Your CPA or Your Bookkeeper ?

I am taking a 10-Saturday Small Business program at Golden Gate University. It is FREE thanks to the generosity of Chevron (Yeah!). And comes with free breakfast!

The first half of the class is a break-out session. We get in a group of 5. Each of us has some times to talk over our stuff and listen to feedback. 5 weeks into that, I got 2 good ideas: use "boomerang for Gmail" to schedule outgoing emails, and connect with Construction Lawyers since I do bookkeeping for contractors.

The Richest Man in Babylon states that one should entrust wealth (i.e. loan) to only people who are skilled in their work. A man who acquired a sudden fortune tends to draw requests for help or investing ideas from friends / families. The book cautions us against both temptations because money is hard to come by. Only when the borrower was skilled in what he did and the preservation of principal was guaranteed should you lend.

I told my recent scare of misreading a team member's email. I thought he was quitting. I realized how important he was compared to my client(s). (Who said clients are always right?)

A team member of mine is a CPA who has been with IRS for 18 years and now working with a CPA firm for 15 years. She could not understand. I told her we work closely with business owners. We go to their site weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. We BOND with the owners. I even drew an analogy of a babysitting business where the babysitters stay with the babies whole day long. Hence she bonds with the baby and the families. If she quit, it is hard to replace her.

The CPA said that I needed to let my clients know that I was the boss. And I can send newsletters to touch base with the clients.

… I was SHOCK that I could not make a CPA understand how the bookkeepers work and our relationship with the clients.

I decided to tell the business owners direct:

1) The CPA saw only the FINANCIAL STATEMENTS a few times a year. They made a few period-end adjustments which made the reports look good at the end-of-the-year. The adjustments do not fix monthly numbers. So, if you try to do a month-to-month or this-month-vs.-this-month-last-year comparison, the numbers are not right.

2) The CPA does not deal with nut-and-bolt (i.e. set-up issues) and daily processing stuff such as invoices and vendors’ bills. The bookkeepers do. The bookkeepers are EXPERTS on those. Your CPAs are NOT.

3) You do OPERATIONS every day. Bookkeeping is the 3rd leg of your business (besides Operations and Marketing) which also needs to be done REGULARLY. If you care to bill and collect money for your sweat, and pay your employees and vendors on-time to keep them happy, then, please DEFER the bookkeeping stuff to your BOOKKEEPER.

Steve Jobs said; "Hire the BEST person you can, and get out of their ways (so that they can do the works.) You want to do that.