Linda Artesani explains four reasons to hire a bookkeeper: you get 20-25 years of expertise, it costs less than your time, you avoid compliance risks, and you can focus on your actual business. New clients get a free tax return.
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Hi there, happy Sunday. Linda Artesani here, Artesani Bookkeeping. So I've got my I Love Qbox t-shirt on. Next week, next week from today actually, I'll be heading out to Vegas to represent Qbox at the Latino Tax Fest, and I'm looking forward to going there, catching up with my friends. Mariette Martinez will be there, of course Matthew will be there. We've got some good friends coming and we're gonna really have a lot of fun. Carmen will be there, so I'm looking forward to seeing them again. It's kind of the extra bonus to see them before we go to QuickBooks Connect in November. But that being said, I was really blown away last week by my heartfelt/confession/blog post on yoga. I didn't expect the love and how everybody kind of really, a lot of people reached out to me and said they were doing the same thing, that they're struggling with the same things. And right now we're in the middle of What we would call the quiet season of accounting. It's the time of the year that I really want to get back to my clients, touch base with them, get some reporting in mid-year, maybe reach out to them with a list of the names of— the names of the subcontractors and kind of get that started. Because when January hits, this is not a great time to go through your subcontractor list and get ready for 1099s. We have such a short 31 days to get that stuff out and sent out to the government. Also, we are partnering with Halon. I've got my little Halon guy out here as a bookkeeping service. We are partnering with them and we are offering a free tax return this year to anyone who signs up with us on an ongoing basis. Halon is a company, they have Halon Private Client and it's a software that I'm going to add on to the books, the QuickBooks, and it'll help as we go along. It's a really amazing service that will provide free tax return for your business. There are a few guidelines that you'd have to meet. It's got to do with how much revenue and all that. But if you're interested, please feel free to give me a call. I would love to talk to you about that. I also have their tax software that will help you to learn about what you can do to save money. So this is going to fall into what the bookkeeping— what this week's bookkeeping blog post is about. The software is called Tax Planner Pro, and it's a software that again I'll add to the QuickBooks file. And as long as you have a bookkeeper that's doing the service for you, you'll have everything in the right categories, right? That's the most important thing. So we're going to categorize everything. And then the software is going to examine the file for us, and I'll be able to get a— take a look at what you have. And with my expertise and knowledge, help guide you to perhaps saving some money. This is the best time of the year to really take a good look at your books. Look over maybe a budget that you put in to see how you're doing with the budget, how well you're sticking to the budget. See how your jobs are doing. See how your individual— what you sell is doing. If you're a law firm, take a look at the services you provide. Maybe one is more profitable than the other. So maybe you need to redirect how your services are, or how you're aligning your business and where you're working towards in the future. There's just a lot we can look at. If you're using QuickBooks Online Advanced, we've got Fathom, so we can take a look at more reporting, a lot more flexibility in the reporting that we're able to do with that product over regular QuickBooks Plus. A lot of the law firms are in that program. So it's a really great way to take a look and examine the books, which is what this week's post is about. Why would you want to hire a bookkeeping service? Why would you want to not do the work yourself and then perhaps just do your books. A lot of companies will reach out to me, and I've had this happen quite a bit this week. I've had a lot of people reach out. They want to see me, talk to me, ask me for help to teach them how to do their own books and then go on their merry way. They're done with the service. They've learned how to use QuickBooks. But really, when you think about it, if you start to look at— I've been doing this for, as my own firm, 20 years, but it's probably more like 25 that I've been actually working as an accountant, doing the books, doing the record keeping. And I've worked with a variety of businesses. And I can tell you honestly that there's a lot more to just taking a 2 or 3-hour training course and learning how to do your books and do them right. There's so much more education that I've taken, more knowledge that I've gained over the years. There's a lot more to doing your own books. And sometimes people, is it penny wise and pound foolish? So they're going to save the money and not have a bookkeeper do the work. so that they can do it themselves and save $100 or $200 or $400 a month when they could take that time. So it's not the $400 or $500 a month that the bookkeeping service is. If you've got somebody doing the whole thing, you have to look at it as it's what is it costing you to sit and do your books at night? And are you doing it well enough and gaining the— gleaning the information out of it that you could do what you're doing, what you do best at? So you're best at doing, you know, best at running a law firm, best at checking in the cases, best at doing the best work you can for your customer, why not hire a firm like our firm to do the work for you and do the accounting for you? We've taken the time to learn it. We take the time to learn the programs. We take the time to learn the ins and outs of the code, the tax code, learn what you need to do to stay compliant. Not being compliant can cost your firm a lot of money. So why not hire someone like us to do the work so that you don't have to worry about that kind of stuff? You don't have to worry about the payroll and the tax forms being done and all those things that are part of running your business. And then you can actually take the time to run your business and what you're good at and let us handle the things that you maybe don't really want to do. And I have yet to meet somebody who's taken on doing their own books that actually says they love doing it. I love doing it, but you probably don't really like that part of your business. You're probably doing it late at night. You come home from work, you eat your dinner, and you're doing it 8, 9, 10 o'clock at night. Why not hire somebody to do it and take that burden off your shoulders? Let us do what we do best so you can do what you do best. So that's my short tip of the day. It's a short video, but I wanted to share that with you. Free tax return next year with our company. If you sign up, you can come with us. Hey, Lon's going to give you a free tax return, and then the following years they're going to give you this 50% off deal. So you can't lose there. If you're not happy with your accounting firm, and if you have a CPA, CPA doing your books and you've had them for years and you like them, stay with them. I would never take you— tell you to take and change. But you could even hire us and have us put that software on and you could take a look at how they're examining the books as opposed to the CPA. And then maybe you'll be more educated for questions at the time of the year when you actually do meet with the CPA. This is a great time to reach out to your accounting professional. Like I said, this is a slower season. Talk to them, start examining your books, start working towards the future and maybe shrinking down some of the expenses that are unnecessary and then expanding on your services that are profitable. That's the best way to run your business, right? So have a great Sunday. I hope you enjoyed the video. I know it's not that long, but I thought I would just reach out. It kind of goes along with the theme of the blog post. And reach out if you have any questions. We're here to help you. Thank you. Bye now.
