In this presentation, Linda Artesani of Art of Sunny Bookkeeping shares insights from a recent industry conference and walks viewers through the role of key performance indicators (KPIs) in elevating bookkeeping and accounting firms to advisory‑level services for mid‑market law‑firm clients. She explains why KPIs matter, how Intuit’s upcoming benchmarking tool could provide industry baselines, and outlines the advisory workflow: reviewing past financials, budgeting, forecasting, and implementing improvement plans. A real‑world case study illustrates the value of advisory work when a bookkeeper uncovered $13,000 in unnecessary merchant‑service fees. Artesani then demonstrates how to set up and manage KPIs using QuickBooks Online Advanced integrated with the Fathom reporting add‑on, showing how to select, customize, and prioritize metrics while avoiding information overload. Specific KPIs highlighted include accounts‑receivable days, customer conversion rate, marketing cost per client, attorney‑generated leads, and gross profit ratio. She also recommends automation tools such as Invoice Sherpa for AR collection and Slack/spreadsheet tracking for attorney goals. The talk concludes with practical advice to focus on 3‑5 high‑impact KPIs, translate the data into actionable client recommendations, and position the bookkeeping firm as a trusted advisor.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So back from the conference, got my t-shirt, show you the back. So we're very excited. It was fun getting to speak. I'm just kind of still new at it. Obviously I'm doing it here behind a Zoom camera, but it's always different to do it in front of a crowd. It was a lot of fun. You learn a lot. You get to have people ask you questions, so you kind of know where they're thinking. And one of the things that was really insightful is a lot of people do struggle with workflow and they don't know what apps to use. So some same struggles we have, the, the audience had. So that was pretty, pretty insightful. So today I'm going to talk about KPIs. So what is a KPI? It's a key performance indicator. So when we start to add advisory services to our repertoire of services that we give to our clients, if we start to get to that higher level, which I've been talking about niching and moving your, your accounting firm to a higher level, It's good to be able to sit with a client and help them grow their business. It's fun. So I think sometimes the hardest part is starting the conversation, which I've talked about in past articles and blog posts and videos. But also, it's hard to engage them in the conversation. Then if you can get them in the conversation, which I'm finding that now that I've shifted more to the mid-market client, it's a little easier because now you've got multiple partners and multiple business owners. So, there's a vested interest in everybody kind of working in to find where is a great place to be in their work. So, and make their firm profitable. Where can they save money? Where can they grow? How much does it cost to market themselves? Marketing is a big budget. And one of the insightful things, one of the exciting things that came out of the conference is that Intuit is starting to really work towards creating its own metric system so that they're going to— they have the data, right? They take the data. So they know what an accounting firm in Estero, Florida makes, and they can take that data and use it anonymously to aggregate the data so that if you're trying to see how each one locally nearby you is doing, you have a baseline. How much do they spend on marketing, for example? So those are some of the questions that you might get answered when you start to check into those metrics. Now, right now they haven't developed that product. It's supposed to be coming out next year. We'll see how it goes when it first comes out. It's always a little bit of testing the waters, but I think it's exciting news for our industry. Some more things are getting automated, but some of these higher-level services that we're able to provide. So I mentioned this in my conference session that I did with Matthew, and we stood up in front of the crowd and we talked a little bit about— I talked a little bit about the old days when I would just sit and was like a data entry person. And I had a meeting with someone yesterday that was trying to developer practice to get out of that and get more into this kind of thing. So I'm finding with working with these middle-sized firms and working— I work with Sarah— we are starting to engage the client in how do we grow. So we're giving them reports on the past, so that would be your profit and loss and how things went in 2019, for example, as we start to come to the close of the year, and then work towards a budget and where are they looking to go, where are they looking for their business to go in 2020. So start to do some forecasting. And then it's not going to just stop there. So the conversation happens, you talk about the past, you talk about the future, but then you have to implement a plan and help guide them on the plan. And that's when it becomes advisory. I saw a really neat post this morning from Bookkeeper, and I call this advisory service, an accountant that actually put down that they were hired part-time for this firm and they found as they were going through their records that they had had a merchant service account with someone and with a company, and they had the bookkeeper that was still working with her. She found that that service was also— there was 2 other services for merchant service still attached to the client file, and one of them was charging them $250 a month for the past— I don't know how many months, but it was a lot of money. It was like they spent $17,000. It was a lot of months, $17,000 on a service that they weren't even using or implementing, and it just got It just got passed along. No one noticed that when they shut it off, or maybe nobody thought to shut it off and actually did the final closing of it. So they ended up finding that error. And the person went back to the owner. The owner called the merchant account person and said, hey, I've been being charged and you can see there's been no activity on this account. And they sent them back $13,000. So they're actually getting $13,000. So that makes that accountant or that bookkeeper that found that mistake and found that error a hero. She helped save the business and get the business back some money and stop $250 a month from happening in the account. So that's the kind of services that's fun to be an accountant in 2019 and moving forward into 2020, which is so hard to believe that that's coming. So let me share my screen and I'll take you in to show you some of the KPIs that actually Sarah and I are working right now with a client that We're trying to help her grow her business, and we are developing some really great KPIs that's going to work for her firm. So let me share my screen and I will show you where you can do that in QuickBooks Online Advanced. So here we are in Fathom, and that's where you're going to be able to build your KPIs if you have QuickBooks Online Advanced. You can add Fathom to a Plus or an Essentials file if they're not in Advanced, but if you are in Advanced, it comes part of the package. There's also an announcement this week that ChronoBooks has been purchased by Intuit so that you'll be able to get a backup. And I can link back to another Facebook Live that Matthew and Dan did about how that works because it's a little bit tricky. So here you would log into your account, your, your QuickBooks account. You would click on Reports, and that's going to bring you to the Smart Reporting by Fathom. If you're in Advanced and you just click this little box and an arrow, and that's going to bring you to Fathom. And then I picked KPI Explorer to get here. So here's where I've already picked some, and you can group them by perspective, you can group them by importance, so there's a few ways of doing it. I also— you can also put them on, shut them off, and then a way to get to where they are is in Settings. So if you click on Settings, it takes a second here, Waiting for Fathom. And then in here you can go to the KPI library. You can, you know, really work with creating what you want, and they've got some canned ones in here. So if you're a little bit nervous about creating KPIs, they're in here, and it's actually really simple to set up a KPI on your own, but you can come right in here and grab from the KPI library. So these are the ones that I've selected. You can see which ones are critical. And I can, I can select what I believe is important, right? And then if you want to create a KPI, like I said, you can come over here and you can go and pick some of these custom ones. You can go right to the KPI library, select, go through them. There's so many in here, and just select the ones you want. I caution you to not select too many because it becomes information overload. So I would actually sit with a client, I would review their records, see with a client and say, hey, like if I'm working with a client that I can see that the accounts receivable is really, really high and they're not— there's a place I can help them. If you start to work with the client and see something like that, then there may be some places you can check to check on customer. You can look at customer here. You can see customer loyalty, average sales per transaction, sales per customer. There's some in here that you can actually look and See if you can look at the time it takes for them to pay you. So go into your sales, average sales per customer, new versus repeated. So they've got them kind of grouped by a folder. And then you can come through and just pick the ones that maybe work. So this is one that I created for a client, but you can come in here and see like which ones are probably the best for you to track for your customer, customer conversion rate. lost customers. For this client, we actually implemented a plan to start to shrink down the, the amount of time that the client has to pay. And they have like a payment plan because they do a subscription. And if you have that, you can work on maybe staying on top of that. So we're adding Invoice Sherpa, which is an app that will track the accounts receivable and it will start to send out notices. It's an automated way of tracking. So they had a person calling and doing all that back, that legwork of Finding out where why haven't you paid, and this is just like an automated system where we'll start to send out emails. You know the first one's like maybe you missed it, maybe you're needing to, maybe you didn't get this invoice and here it is, and it'll go from there to the next step would be hey you haven't paid, maybe you missed and maybe the check missed in the mail, but something a little bit stronger, and then you can create your own language until you get to the point where like hey we're gonna come and we're gonna start to process a. a collection method on you, and then you could add Coalbox or another app there to help you collect. So there's a lot of ways to automate the whole accounts receivable process, but this is a really, uh, good way to track that. A couple KPIs I think that are important to work with with a client is— a good one is I had working with a client was that they, they, all the attorneys had a goal of how many clients they could get per month. So we've made a little Slack channel And we had them track their own goal. And then that was kind of not automated, but you put— they put it on— we put it on a spreadsheet, we pulled it into Fathom, and we were able to track that KPI. You could track marketing costs per client. You could track— another thing you can track is how often a client walks in the door, a potential client walks in the door, and this is one that we're working on now, and how often that turns into an actual paying client. So those are— some of the metrics that I think are really important when you look at that part of the business. And then of course you can track gross profit ratio and there's other places that probably should be looked at. So it's kind of 3 sections of when you're looking at someone's records that you can start to really look at, maybe give them a little report card on how their business is doing. So when you get into some of these, these level, this level of reporting, you can see that it gets to be, it can get to be harder for the client possibly to understand what's going on, so it's our job to explain it to them and what would be the best avenue for them to look. So you really have to look at their business as a whole and then see where there's a need for them to be tracking. And like I said, just pick 3 to 5 areas that they need to track and start to track from there. Try not to overload, and sometimes even less than that if you want to stick to the 3, so that way they're seeing a result of what you're examining. And then you can move towards improvements to those areas that you're helping them track. And that's the key. And that's the goal. So I hope this was helpful to understand a little bit about advisory services, a service that we provide in our firm. And if you're interested, you can reach out, but I'm more than willing to help anybody. Like I said, together we all succeed. Hopefully that comes up on the camera, but we're big about that here at Art of Sunny Bookkeeping. So on that note, I hope everybody has a fabulous day. Bye now.
