Linda Artesani shows how to organize a large client roster in QuickBooks Online Accountant using parent customers and sub-clients. She demonstrates the Work tab templates, explains how to disable "Bill with parent" to keep invoices clean, and shares segmentation strategies for managing 80-100+ clients efficiently.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So today's video is going to be more geared towards the bookkeeping professional or the pro advisor that's found a surge in business and starting to get a list of clients that's become a little bit overwhelmed. So you've got this list, maybe you for years have had 5, 6, 7 customers, and now all of a sudden you're growing and your business is growing and it's getting a little out of hand. So Maybe you do trainings like I do. I do individual trainings one-on-one so that we work on the person's records. If there's someone that wants to be hands-on, small business, doesn't have a budget for a bookkeeper but wants to learn the right ways to set themselves up. Or maybe you have a, you know, client base that's got specific needs but not so full service. Maybe you see them quarterly, or maybe you've got monthly clients. So we don't really have a way to navigate in our files, so let me take you to my sample company. So I'm just showing you, here's my sample company. It's a QBOA file, so we get our Work tab. And I think I did a video on the Work tab, so you can start to delegate your work in here. It's a pretty neat thing. You've got some templates in here now that, you know, if you have an onboarding, there's a checklist for onboarding, which is kind of nice. You can create the project, set it up, so it's all preset for you, which is really nice. You can take things off, add things, I really like this new setup. Not yet moving there only because I am using ActiveCollab. I like that app a little bit better, but this is nice and maybe someday I'll switch back. But you know, here's your separate kinds of clients. So wouldn't this be a great template for you to be able to navigate through your list? So here's your client list and maybe you've got clients that are just payroll and you want to make them group together so you know that these are payroll clients and then once you start using this as a great list for the Work tab because it will actually remind you as well as you get emails, which I wish there was a way to shut some of them off, but there isn't. So let's go to this list and how can we navigate through this? So the way I move through this is I want to add a client that's named Payroll Services, and that way I can set the client up and then start to make these clients sub-clients of the payroll client Payroll. So You won't come over here because over here where it says Add Client, that's where you're going to like set up a brand new client. I want to come into my actual sales list, so my company file. So here's— I'm now in my company that sits inside of the accountant, uh, QuickBooks accountant version. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to come over to my customer list. I'm just going to add a new customer and call it Payroll, and I'm just going to give it the name Payroll Client. And just display the name as that. Now while I'm in here, I might as well do the other ones. I'll come over to Sales again, Customers, and then another client and just write Monthly Clients. So, you know, I'm not going to go through all of the different labels that you can come up with. You know, you can make them be whatever you want them to be and whatever works in your business. So if you do remote trainings, I sometimes stay in touch with my remote training clients, so I may work with a client in the beginning of the year, help them get their records set up with some training sessions, and then as the year goes on, they just stay connected to me. And then I can go back in at the end of the year and reach out to them and say, hey, how's it going? Do you need more help? You want to finish this year strong, get the records in and done and perfect so that your tax return is not on extension. I mean, it's a win-win for, for us and for, and for the client. So now I've made these clients. Now how do I fix add them to my payroll. So if I'm going to come down to my payroll client, should be here. Here's my payroll clients. So now I want to add these clients as sub-clients. So let's just grab Max. Max, one of my clients that's just payroll only. So I'm going to come over here and edit, and I'm going to make this client a sub-customer payroll. So there's my payroll clients. And then I want to make sure here, really important, bill with parent— I don't want to bill with the parent because then your email is going to look kind of weird. You want to bill exactly directly to customer. You don't want them to see payroll client colon, you know, Max Pascarella. So that's how you add them in as a sub-client. So now if we come back up onto the big list, so let's add another one. Let's add Pearson and same thing. So now when you come back up to the big list, what you're going to see is a hierarchy. You're going to see the way the list should be. So we'll now navigate to my payroll client and And obviously this list is on my— on this particular file is pretty big, but you can see now on my payroll client, I've got these 2 clients here as sub-clients. So this is in my actual, you know, it would be my Ardisani Bookkeeping file, and you would see the payroll client and you'd see the sub-clients. So that's what you can do when you start to get like— you get like 100 clients or 85 or 95, it can get really overwhelming. And some of them may be just remote session clients. You train them once, but you want to keep in touch with them. They don't want to lose that attachment to you as a bookkeeper, so you stay with them. You might want to make a remote client section. You may want to have a section for bookkeeping clients that are monthly, quarterly, annual. If you only have annual clients, maybe you do support for them during the year and they're an annual client. So those are the categories that I have set up in my business, and it works pretty well, especially for annual clients for support. Most of them come because they called QuickBooks directly for support and it was just disastrous. Either they were given the wrong information or they had to be on hold and they got shuffled around and booted around. And people are willing to pay a little nominal fee to have you as a bookkeeper on hand. So if something comes up, say they buy a truck, and I'll put a link in the post to direct you to that, that truck post, but they might want you to be able to just jump in their file. So I want to stay connected. I'll make annual clients and maybe those clients are just annual basic or maybe they're annual plus where you actually go through their records at year end and maybe they're You're the intermediary, the person that speaks to the CPA. There's a lot of value in that as well. A lot of customers don't want to deal with their CPA. He's scary. He usually costs them money on March 15th or April 15th. So we can be that person in between to help guide them and talk to the accountant. We have that— we talk the same language. So just a few tips on how to control and manage a large client base, a client list. Everybody I talk to is doing really well and they're, they're growing their businesses and it's wonderful. The economy is great, so we get a ride with it while it's here and I hope these tips were helpful for you professionals out there that do what I do and if you have any questions, comments, please feel free to reach out to me. Bye now.
