I can’t really say this better than Rhonda. It’s eye-opening if you haven’t done this yet.
We’ve been considering a side business of focused bookkeeping for a specific business type. Every business has it’s own quirks, and it’s a useful sales and marketing tool to have experience with the specific business model. If we had a US based accountant specialist in our business, we’d totally be interested in working with them too. As it is, we have a good enough US accountant to file our state and federal year end returns. Actually I would probably launch the side hustle if I had a great industry experienced accountant to work with.
We have an amazing OFS bookkeeper, who’s learned all the ins and outs of our odd business and set up as much as we can to be automatically entered, while also being looked at with a critical eye. She recovering from giving birth this moment, but trained her fiancee to do the basics to cover while screen recording the processes so we can train other people as we go too. We’re trying to get her to take time off work to be with her brand new baby, and recover. She’s more comfortable checking in bit’s and pieces to make sure everything is going well.
We use gusto for payroll, primarily because they do local income tax returns too. Clarice prepares and files our sales tax returns, government reports, licenses, insurance audits, and all the odd things that come along. She prepared the whole information and application for COVID assistance with me, and followed up the entire time with receipts, information changing weekly sometimes on the requirements, and then created and prepared the whole audit requirements for the external auditory.
Before we decided to hire Clarice through onlinejobs.ph, we asked our accountant about doing bookkeeping for us. If his price had been in our reach, we would have totally gone for it. But what they thought of as bookkeeping was only data entry. And Clarice is more like an office manager and full charge bookkeeper, arranging payment, asking for statements, questioning odd amounts, making sure we get copies of invoices, balancing cash paid outs, filling out reports for the government and insurance company, balancing checking and credit card statements, bringing missing deposits up for investigation, providing audit information, compiling payroll hours and reimbursements… Just a million things.
We hired her straight out of college, and she had no experience with electronic bookkeeping. But she picked up QuickBooks desktop in a flash, and actually ran QuickBooks desktop and QuickBooks online side by side for months to make sure it was going to work properly for us.
We’ve been blessed to have an amazing team overall, and I can’t recommend onlinejobs.Ph enough for the advice and help in going through the process of finding her. Start slow, make sure you get someone eager to learn and willing to ask questions and learn how to give feedback in a happy and supportive way. I take full responsibility for anything my people don’t understand, because it’s my job to make sure I’ve given them the training and review their work ongoingly.
This is very useful because if I get an apology from her, I know I’ve messed up somehow and let her know that too. It gives her so much room for asking and correction because she knows she’s not going to get dinged or blasted, which is a very very big deal in her culture from what I gather.
I was extremely nervous about opening access to my books and accounts to someone in a foreign country, and we tried hiring a company in India, but they wouldn’t keep one person in charge of our bookkeeping, so I had to retrain folks every week. I’m so glad I took the chance.
Use anything useful here.
Warmest,
Ronda
Want an OFS bookkeeper for your business?
You can find them at Onlinejobs.ph.
John