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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
Erin Pohan’s firm, Upkeeping, is on a mission “to make accounting relevant and understandable” to all its clients. Pohan describes Upkeeping as “a tax-ready firm” that does everything but tax prep, which they hand off to the clients’ tax professionals. But their hand-off doesn’t stop with providing the tax pro with the information needed for the tax return.
“We don’t believe in just handing pieces of paper over to our clients and letting them run with it,” she explains. “We do work with them throughout the year. We do our client calls where we’re explaining the numbers and the stories behind the numbers, especially, and making sure that they feel equipped and empowered to understand their business finances.”
Pohan calls herself an “entrepreneurial accountant,” a title she traces back to a high school entrepreneurship class. With Upkeeping, she founded a business doing what she loves. “And in that moment, I realized I’m now not just doing accounting work. I am the marketer. I am the sales lead. I am the manager. I am all of the things,” she says. “I’m wearing all of the hats.”
Her identity as an entrepreneurial accountant connects her to her clients. “They’re entrepreneurs. I’m an entrepreneur. I just happen to love accounting, and so that’s kind of where we intersect,” she says.
As she slowly builds her team, her approach has become “more intentional” with each hire. Her first team member had kids who attended the same school as Pohan’s, so they shared the same challenges with school schedules and needing time off for sick kids. Her most recent hire, however, was more intentional.
Pohan worked with an operations specialist from Operations House who asked her, “Erin, why is your name on so many of these tasks?” With that new awareness, the operations specialist helped Pohan create a new position tailored to what Upkeeping really needed and a detailed onboarding agenda for that new hire. This new hire has “been such a game changer,” Pohan says. Instead of being the perpetual bottleneck through which 80% of the firm’s work funneled, her share has so far dropped to 65% and continues to trend in the right direction.
The onboarding week agenda covered communication styles, firm values, security protocols, and client histories. The week ended with the new hire setting 30- and 90-day goals. One of those 30-day goals was to implement a new time tracking system. “It’s been the most beautiful thing to have,” Pohan says. “It’s such a gift to me as a leader, to have that information now, to pool and just be able to capacity plan and just see where all of our time is being spent.”
Pohan’s most visible contribution to the profession is WAVE Seattle, a one-day micro-conference for women in accounting and finance, which just had its second annual meeting. WAVE Seattle grew from a simple LinkedIn post after she left Bridging the Gap in 2024 and didn’t want to wait a year for those authentic connections. “I felt like it was me trying to provide a gift to the women in our industry,” she says.
Looking to the future, Pohan sees a more advisory role for the profession. “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to remove the humans out of bookkeeping. There’s just too much nuance,” she says. Bookkeeping will still be around, but it will look different. “If you want to survive the next years of the profession, you have to be willing to roll with whatever comes your way. You have to be adaptive and tech-forward and just be willing to change.”
Key Takeaways
1. To build a network, start by finding 10 people on LinkedIn who align with the people you want to be surrounded by, and start commenting on their posts. Then, when you meet them in person at a conference, you’ve already established a connection.
2. Internships can be powerful tools for attracting young talent into the profession.
3. Bookkeepers and tax professionals often have contentious relationships. One way to improve that relationship is to pause before emailing a client’s bookkeeper and thank them for the work they are doing.
4. AI is Assisted Intelligence. It won’t replace human expertise, but it’s a tool to enhance professional judgment and improve client service.
5. There are three levels of engagement with AI notetaking tools:
a. You have a tool that records and transcribes.
b. You do something with the transcript, like generating a follow-up email or an SOP.
c. You and your team ask the notetaker questions about decisions made in previous client conversations to help you stay on top of things.
6. Pick a notetaking tool, stick with it, and provide feedback to the developers. At this stage in their development, your suggestions have a good chance of becoming reality.
7. Solopreneurs consistently underestimate the vulnerability of not having backup when things go wrong.
8. Business mistakes may feel terrible at the time they happen, but they are just a blip in time. Mistakes help you fix your processes.
9. To become a better leader, surround yourself with others who are leading the way you’d like to lead. Ask questions, share ideas, and hold each other accountable to your goals.
About today’s guest
As Founder & Visionary of UpKeeping®, Erin is changing the old & boring stereotypes about accounting and helping business owners truly understand their business finances. Through customized bookkeeping subscription services, the Upkeeping® team supports entrepreneurs and already-established small business owners by being their #1 financial cheerleader/concierge/communicator. Erin holds an MS in Accounting from Liberty University and a BS in Accounting from the University of Maryland. When she’s not at her desk, she’s hosting WAVE-Seattle, a micro-conference for women in accounting & finance, and boating with her family around Seattle.
Transcript
Liz Farr
Welcome to The Disruptors. I’m your host, Liz Farr from CPA Trendlines, and here I’m talking to owners of firms who are doing things a little differently than our parents, accountants and bookkeepers. My guest today is Erin Pohan, founder of Upkeeping and host of WAVE Seattle. How are you today?
Erin Pohan
Erin, I am doing amazing. Things are alive and well over here in Seattle, and I am very excited to just have this conversation with you today. Yeah.
Liz Farr
Well, I thought it was about time, because I keep seeing your name in the same places that I’ve been. But yeah, as we were talking about just before we started recording, we’ve never actually met face to face, which is bizarre.
Erin Pohan
Yeah, absolutely, I’m sure we’ve been in the same places at the same time too, but that’s the nature of those large conferences. But we’ve got Bridging the Gap this year, which that is my number one goal now is to go find you and and make it happen.
Liz Farr
Yes, we will certainly make that happen. Now, Erin, can you tell listeners a little bit about your business, where you’re located, what services you offer, what kinds of clients, things like that?
Erin Pohan
Would love to we are in Seattle, Washington, so I am the founder of Upkeeping, as you mentioned. We have been in business for five years this month, and we are a small but mighty team. So it is me and three other bookkeepers. And so we are what we call ourselves, a tax ready firm. So we do everything up until the point of tax preparation, and then we hand it off. But also love to work with our client’s tax
professionals, and help them with any of their needs during the time as well. But we don’t believe in just handing pieces of paper over to our clients and letting them run with it. So we do work with them throughout the year. We do our client calls where we’re explaining the numbers and you know, the stories behind the numbers, especially, and making sure that they feel equipped and empowered to understand their business finances. So our mission is to make accounting relevant and understandable, and we try and do that with all of our clients that we serve, which at this time is about 50 across the country, and we are not niched. So we work with a number of different businesses,
Liz Farr
interesting, and I love that you brought in relevant, because that is something that I’ve talked to a number of people on the Disruptors about about how we need to make accounting relevant, not only to our clients, but also to the next generation of would be accountants, because If they don’t, if no one sees what relevance accounting and bookkeeping and financials have to their lives. They’re, they’re not going to do this. They’re, they won’t, they won’t put any value on it.
Erin Pohan
Absolutely. Yeah, that was one of our, one of my takeaways from QuickBooks Connect, before it was Intuit Connect, I left that conference, and I really wanted to have some kind of impact that created that relevance piece. And so we came back and set up an internship program. So we’ve had two separate interns from two different universities. The most recent was University of Washington, and we were able to, you know, have the three or four months and pour into them. Actually, one of them turned into one of our employees, which is incredible, and the other one, she has stayed in contact. In fact, she’s coming to our conference, which I’ll talk about later on, but she is bringing several other students with her to the conference, which is incredible, and again, is adding to making our industry look attractive like it should. I think we’ve lost that piece. I think it is a an aging industry. A lot of people are retiring, and so we need to do the work to show that there’s still really great opportunities to have a career and make a life out of the accounting industry.
Liz Farr
Yeah. That is so true and and I’m glad that you’re working with the University of Washington. You know, I don’t know if I if you know, but I spent two years at the University of Washington about 30 years ago as a PhD student in linguistics, believe it or not,
Erin Pohan
wow, I had no idea,
Liz Farr
yeah, so, yeah, so I, I do have a warm spot in my heart for the Huskies.
Erin Pohan
That’s great. Yeah.
Liz Farr
Now on your LinkedIn profile, you call yourself an entrepreneurial accountant, and so I’m curious, what does this mean to you?
Erin Pohan
That is a great question. I have always embodied the entrepreneurial spirit, and so I think I can trace it all the way back to this entrepreneurship class that I had in high school. So my parents moved me halfway through high school from the school system that I had known since kindergarten, just outside of Cleveland, Ohio, to a school system that was probably 10 times the size it felt like in Northern Virginia. And so it was a really hard time in my life to be this junior and then senior in high school, not really knowing anyone. But I took this entrepreneurship 101, class, and it was awesome. I felt like that’s where I ended up pouring all of my energy into. We were able to create products and market them and really do the whole encompassing entrepreneurship of everything that I’m doing now in my business. Fast forward, I graduate high school, I go to college. I’m going to college for marketing. End up taking an accounting 101 course. I love it. I’m also the oldest in my family, and I feel like I have this responsibility to have this really safe job. And so I transitioned from a marketing degree to an accounting degree, and went full force with accounting, and I love it. I felt like I understood it really early on, I really liked the idea of how things balance. I love double entry. And yet, five years ago, I decided to start a business doing what I love. And in that moment, I realized I’m now not just doing accounting work. I am the marketer. I am, you know, the sales lead. I am the manager. I am all of the things I’m wearing, all of the hats. And so with that, I found that I was able to start focusing on, like the marketing piece again, which, again, I went to school for marketing in the beginning because I really enjoyed that. And so I’ve been able to just pour into the other aspects of firm running that bring me joy and make it so I relate to a lot of the business owners we work with, because they’re wearing all the hats too. They’re entrepreneurs. I’m an entrepreneur. I just happen to love accounting, and so that’s kind of where we intersect, and we’re able to just have that relation together and build that trust as well.
Liz Farr
That’s fascinating, you know, and a lot of people get into accounting, especially my generation and older. We got into accounting because we were good at the technical part of it. Many of the legacy firms, you know, they they did wear all the hats, but primarily they focused on being the technician. So I saw that as not really ever being able to step out of the doing and the working in your business to the entrepreneurial role where you spend more time working on the business. So, so what? What is the opportunity in accounting for people with an entrepreneurial bent like you?
Erin Pohan
Yeah, you nailed it with working on the business. That’s where I am finding increased, increasingly amounts of joy with my work. And so when I’m working on the biz dev piece. So what does that look like for Upkeeping five years down the road? I mean, I can tell you I started. Let’s just use LinkedIn as an example. I started putting myself out there on LinkedIn again, after going to a different QuickBooks Intuit Connect, my takeaway was I need to start interacting with people at these conferences, between the conferences, so that way, when I show up, I actually know someone in the room. Because, you know, you go to these big conferences, and there are a lot of people, and some everyone has to start somewhere. And so for me, it was probably two years worth of going and not knowing a single person. And after that second time, I was like, Okay, I need to give myself permission to share my voice, to let
people know that I exist. And I used to joke that one of the pieces of advice that was shared with me to start posting on LinkedIn was to find 10 people that are aligned with who you want to be surrounded by, and start commenting on their posts. And so that’s what I did. And I had the jokes that I bet these people think I’m an AI bot, because who’s this? Erin Pohan, out of nowhere, commenting, you know, on posts. And then it wasn’t until, you know, I went to the next conference that I walked up to that individual and said, Hey, I’ve been following your posts. And you know, I would say my name, and they would say, Oh, yes, I know who you are. And so we had that, that connection. So that piece was really, really great to just start building the referral network and then the sales piece. And even though it’s fun and it brings me joy, it’s still pushing our mission forward at upkeeping.
Liz Farr
Now you mentioned that you have three team members. So as you started building your team, what has been your process for finding and selecting new team members? What does that look like?
Erin Pohan
It was very much so luck and winging it in the in the beginning. And so our first team member was a contractor. She has since converted over to W2 but she was a mom who and she is a mom. She’s still on our team. She her daughters are in my kids classes at school, so we have the same schedule. She had a background in QuickBooks, and we were aligned with, Hey, I’ve got work to do. You’ve got some free time, but our kids are always sick, so you can’t get a nine to five corporate role. And so she hopped on to help with a lot of the behind the scenes, data categorization, recurring tasks, and like I said, she’s still on the team today, I would say that each of our hires has been more intentional and more work put into the thought process of, who do we need to hire? Why do we need to hire them, and then setting them up for success? And so I mentioned that one of our team members was also an intern at the beginning. I got lucky, because she actually was a career pivot. So she had worked 20 years as a retail manager, so she really understands the business operations space, and she was just ready to do a career pivot into accounting. And so she had already been working at another firm, but did the internship with us, and it was just a really lucky chance for us to take her on to our work, and that’s been really great. Now, our most recent hire was very intentional. I worked with an Operations Specialist, so shout out, Operations House. They were awesome to help us, help me. First of all, we did this really deep dive into all of the work that the firm is doing. And she asked me, Erin, why is your name on so many of these tasks? And from there, we were able to really create this job position, that was what I truly needed. And so not only that, we also built this beautiful onboarding week agenda to help set our newest team member up for success. And we have. So that team member has been on since late November and so where, what March now, so four months, and it has been such a game changer. So my workload is going down. There’s still a lot of work to do. I think there’s a lot of work on my end. I need to just continue to let go. I’ve got some intentional delegation hours on my calendar now, but what was once 80% of the workload on me, and really it was more like I was the bottleneck, and it was funneling into, you know, my work is more like 65% so still a lot, but it’s increasing, and we are just getting new clients who are aligned and going straight over to our team, which is super exciting.
Liz Farr
That’s exciting, and I love two things about that. You know, first that you worked with Operations House, and you created an onboarding process. And second that it’s so intentional, I love that, yes, yes. So what is, what is in this, in onboarding process that you put together?
Erin Pohan
So it was a document that was put together that gave our team member an idea of what was ahead. So it was broken out by each day, and it had the topics we were going to cover. And so, for example, day one was, you know, intros like, obviously we’ve gotten to know each other through the hiring process, but just more intros into who they are and who I am and who Upkeeping and the Upkeeping team is. So we had the our other team members do intro calls as well, and we were able to also talk about culture, talk about communication. What is your communication style? Because maybe it’s different than mine. Maybe you are better at chat, or maybe you don’t like chat at all, and we should just stick to emailing and so really just figuring out how to best communicate. What kind of expectations we want to see. You know, we don’t. I might work on a weekend, but I don’t expect the team to work on the weekend when I can. I’ll schedule those emails for Monday morning. Sometimes I don’t, but, you know, laying the ground rules out during that first week. Hey, if you get an email for me on the weekend, ignore it. That’s not for you until Monday. And so just talking about our mission, which I’ve shared already, our values, and then also, you know, talking about our security policies, and then talking about all the access points. And then we spend too much time making sure access points are working. And all you know, getting into the real nitty gritty of it,
Liz Farr
that sounds quite a bit more intentional than the onboarding processes that I went through, which were basically, well, here’s a laptop for you and I think this is the login, you know, at one place, they didn’t even really have a laptop for me, but they had somebody else’s that I could kind of use, and so some things I had to log in as myself, and some things as this other person who I never met.
Erin Pohan
Oh, that’s crazy. Yeah, yeah. I forgot to mention that we spend a good chunk of time midweek, going through the actual clients that we have, giving the background on the clients, and we have our client list, and just going through what I what I went through with Operations House, where it shows all the clients, all the tasks that we do, just giving the history and context. And then we ended the week with the new team member creating a 30 day and 90 day goal. And so for us, we decided the 30 day goal was to implement a brand new time tracking system and have all of our clients work moved into that with all the tasks set up. And it’s been the most beautiful thing to have. It’s like such a gift to me as a leader, to have that information now to pool and just be able to capacity plan and just see where all of our time is being spent, see if we’re charging our clients the right amount, and also just reward the team with all the work that they do.
Liz Farr
Yeah, and I want to go back to something you said about delegating and letting go, because Brannon Poe, who I’ve had on the podcast a number of times, has talked about the relationship between scaling up as a business and the need for the owner to let go of things. So growing is a process of just letting go because you can’t do everything that you used to do when it was just you,
Erin Pohan
yes, immediately creates a memo in my brain to go back and listen to every one of those episodes.
Liz Farr
Yeah, Brannon Poe is a great guy and and I hope you get to meet him sometime at a conference.
Erin Pohan
Yeah, I hope so too. Yeah.
Liz Farr
Now I’ve seen you talking a lot about AI and technology in different places. So tell me what is your current favorite use of AI.
Erin Pohan
Oh, man, I could talk all day on this. So I always say AI is assisted intelligence. And you know, all of the tools that are now available to us today are strides further farther than they were a year ago. And it’s just incredible what we can do with these tools now that help us to do our jobs better, to make the client experience a million times better, and, yeah, just to free us up so we can either provide more value. Or I saw a LinkedIn post from Roman Villard about, instead of freeing up our time to do more work, why don’t we free up our time to do less work? And, you know, enjoy life, which I really, I really resonated with, I would say my favorite tool are the AI note takers, and so I have been using Abacore for the last year, and the things that I can do with Abacore are incredible. I just had a workshop with Luke Templin’s Kick CAS community, on all of the capabilities. So I say there’s three different levels right now, so you’re either you’re level zero, you’re not doing anything. Level one, you’ve got a note taker that joins your calls is taking, you know, a meeting summary. You can go back and see that there’s a transcript, but you’re not really doing anything with that information. Maybe you’ll go back and see if any of your conversation was referenced that you might need context for later. Level two would be, you are doing something with that information. So let’s say you might be plugging the meeting summary into chat GPT and saying, create an SOP based on this conversation, or create a meeting follow up email based on this conversation again. So there’s three AI note taker platforms that are kind of the main ones to look into. Abacore, Vinyl and Ping Assistant. And so I recommend doing your homework and just seeing which interface works best for you. They all provide demos of their products and then just stick with it, because these tools are developing at such a lightning pace that if there’s one aspect of a tool that you really like that is not available in another one yet, that one will probably have something similar in three to six months from now. So pick one, stick with it, provide your feedback. The developers are so amazing to just be open to feedback and actually do something with it. But because of that, we’ve we’re seeing this level three now, and this level three is the most exciting to me, because this is where I can go in before a client call and say, Hey, what did we decide about the capitalization policy last time? And I will get this is what was decided, or my team member can log into their account and say, did Erin ask the client about this certain question I had? And they’ll give her the answer. And so it’s it’s helping us to be more cohesive. It’s helping to cover me, because it’s giving me tasks that I can plug in to our task management software that that that integrates automatically. So again, all the automations, and then I am able to just have this client brain being built out of all of the historical
context of our meetings. And so it’s just so incredible. Our clients think that we’ve got it all together. Half the time I’m just using my Ask Abacore, Hey, what did we decide on this? Hey, what was this about? And we are able to just have all of the answers right there.
Liz Farr
It’s so cool and and while you were talking, I was thinking, you know, I should be using my own note taker a little more to help me with some of the writing projects that I’m doing.
Erin Pohan
So, yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s a great way to how that’s how I start a lot of my content is I just brain dump into whatever tool or I use. You know, I just created a guide for our website, and I took all of our discovery consultation meeting notes from Abacore, and I said, based on these discovery call consultations, and one on one consultations, create a resource of all the common questions that I get asked, and it created this beautiful resource that’s in my voice. I mean, I still spent probably two hours tweaking it, making sure that, you know, it aligns to my standards of what I want out into the world as my product. But it is such a great starting place to and to get everything that’s in here out into the world.
Liz Farr
Yes, yes, yeah. It’s, it’s wonderful for doing that now. Now, what about technology? You know, do you have an a technology tool? You know, that’s not, not just AI, but another, a tech tool that you like to use.
Erin Pohan
I can’t really think of anything I feel like AI is such the focus now, I mean cloud based. So I, I know we talked just briefly before we started recording, but I was, I always say I was raised in a CPA firm in Arizona that was a very much so legacy firm. When we started, we thought we were well, when I started at the firm as a receptionist, I thought we were cutting edge because we were scanning and saving electronic files onto the computer. So we were not cloud based, and we were still technology focused. And so this was right around the time QuickBooks Online was coming out, so we were still, in fact, I worked on a summer project there to move about 30 clients out of their legacy accounting GL program into QuickBooks Desktop. And I was like, wow, this is cool. So, you know, I’ve seen the change from desktop to cloud based technology, to all of this AI that we’re experiencing now, and so it’s hard when I hear tech. I’m like, what’s considered tech anymore? I think it’s all right.
Liz Farr
That is true. That is true. And I had an interesting conversation with Randy Johnston last week about the changing architecture of the new AI based GLs, which is very different from what we what we’ve been used to. So I can’t wait to find out more about that.
Erin Pohan
Yeah, yeah. It’s exciting times.
Liz Farr
Exciting times now, as I mentioned in my intro, you are the host of WAVE Seattle. So tell me about this. What? What? How did this come about?
Erin Pohan
What is it? Yes, we it’s it is wild. We are. This is our second year of having WAVE Seattle. It is a one day micro conference for women in accounting and finance, and it is been such an incredible honor to just pour into something that’s giving so many women a platform but a chance to also connect with each other for the better of our industry. And it really was inspired by going to conferences like Bridging the Gap. I went to Bridging the Gap in 2024 and I left that event and said, I don’t want to wait a whole year to do that again, I also don’t want to travel every time to make it happen. And so what if I just throw it out on LinkedIn and see if people are interested? And so I posted, and we had people who wanted to go, who wanted to speak, who wanted to sponsor, and we had ourselves an event, and so it was an incredible lesson in building in public. I remember, like, a month before it happened, I had a nightmare that it went terrible that I was three hours late to the event. And it wasn’t until I had that nightmare that the realization set in of what I was doing, as far as like, how important this was, how many people were counting on this. And I think that was good. I think it set the tone for me to just make sure that I could provide the best experience possible. And really it was like, I felt like it was me trying to provide a gift to the women in our industry. And I think that’s how it was received too. I think the amount of positive feedback after the event was just overwhelming. And I was like, let’s do it again. And so we are, in fact, we’re just under two months away from the next one. I spent three hours yesterday preparing the latest newsletter, because that’s how many updates we had to just announce. And so we have this year, Nicole Davis, we have Lynette Oss Connell. We have Brittany Brown, we have Diana Gleason. And now, as of today, which I announced in the newsletter, we have Jackie Meyer as well speaking. We have a panel on partnerships. We have a mentor hour where we will be taking two pain points that a lot of the firm owners experience, and then in small groups just talking it out. And then we’ll be ending the day with a live recording of the She Counts podcast.
Liz Farr
Oh, wow,
Erin Pohan
yeah. So wow, it’s a packed day, but it’s going to be amazing. Last I checked before this meeting, we had three tickets left, so it wow, yeah, so we’re almost there, yeah.
Liz Farr
Well, congratulations to you for putting this together and just having the initiative and and the vision to see that this is something that you could do.
Erin Pohan
Yeah, I remember waking up the next morning after last year’s WAVE and saying, Well, if I wanted to retire, I could just based on the feeling of, I feel like I have finally been able to contribute something to the industry. And you know, if anyone listening feels like they might be too small, you know, they might be a solopreneur, or they might have a small team of three team members, you always have the
possibility to leave your mark, or it’s not even leaving my mark, it’s just having some kind of contribution to the industry that makes it better, brings more people in.
Liz Farr
Yeah, well, I am all for making this profession better and bring more people in. Anything that we can do, I am right behind you, cheering you on.
Erin Pohan
Thank you. Yeah, you too. Thanks.
Liz Farr
Now I’m going to switch gears a little bit and ask you some questions that I asked many of the guests on my podcast. So many of us, unfortunately learn by making mistakes. So what would you say is the most valuable mistake you’ve made, and that’s valuable in terms of the lessons you learned?
Erin Pohan
Great question. Which one do I share my goodness, I would say the hardest lesson I learned was in year two of running Upkeeping. I went for a run. I tripped and flipped and broke my elbow, and I was down for the count. I mean, it was 10 days before they could even get me into surgery, and so I was laid up in bed, and I remember when I met with the surgeon, he said, Yeah, you’re probably gonna need at least a month or two off if you want to let your boss know. And I was like. Cute, I am the boss. So, oh yeah. So I learned how to navigate Quickbooks online via the app with my left hand and but I think because of that, there was definitely an exposed weakness of client communication. And so I had a client who was well meaning that I was handling the accounts receivable for and they knew that I was laid up in bed and started running accounts receivable on their end, and I was of the well, it’s your business. You know, you can run your AR, that’s okay. And that was my mistake, because I don’t know how familiar you are with the QuickBooks Online platform, but if you go in to take a customer payment, and you put in their credit card information and their bank information, and you save that receive payment on the customer side, but you don’t check the little box that says, My customer authorized this payment. QuickBooks shows that it’s been paid, but it never processes and it never actually pulls the funds from the customers. And because I was laid up and because the client had a wonky bank account that didn’t connect the statements to QuickBooks, I was not reconciling as often as I needed to, and it wasn’t found out until much later on that those payments were sitting in undeposited funds when they should have been clearing the bank account, and were not so it was a huge embarrassing mistake to have it is one that I actually had to go to therapy for, but because of doing that, the value in it was allowing me to work through the idea of perfectionism is not realistic, and we are going to make mistakes. And one of my really good friends who is a client. Now, she was a friend before she was a client, and is a business owner. When this all was going down, we went out to dinner and she said, Erin, this is all just a blip in time. It’s gonna be okay. And you know, hearing it in the moment I took it, but four years down the road. Now, you know, I look back and I’m like, that was just a blip in time. It was a really hard lesson learned. The client did let me go that to this day, that’s the only firing I would say. That was a true firing by a client, and rightfully so, and I can talk about it today, which is like huge work too, like that. That’s the realness of just trying to figure out how to run your own businesses.
You’re going to have lots of wins. You’re going to have some big losses. It’s really just an up and down ride.
Liz Farr
Yeah, yeah. And you also speak to the risk of being a solopreneur and not having a backup. So I think that that is something that a lot of solo practitioners show me included, I’m a solo firm ghost writing firm of one, so we always worry, you know, what will happen if something happens? And yeah, exactly.
Erin Pohan
And I and, you know, I look back to that time, and I think one of the things that really freaked me out is, before we knew there was a problem, I just thought everything was smooth sailing. I thought everything was working. Oh, I’m not going to bother them to get this bank statement right now, you know, I’ll reach out to them at the quarterly call and get it and, Oh, we didn’t get it at the quarterly call. I’ll just get it, you know, at year end, and we’ll just do a year Rec and move on, and we’ll be good. And it wasn’t until we got there that we realized it was such a problem, and we got almost all of the money that we needed to apart from $5,000 because the client went out of business who was supposed to pay that $5,000 that $5,000 still haunts me today, you know, like I still feel I feel bad about it, but again, the value is the lessons learned is fixing our processes and our our standards to be better for our clients now.
Liz Farr
Yeah. Oh, that’s this. Are all those are all powerful lessons to learn. Now. What advice do you have for accountants who want to be better as leaders?
Erin Pohan
To find help with that, find the people who can help you to be a better leader. So sorry, yeah, whether that is first being mentored by someone you wish to lead like and surrounding yourself around others who are leading the way you would like to lead, and being able to ask questions to those individuals as things come up, being able to hold each other accountable towards your goals, to just share ideas and feedback with one another, and then to maybe even just work with a coach. I mean, there are so many incredible executive leadership coaches that can help you prepare your mindset as to what kind of leader you want to be and for the things you should be really focusing on as a leader, to just prepare your team and just continue to build the type of culture you want for your firm and organization.
Liz Farr
Those are all really good ideas, and I love the idea of finding mentors and getting coaching, because I think too many of us think, oh, I can figure it out on my own. And I also think that the The art of mentoring has sort of been lost over the years. One of my other clients, somebody else I do a lot of work with, that a lot of that went out the window during the pandemic, because when everyone went remote, then suddenly, you know, the young people, young team members, weren’t being taken to a client meeting with the boss. They just didn’t ever really see what it was like to work as a group, or what it meant to work with a client, they weren’t getting that kind of guidance.
Erin Pohan
Yeah, yeah, I never thought of it that way, but that’s so true that it’s taken away from some of that experience, or that opportunity to be a mentor, or, on the flip side, just have the the chance to see how it’s being done from someone else’s eyes.
Liz Farr
That’s right. Now. What are some things that you think accountants should stop doing immediately.
Erin Pohan
I don’t know this is like one of those things where I get on LinkedIn and I see someone share, why are people doing this, or you shouldn’t do this, and I say I just did that in my post. Why are you telling me I can’t do that now, I don’t think I have any place or any room to tell people what they shouldn’t be doing. I think as long as you are being a nice and kind human and you are seeking your joy and not putting anything other than joy into this world. You do you? I would say the only thing is I just wish there was a better relationship, a better working relationship between tax preparers and bookkeepers, I will say that, and I know Nancy McClelland is doing so much work to help bridge that gap between tax preparers and bookkeepers. For the most part, our clients, tax professionals, are wonderful, we get a few who are just like, why is this like this? Why is this like this? Why is this like that? You know? And then we’re able to provide the answer, but it’s very tone deaf. You don’t know if they’re upset or if they’re just busy or overworked, and short because of that. And I truly want to have just a nice working professional relationship with everyone who touches my email inbox. So yeah, that’s the only thing I can think of, is just maybe taking a moment to pause before you email a client’s bookkeeper to ask your questions and just say thank you for the work you’re doing. I have a few follow up questions.
Liz Farr
That’s really good advice and and I think I’m embarrassed to say that in my time as a CPA, I wasn’t always that kind with the bookkeepers. I think at that time, I didn’t really quite realize what it was they were doing, because I had never done that myself, and I never really quite understood the value of really good bookkeeping until I stepped away from being a a tax accountant and started talking to bookkeepers. When I started doing website copy for bookkeepers, and really diving into what they were doing, then I really understood the incredible work that they do, how detailed and how careful they are and how big that job is, to take this mass of information and filter it into something that is useful and makes sense. Yeah.
Erin Pohan
I mean, it’s easy to look at it through your lens of context, so I totally get especially because tax season is so condensed into just this short season where you have so much work that needs to be done and you can’t just have a quick email conversation, you know, with the bookkeeper. But to that point, and what I said, with Nancy doing a lot of work, I think you know the work that she’s doing, she has the Ask a CPA Community as well, and she talks about this at so many of the conferences that are available to accountants, but there is the opportunity just for that synergy. And I really appreciate when a tax professional comes and asks questions and catches something that maybe we didn’t have an eye on. And I think it’s actually a benefit to our clients to have a tax professional who is separate from their bookkeeper, just for that, like checks and balances piece, the separation of duties, but at the same time, We are, you know, we have so much respect for the CPA and EA and tax profession in general.
We also understand that bookkeepers don’t have credentials. And, you know, bookkeepers there, there’s a range of experience levels when it comes to bookkeepers. And, and I’ve seen it all too on my end, you know, taking over clients books from bookkeepers who should not have been working on that account. Oh, yes, but it’s, I wish I could just scream, hey, like I take our job seriously, and, you know, we, I’ve got the experience, I’ve got the education, and we care.
Liz Farr
That’s, that’s really the important part is to care, yeah, and to want to do a good job to make it relevant. Like you said, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Now I’m going to ask you to pull out your crystal ball. Or, you know, maybe, if it’s Seattle, to look out and see, can you see Mount Rainier today or not?
Erin Pohan
Absolutely not, even if it was right out my window. It. Is gray and rainy,
Liz Farr
yeah. Now, where do you see the accounting profession in 10 years?
Erin Pohan
I mean, tax law can only tell us where we’ll be. I think 10 years from now, I see more of an advisory role for the profession. A lot of the bookkeeping, categorization and recurring tasks, those are becoming automated. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to remove the humans out of bookkeeping. There’s just too much nuance. There’s just too much human decision needed in that. So I still believe there, there will be bookkeeping in the profession, it will just look a little different and be able to be pushed more into that advisory space. So when I say advisory, that means a little bit of what we’re doing in Upkeeping, where we’re helping our clients understand their financials, helping them if they are budgeting or forecasting based on those financials, and then really just helping them to figure out, are they having a return on investment, on all that marketing ad spend that they’re doing and, you know, making those like periodical financial decisions that they have to make. So it’ll be, I think we’ll be able to do more real time analysis with them. And then on the tax side, I have no idea what that’ll look like. I mean, there’s all these. I mean, we have tariffs, and then we didn’t, and then we have, obviously, OB3A is what I call it, you know, and that changed things for this tax year, and I have no doubt we’ll see more bills passed over the next 10 years. There’s always threats of taxes are going away. Like, is that really going to happen? No one knows. I think there’s just a lot of what ifs, and the profession just kind of rolls with it. So I think if you want to survive the next years of the profession, you have to be willing to roll with whatever comes your way. You have to be adaptive and tech forward and just be willing to change.
Liz Farr
Yeah, that is the way that I see it also, and I think that that’s a perfect place to end our conversation. Now, if listeners want to connect with you, what’s the best way to find you?
Erin Pohan
I am most active on LinkedIn, so you can find me, Erin Pohan, on LinkedIn, and you can also go to our website, Upkeeping.com,
Liz Farr
alright, well, it’s been just a joy to have you on The Disruptors, and I can’t wait till we finally meet in person. I mean, I think, I think we’ve been ships passing in the night.
Erin Pohan
I think so too. Yeah, I can’t wait. We’ve got, we’ll, we’ll always have Bridging the Gap,
Liz Farr
yeah, and you know, and we know all the same people, so yeah, it’s inevitable that we will eventually meet. Someday we will, yeah, all right. Well, you have a wonderful rest of your day.
Erin Pohan
Thank you. You too. Liz