa, non cpa, ea? Or do they even just have access to quote the team? The team being probably the lowest level option here because like if you go to say, a productized solution like Intuit Live Bookkeeping, you don't actually know anybody there and every time you call you get a different person on the phone. So is that how this works? Is it like a pooled thing? Does the better version give them access to a specific person? Does the even better version give them access to an even higher level person? Oftentimes we make the mistake of the only person that like all of our clients get access to being the most senior people, as opposed to gating that access based on what they're paying. Other sort of things that fit within this, a VIP phone line, a special number that goes to the best of your support people. And honestly, like, there's so little behind the scenes that goes into setting this up. You have one or two of your people, your best support folks, where anytime somebody rings this number, it comes through to one of them. People may not even use this. But if we get into the minds of our snowflake clients, when they're staring down the three tier proposal options, when they see that item, aren't they going to want it? And think about for yourself, think about every time you called into it or somebody like that. Wouldn't you appreciate having the fast track getting the VIP lane? And again, there's another thing where there's only so many of these that you can sell. And if we're not apologetic about that constraint and instead show them that constraint, you wouldn't believe how much more people will pay for the same work just when it's dressed, when it's simply dressed up in a way that better communicates that constraint. Other things we can do faster turnaround time. One of the greatest values of having a communicated expected response time in your firm is being able to have that number be different for folks in the gold tier versus the bronze tier. If that number doesn't exist at all, then we can't flex it for the folks who are in the Admirals Club. Right? Other ideas here, Your client being able to send information to a dedicated email alias. So if I have and I did this at my firm client's name at my firm. Com. The clients then have permission to like point invoices or receipts or any of the stuff that I that we would have needed directly to that email inbox. Saving them the work of having to route that stuff to us may seem like a little thing, but it's totally something that we can gate behind. Like how premium of a service are they signing up for a shared document library? So we're going to send clients all sorts of stuff, but wouldn't it be helpful if you had a very well organized library that they could have access to any time? That was something we did with our clients. Actually only the most premium tier for our clients, we would have this sort of library. Another item here. We would also give them a receipt matching report to show the transactions where we had receipts and documentation. And those that we didn't, that we didn't. We would also organize those receipts into this shared library. And it was like the most complete documentation the client had because they were not that organized, but we would be for them if they would pay for it. Reality was this was a copy of all the stuff that we had internally because we would put our own notes on it and all that. But then after the month unclosed, we would go out and like organize that stuff with a specific naming convention and all that. So it was as helpful as possible for the client. Extended availability window. So we had a whole bunch of dentists that we worked with who were chair side from 8 to 5. And if our firm was only ever open 8 to 5, there didn't give them much time to be able to call and work with us. So there's a world where you could make yourself available until say 8pm for the Admirals Club folks. Figure out a way to staff that. This is probably very client specific. Like if it's just if it's clients who are white collar and they could call you anytime, not a big deal. But for someone like a dentist where they have that constraint, that's actually really valuable. Uh, how about a 1099 readiness support? So in addition to the financial statements, you're going to give them a breakdown of all 1099s that will be required at the end of the year and whether or not you have W9s on hand. And then another thing here, W9 outreach. Is your team doing it or are they doing it? This is something we did in our firm for the most sort of premium tier is we would proactively do outreach to folks that we need a W9 from by the way, you wouldn't believe how easy it is to get a W9 from someone just by calling and asking for it. And there was part of me where I was like, is this wrong that these folks are giving us their information? But like we would literally call them, say, hey, we work with this client, sometimes that person would be smart and confirm with the client that yes, we actually do work with them. But it saved the client having to track those people down. It was kind of a white glove way of making sure we could get the 1099s out. This is a great time to be like whipping that, that those firm processes into shape before we get too close to year end and things start kicking off. The more locked down we have, what are the things that we're doing for our clients, the more opportunity there is when it comes to propose renewals. So if this is the first time you're going to roll out three tier proposals, and I'm jealous because that's like a big time first year is a big time opportunity to make those, those projects more profitable than ever before. But when all your clients are kind of slotted into what service items we do for them, you'll also find it creates some really cool cross selling opportunities. So today we're just talking about bookkeeping, but over the next couple of weeks we're going to be talking about a bunch of different services and you'll find stuff like man, bookkeeping pairs really nicely with like a bill pay service or a bill pay service pairs really nicely with a VCFO service because we can see all their like upcoming cash spend. And when you start sort of building these things together, renewals become a huge profit opportunity. Our firm grew at a, at a pretty quick clip, but the biggest source of new revenue every single year was always our renewals. And that was because we got really granular about the work that we were doing for our clients. So we understood like internally here's where they're at right now. It wasn't this messy, ambiguous thing where a member of the team had just kind of gone off and was just managing the client. That was all we knew. No, it was, it was pretty locked down and we knew what we were doing for them, so we knew what more we could suggest. And we can know how to present like a more premium version of that service delivery that oftentimes clients would opt up into. And then, you know, they may call that VIP line twice a month, but they're paying another 320 bucks for it or something like that. The whole service library thing, like, it's kind of abstract until you get your head around it. I'd encourage you to check out some of the content at the service library resource that's shared in the show notes. I think it'll help contextualize all this stuff. The fun of these episodes is I think we can kind of riff on one. How can we better standardize all the stuff we're already doing by shoehorning it into this framework? But then next, how can we then present that to the client to say, like, hey, here's the basic version, but here's the juicy version? Because those upsells, man, that stuff is almost pure profit. Since we're kind of just dressing up in a different way. The work that we're already doing and maybe creating some new support channels and ways for them to get easier access. I found running my firm, like, the core work, the bookkeeping, the tax, all that, that was the hardest thing to do. And the profit opportunities actually came from all the stuff around it, like how we dressed up service delivery, how white glove would we be in the ways that we supported clients and how, you know, available we were when they wanted to talk and that sort of thing. Those things people would pay for. But tax prep and bookkeeping, like, they had sort of preconceived notions of what the value of that was. And it wasn't until we dressed up the things around that that we can make the underlying work much more profitable. Any other thoughts? Drop that stuff down in the comments again. Super recommend you check out the resource library stuff in the show notes. You can swipe this, this whole workbook as we're riffing on ideas for how to make this work more systematized and more profitable. I'll see you in the next one.