BEYOND CAS. GO BOS. 

It’s NOT Just the Numbers

By Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead

  • How to move beyond the numbers and deliver real value for your clients.

  • The 11-step process for building a Back Office Support practice.

Includes Toolkit at no extra charge. (Not sold separately)

$265.95$295.00

By Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead

  • How to move beyond the numbers and deliver real value for your clients.

  • The 11-step process for building a Back Office Support practice.

Includes Toolkit at no extra charge. (Not sold separately)

The links to download your Toolkit (.zip file) and eBook (.pdf) will appear on your order confirmation screen after purchase and via email from auto-confirm@cpatrendlines.com (add it to your address book). Downloadable to five devices within 30 days of purchase. CPA Trendlines grants the purchaser a single-user license. Reproduction, storage, and distribution are prohibited. Ask about multiple, group, or volume discounts at service-team @ cpatrendlines.com.

Penny Breslin: Don’t Blame The Robots.

Penny Breslin, CPA Trendlines contributor and expert author, explains how firms are conquering challenges with cloud-based apps and high-value advisory services.

  • Get the full CPA Trendlines video, the podcast, and the takeaways here.
  • View all of Penny Breslin’s articles on CPA Trendlines here.

The proprietary 11-step process for building a Back Office Support services practice.

  • Real-world proven processes and procedures.
  • From practicing professionals with 20-year track records.
  • Field tested at a thriving accounting business…
  • …With offices in Chennai, India, and Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Including case studies, sample spreadsheets, templates, and checklists.

Included in every order at No Additional Charge:
The Bonus Toolkit with Customizable Excel and Word files.

(Not sold separately)

Free U.S. Shipping by Priority Mail


BIG BUCKS in B.O.S.:
The Roadmap for Your Firm

This new service line could rule all others – cloud-based, value-priced, and infinitely scalable.

  • And clients love it!

  • It could be the next big thing after client accounting services.

  • It might even solve your staffing crisis.

  • It fits firms of every type, style, and size, in any town, market, specialty, or niche.

  • It will completely transform your firm.

  • It takes total commitment.

  • You’ll need a foolproof roadmap.

  • Fortunately, Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead are giving you the roadmap.

CPA Trendlines believes you’ll be so thrilled by the opportunities you find in this handbook and its tools that we offer a full 30-day total-satisfaction guarantee. No hassle. No questions asked.

Champion of the Entrepreneurial Spirit

Damien Greathead: The best news is your clients are screaming out for this help.

By Damien Greathead 
From the Foreword

Fifteen-plus years ago, tech stacks, big data, A.I. and machine learning were the vernacular of the science fiction buffs (or the incredibly tech-savvy). I was neither.

However, I was fortunate to be on a CPE seminar circuit with Penny Breslin. She introduced me to the cloud opportunity for accountants and bookkeepers in public practice.

It was (and still is) an opportunity to move beyond the numbers and have a meaningful conversation with clients about their business.

Ironically, you can’t move beyond the numbers without good numbers. So, the question has always been, how do you get data from your clients, processed promptly to facilitate these conversations? Back then, it was about offshoring, and Penny was at the forefront of that trend, helping firms understand the importance of standardization to enable a global workforce.

Then came Xero and QuickBooks Online, followed by bill.com, Receipt Bank, and TSheets. Penny was one of the first people to talk about an ecosystem of apps doing the grunt work of data collection and processing.

I don’t need to rehash the evolution of cloud accounting. Suffice it to say Penny has been at the forefront of it, especially when it comes to what is now known as client accounting services (CAS) or client accounting and advisory services (CAAS).

And now we’re at a critical intersection.

The tech is here. Awareness is here on both the accountant and client sides. So, in theory, new clients, revenue, and profits should be here for the taking.

Unfortunately, Penny and I have found it’s not that easy.

Change management is difficult. People, unlike algorithms, are unpredictable. Forgoing the short-term bump for a long-term sustainable win is a difficult choice. And that’s before you step onto a trade show floor to compare, for example, five different A/P apps.

The harsh reality is: There is no silver bullet to moving beyond the numbers and being successful with client accounting services. Instead, it takes intention (to borrow from Darren Root) and doing what is obvious but not easy (to paraphrase David Maister).

It also takes a strategic roadmap, which is what you have here.

I’ve seen Penny’s processes work to transform accounting firms. I’ve also seen many others crash and burn. A few partnerships have dissolved along the way. But I’m pleased to say most (even the dissolved firms) are better for it.

It’s an exciting time to be in public accounting and bookkeeping. The concept of “controller” is an interesting one. The traditional model had accountants controlling money in and out. But today’s controller is about controlling data, ensuring clean data is moving between apps, getting processed promptly, and driving insights for the business owner. And the best news is your clients are screaming out for this help!

Building a New Future for Women, Wives, and Mothers

It would be remiss of me not to highlight Penny’s (and her business partners’) work building one of the first and biggest all-female-owned and -operated professional services firms in India.

Penny, Sharmila and Nirmala are building a business that supports wives and mothers and encourages female entrepreneurship in India.

And at the end of the day, it’s this entrepreneurial spirit we’re all championing and supporting.

– Sydney, N.S.W., Australia


Bonus: Excel and Word toolkits are included at no extra charge with every order. Not sold separately.

Penny Breslin
Penny Breslin: I always told them no, I am not interested in being a salesperson.

Just One More Thing

The Real Story behind MoneyPenny LLC

By Penny Breslin
From the Preface

MoneyPenny LLC was started because of Damien Greathead. So yes, the dude who co-authored this book caused this.

I had been ready to walk away from this industry. I was doing one last consulting job for a CPA business in Orange County, California. And I ran into Damien at an accounting trade show.

Damien asked what I was doing, and I told him I was winding down my days of working with accountants and was looking at growing my small side hustle of topical cannabis lotions and tinctures.

Damien asked if I would write down everything I had done with setting up an outsourced back office for accounting and bookkeeping businesses and the consulting I did for them.

So, I did. He and Chris Frederiksen of the 2020 Group then turned that information into a book and published it in 2014. “CFO Services: A Practical How-to Guide for Accountants.”

After receiving a rather hefty check from the 2020 Group, Damien asked if I would do one more thing. What was I thinking? I wasn’t!

In 1996 someone asked me to do one more thing after being accepted to grad school for an M.A. in History and Economics, which turned into a company called Bridge21. I never did get that M.A. But while writing the book for 2020 Group, I did get an MBA.

Back to one more thing.

Would I consider doing a two-day workshop for accountants based on the book? I agreed and told him 15 to 20 people for two days was doable, but only if it was a “workshop” and not a lecture – so that it could be active and participative by the attendees. I had seen enough lectures and demos that were just sales pitches. I did not want to do that. I never liked it then and don’t care for it now. He agreed.

When Damien called me later to tell me the registration was up to 79, I said Whoa! You cannot do a workshop with that many people and still be effective. So we re-evaluated the workshop’s two-day agenda, narrowed some things, and brought in Edi Osborne, the writer of “Firm Forward.” What a wonderful addition. I was awestruck and still am by her talent, expertise, and the kind mentoring she provided to the attendees and myself.

Other winds were also changing at the same time.  Regulation of Adult Recreational Cannabis would force my medical cannabis side hustle to become a behemoth to get off the ground. The early days of regulation were a maze of misinformation, mixed legal and illegal operations, and a drama show that I was becoming weary of.  I taught my grower how I made my lotions and tinctures and sold him the recipes.  Let him navigate what was, at that time, a flipping nightmare of rules, regulations, and misinformation.   I kept my hands in it to help others navigate the financial side but begged off building a lotion company.

The second wind came from India.

Two young ladies I had worked with and trained on the outsourced bookkeeping process back in 2005 called and asked me if I would help them find clients in the U.S.  This was not my first call of this type.  I had already worked in India for several business process outsourcers setting up that service and had become known to others in this industry.  I always told them no, I am not interested in being a salesperson.  I do not know how to sell or do marketing.

But these ladies had a few other things that made me change my mind.

On the same day they contacted me, I was contacted by a U.S. franchise looking for this type of service.   The other motivating factor was their story.  It revolved around how they, as now-married with children working females in India, wanted to have a better life.  Both ladies had come with me to the U.S. several times.  They had spent enough time in the U.S. to understand how they were treated.  Both wanted more control over their lives.  Both were powerful women I knew I could trust and who understood more about U.S. accounting, bookkeeping, tax, remoting, and cloud apps than some of the firms I had been dealing with. I got them their first client and invited them to come to the U.S. again and be my assistants in this workshop.  I told them maybe you could get some accounting firm clients from this.

Damien and Chris ran the show. Edi, and I each had one day to present.  Sharmila and Nirmala were the assistants helping the attendees in the workshop and explaining some of the cloud apps to the crowd, which counted out at the end at 90 people.

After two days, these two women had six firms wanting to sign up with them, with one stipulation, I had to be the U.S. face of the company.

So once again, just doing one more thing, became a six-year-old business with its own offices in Chennai, India, and in Wyoming.

The office in India is custom designed by us for us.  We have 50 seats with room to grow quite a bit more. We have a team of dedicated, trained, educated accounting professional women who perform bookkeeping, accounting, tax prep and audit prep services for U.S. and Canadian accounting businesses. They also test app integrations and app results for developers and do conversions for accounting programs. In our offices, we have an on-site nursery and kitchen staff.

And a room full of women where all are welcomed to share their voices and an occasional toddler scrambling to mama.

It is a lively, friendly place and always a joy to visit.

– Cheyenne, Wy.



The 11-Step Process to a BOS Practice

Step 1: What Do You Want to Do

  • Partner with a Firm that Specializes in What You Don’t Want to Do
  • What Are You Doing Versus What Do You Want to Do?

Step 2: Build a Team

  • What kind of team are you starting with?
  • Who’s on your team?
  • Why you need to build a team before you find the clients
  • Best practices for building and handling teams

Step 3: Clients

Sample pages: Guidance, insight, templates, examples, step-by-step procedures
  • Which of our clients is best suited for this?
  • Client types
  • Pick the best clients
  • Have a conversation with your client
  • Step 3A: Marketing

Step 4: Technology

  • Meets the 80/20 rule of what you and your clients need
  • Plays well with other software
  • Applications
  • Hardware/ Network
  • Terminology and Acronyms
  • Managing your work
  • Technology simplifies source document retrieval
  • Choosing your Little Black Dress of technology
  • Tips for Getting Started
  • Working with your client’s technology
  • Third Party Integrators
  • Creating a map of interconnected programs

Step 5: Procedures

  • Workflow vs. Tasking
  • Why developing procedures is essential for BOS
  • Benefits of documenting your procedures
  • Guiding principles for creating procedures
  • Rules for creating procedures
  • The importance of a mighty search engine in your DMS
  • How do we develop internal procedures and protocols
  • Using OneNote to create a firm playbook
  • Document a new client intake for your firm
  • Working with Procedures
  • Revisit your Procedures Regularly
  • The importance of standard naming conventions
  • Naming Convention Guidelines
  • Obtaining the Source Documents

Step 6: Pricing

  • Fixed Pricing
  • How To Determine an Appropriate Monthly Fee
  • Determining Flat Rate Pricing
  • Value-Added Pricing
  • How to Price Various Services Provided by Your Firm

Step 7: Meet With Your Client

  • Prepare for your meeting
  • How to get the most out of your on-site meetings
  • Some Other Common Mistakes
  • Set expectations with an Anticipatory Set
  • Team Exercise: Practice Developing an AS

Step 8: BKM Starts the Work

  • Checklists for Work Details

Step 9: Communication With the Client and Your Team

  • Adapting to the Communication Needs of Your Clients
  • The Importance of Keeping up Communication During Crises
  • Technology makes Communication Easy
  • A Case for Slack

Step 10: Security for You and Your Client

  • Security and Ethics
  • Cybersecurity

Step 11: The Client Operations Manual

Conclusion and Action Plan

Appendices

  1. Resources
  2. BOS Meeting Agenda
  3. Service Level Agreement Sample Checklist
  4. Proposal for Services for Namaste Clothing
  5. Sample Proposal
  6. Checklists for tasks
  7. New Client Checklist
  8. Accounts Payable (AP) Checklist
  9. Payroll Setup Checklist
  10. Accounts Receivable Checklist
  11. Bank Accounts and Credit Cards Checklist
  12. Inventory Checklist
  13. Cleanup Tasking Activities

INCLUDED: BONUS TOOLKIT

with customizable Excel and Word files

1. Pricing Calculator – Restaurant Example (Excel.xlsx)

2. New Client Onboarding Checklist Package – 28 Checklists and Worksheets, 64 Pages (Word.docx)

3. B.O.L. Calculator – Wages, Costs, and True Costs (Excel.xlsx)

4. B.O.L. Time Budget Proposal Worksheet (Excel.xlsx)

The toolkit elements are designed to be flexible, so you can customize them to your practice. Some firms include the corporate tax return in the monthly fee; some do not. As mentioned in the handbook, when the CFO meets with the client owner, special projects will arise that you will bill at premium pricing outside of the SLA. Note on cost per hour: enter the amounts as fully loaded with payroll tax and benefits.


Why do we call it Bookkeeping when we no longer use Books?

From the Introduction

In 1994, in a small hotel meeting room in Colorado Springs, 50 accounting firms were up in arms when the presenter mentioned QuickBooks.

They shouted angry comments:

  • “QuickBooks is destroying my business.”
  • “They want to take my clients.”
  • “They are giving people a false sense of security with their commercials that say, ‘If you can write a check, you can do QuickBooks.’”

The presenter was nervous and asked me what to do. I said I use QuickBooks for your company, and I have no idea what I am doing, and I could use an accountant to teach me. The next two days were dedicated to showing them how much help was needed, and a QuickBooks training company was born. I seem to remember many accounting people made some nice income from that.

We have the same kind of hysteria today.

“Robots will take our jobs.”

Accountants fear that automation means clients will no longer need us to keep their books.

There is nothing to fear and a lot of work yet to be done. The loss of data entry is by no means a loss of required human interaction. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is a marketing term. Truly what we have, due to faster processors, blockchain security, and multiple data points, is automated machine learning (M.L.).

So what is Machine Learning?

Machine learning can be defined as “computers’ use of algorithms to find statistical patterns in massive amounts of data, which can then be used to make predictions.”

With machine learning, accountants will have more time to spend on the review of incoming data.

The decision on what to do with any given piece of data can be done by what was traditionally a data entry bookkeeper.

Errors can be minimized by using machine automation, yet often a human still has to recognize and act on two types of failures:

  • Alpha failure: the probability of failure to detect an error
  • Beta failure: false negatives

Those errors can occur with AI as well as with humans. Think of all the intersection points in any data file in the cloud. The intersecting data is typically the first point of failure, especially when you put 3–5 apps on top of your general ledger and allow them to sync in real-time. And that is just a review of a simple write-up.

Here are some of the ways that human discernment and judgment are still needed when apps intersect:

  • Splitting transactions into varying amounts
  • Duplicate transactions when multiple data points cover the same information
  • New bank or credit card account
  • Business owners mixing personal and business income and/or expenses
  • Reimbursable expense income mixed with regular income.
  • Multiple people working on the same app file, allowing for duplication of effort and transactions

That is all the initial surface stuff. We could go on and on with the problematic items that crop up when apps intersect.

Machine learning will adapt and improve over time. Along the way, the information humans provide to check the failure factors will be critical to that improvement. However, that is all just binary-level information.


Small business owners still need advisors for things machines can’t do.

The average small business owner most likely did not take courses in expense management, cost accounting, tax law, valuation, financial analysis or projections. Or reading the myriad of U.S. or state regulations and then keeping up with all the changes in those regulations. A machine will not take a call from an anxious or worried business owner late on a Friday afternoon and provide anything more than that binary support. AI does the data entry, but your value comes when you provide the context.

Providing Back Office Support (BOS) is how you provide that context and demonstrate your value and expand your opportunity for Client Advisory Services (CAS).

Controlling the basic inflow and organization of data for a business puts you in the driver’s seat for expanding the value add.

A future with binary-level automation is inevitable, but how you approach that future, get ahead, and respond to it is a choice.

So as BOS, it behooves us to be flexible, to collaborate, to move along with the changes in technology, and, most importantly, to keep open the lines of communication with clients.

When ATMs first started popping up around the US, there was an outcry that tellers would no longer be necessary and, therefore, a whole job market would be gone. Contrary to that idea, what occurred is that banks hired more people, restructured the work type of current tellers and hired more employees to work on other customer-facing functions.

It is not always true that automation moves one to another job within the same framework, but in the services arena, it is not uncommon.

The move away from data entry has been ongoing and mentioned over and over at accounting conferences, in training classes and by app developers for the last decade.


Get prepared. This is coming.
And here is how you can re-engineer your work using these new tools.

This has been presented and spoken about over and over. There are myriad apps for the accountant/bookkeeper to assist, track, manage and analyze data in a general ledger (GL). Producing reports that provide understood and actionable information for clients is a very important function that many small businesses need. Assisting them in understanding and actioning is where the value lies.

As much as we can feel overwhelmed by fast changes, new technology and all the data, think about how your small business owner clients must feel.

Changes are not just occurring in accounting. These business owners also must be nimble and react quickly to changes within their industry. This certainly is a good time for those who smartly look at a small business niche for their firms.

Get in front of AI. It is not the enemy, it is an opportunity.

Like desktop accounting software before it, which gave rise to the professional bookkeeper/accountant needed to fix “stuff,” AI continues the adventure with a human at the helm.

Accounting businesses have historically provided various “after-the-fact” compliance services, including year-end accounting and tax return preparation.

Many firms also provide “write-up” services, which involve recording business transactions based on documents generated by the client, such as invoices, checks, deposit slips, and documents provided by third parties, such as bank statements and payroll reports. Write-up work is typically done once a month after the fact.

Today, major technological innovations allow accountants to expand their services and provide their clients with more comprehensive, timely, and useful information.

One area of expansion is offering clients a complete back office support (BOS) manager, which can include:

  • Assuming responsibility for a client’s accounting function
  • Having the client outsource most, if not all, of the mechanical and review aspects of allocating transactions to the accounting business.
  • Processing data efficiently
  • Producing reports that are accurate, timely, meaningful, and actionable to the client
  • Providing more and better advice

This is the manual to move into BOS services.
Far more satisfying and rewarding than mere “scorekeeping.”

Scorekeeping is basic bookkeeping and accounting. Scorekeeping establishes a baseline from which to jump into value-add advisory services. The former must occur to provide the latter. Both you and the client need to know where the numbers are on any given day or hour. You both need to be able to trust that the numbers in the accounting file are accurate and provable. Today’s cloud applications and AI make all of that easier and faster. They give you the time and headspace to do more for your clients.

When you combine human knowledge with AI, you can expand those basic scores from a client file to provide what the industry calls “Advisory Services.” What’s the definition of advisory services? Talk to 20 different bookkeepers or accountants, and you’ll get 20 definitions.

The free dictionary defines Advisory Service in this way:

Noun 1. advisory service – a consulting service in which a CPA develops findings and conclusions, and recommendations that are presented to the client for consideration and decision making

The dictionary’s stock image is an overhead shot of three men at a small table with paper in front of them. Very dated! Also, it is presented as a NOUN. Advisory services are not a static person or place, but it is a thing—hopefully not along the lines of Thing One and Thing Two. In contrast to scorekeeping, providing advisory services means taking an active role in your clients’ businesses. And a key to providing advisory services successfully is that the client has to also keep up their end of the bargain.

Why did he not know this? Why was he not told the client had a third-quarter revenue jump? This cannot happen. He needs to know what is going on with his clients!

Now my dogs are chasing balls, other dogs are running, playing, barking, and the sun is shining, and all I can think was, “Awesome for the client. This client has one of the businesses which thrived under this weirdly morbid time.” I told the CPA that once I got home to my office and could talk to him in quiet, I would call back.

What was wrong with this scenario? First, I was an outside consultant and was held responsible for a client’s internal process. A consultant can only suggest and not actually enforce. That comes, sorry folks, from the top down. By now, reader, you are already formulating what you would have done prior or after as the client’s manager.

I remembered this client clearly. When we originally got the file, we had to do a manual year-long reconciliation on QuickBooks desktop. As most of us have heard repeatedly, we were told that their client had a good bookkeeper in-house, so there was no need to control the QBW file.

We got a backup sent to us, and we reconciled the prior year so they could do the 2019 taxes. We got the OK to use prior historical references for allocation and completed the recons in about eight hours. We sent the file back along with our standard query sheet listing what we had done, what we felt we did not fully understand, a year-end balance sheet, P & L and TB, and included a list of all our caveats as to our concerns. What did we get back? Crickets!!!

Two months later, I got a call at the dog park. I was considerate and made recommendations when I returned his call in private. What I thought was, “Dude! Why did you not at least look at the client’s current QuickBooks file before going into that meeting? And if you did not have access, why not? If the onsite bookkeeper did not update the file, ask why?”

This would have been a perfect scenario for the CPA to value-add with real actionable advisory information and perhaps expand his service model with the client. I made a small attempt to broach the CPA on this but was met with the standard, “My clients won’t do that.”


What Do You Want Advisory Services to Be?

What do you want to do for your clients? Define it, implement it in yourself, and build a team that wants to be a part of your defined image. Watch it grow, and adapt it to the changing times.

Added knowledge and insights assist the client in taking future action on the sustainability and growth of their company. Cooperation between the client, the account manager and the cloud AI makes this work to provide the space for advisory.

First, realize that you are an outsourcer when you take on this type of work.

Your client is outsourcing to you, and you are insourcing their work. As an accounting business, you can decide on the type and the amount of work you want your firm to do. The work may vary from client to client, and the steps to accomplish and maintain the work. The key is finding what is common across all those possible variables in your client base to establish the baseline for your firm’s service offerings.

What is Outsourcing?

An accounting office is an outsource provider if they enter their client’s after-the-fact payroll derived from reports provided by the payroll company and reconcile bank accounts from statements obtained via a bank feed. The business owner utilizes the core efficiencies of the payroll company, the bank, and other third-party providers, to complete transactions that are critical to the smooth running of their business.

The business owner then turns to the accounting business’s core efficiencies to ensure that all information is correct and properly recorded. In this approach, the accounting business works from the historical source documents received after the transactional event has occurred.

Technology allows the accounting business and client interaction to occur more often in (close to) real-time. Apps with direct integrations, portals, cloud servers and Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms allow for real-time access, which means immediate access to what we want when we want it. Business applications take it one step further by allowing immediate access based on roles, rights and permissions.

These new technologies are opening the potential for accountants and bookkeepers to serve their business clients in dramatically better ways.

And in fact, typical compliance work, including after-the-fact bookkeeping, has already become a commodity.

Just as the accounting business struggles to keep up with changes in business, technology and the economy, so too do all businesses. In the last two decades, we have experienced an increasingly specialized economy. Smart businesses find out what they do well and do more of it by divesting themselves of those parts of their business that, although required functionally, are not part of their core competency and do not add to the bottom line.

For example, having a website with a portal so that you and your clients can share documents is now standard practice at most accounting businesses. But having your own on-staff web developer and portal manager is not cost-effective. This is true for many business operations. Managing routine financial transactions, although necessary, is not work that adds to profit. Sending payroll, human resources and accounts payable work to an outside service provider frees the business owner and their team to focus on its core competencies and customer-facing opportunities.


What Services Does a BOS Provide?

Sample illustration

In anticipation of your move into comprehensive insource services, let’s look at the typical responsibilities of a BOS:

1 – Financial reporting:

    • Ensuring the accuracy of transaction recording
    • Running month-end system reports and checking the integrity
    • Ensuring accounting policy is compatible with double-entry standards
    • Maintaining and monitoring financial statements
    • Planning, conducting and finalizing audits of financial statements
    • Formulating financial statements and consolidations
    • Reviewing audit files and assuming responsibilities for interim and yearly audits

The above work is managed by a bookkeeper or an accountant in conjunction with cloud applications and AI and gives a baseline for the advisory services listed below. For larger firms, defining the team members’ lanes is relatively easy. But with smaller firms, these may overlap a bit more, meaning the utilization of AI is even more critical.

2 – Monitoring business performance:

    • Managing issues relating to overall financial management, profit optimization, and capital efficiency
    • Formulating all relevant reports
    • Reviewing daily, weekly and monthly reports and preparing them for presentation to management
    • Ensuring budgetary compliance
    • Liaising with banks
    • Identifying and reporting on KPIs
    • Benchmarking performance against plans and industry statistics
    • Researching and reporting on factors influencing business performance

3 – Planning and risk management:

    • Formulating long-term business plans
    • Formulating annual budgets
    • Quantifying and managing risk
    • Analyzing change, conducting risk assessments

CASE STUDY: (RE)DEFINING THE ADVISORY ROLE

I recently spoke with a young lady in the Midwest with an MBA focused on finance. She became certified in several accounting GLs and add-on apps. With the birth of her third child, the prospect of owning her day-to-day time became important. She is building her own advisory firm with a focus on dental offices. She has no interest in tax work, and we found a CPA that only wanted to do tax work to support the needs of her clients. With our bookkeeping staff doing the review and book closings monthly, she works with the clients providing these functions on her time.

The advising firm has a relationship with the client. They have a meeting once a month to go over the business details. The advisor is also available for emails, SMS and quick calls. The advisor creates assigned tasks for the outsourced bookkeepers within her ClickUp app and a private Slack channel for off-task communication. She meets weekly on a pre-scheduled recurring Zoom with her outsourced staff. These meetings can be anywhere from five minutes to one hour or more, depending on the amount of work.

The advisor sets up the relationship with the Tax expert and provides the documentation and data information accumulated throughout the year-long relationship with the client. She acts as the go-between and brings the client in to sign the final return.

This client came on board with us shortly before the COVID-19 lockdowns, so all this work has been done virtually. Within one year, she has grown her business from one to 15 clients. Beyond all bookkeeping functions, she is helping them with insurance, multi-location rental and building purchase agreements, cost segregation for build-outs and watching their specific KPI needs.


From Steward and Operator to Strategist and Catalyst

The traditional role of an accountant has been as a steward and operator. If you’re happy there, then that’s OK, this handbook will help you streamline your processes and technology to deliver these services more efficiently and profitably.

And if you want to move into higher valued (and higher paying) work and play a role in transforming your client’s businesses, and play the role of strategist and catalyst, then we’ll show you how.

Over the last decade, I’ve developed an 11-step process for building a BOS practice. I have my own BOS practice using a team in Chennai, India, and I have mentored hundreds of others in creating their own BOS practices.

This handbook will walk you through those 11 steps to build a satisfying practice that helps small business owners achieve their financial dreams. This sequence worked for me, and it has worked for many others.

Making this change means committing to doing almost everything differently.

Yes, change is hard, but tell that to the dinosaurs who didn’t survive the changes to their environment. I can tell you that if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll end up like those dinosaurs.


ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Penny Breslin, MBA

As MoneyPenny LLC COO, Breslin has responsibility for onboarding new clients and preparing our teams to begin working. In addition, she champions her teams and supports all clients and client employees in communicating the needs and goals of any engagement.

She began working with accountants while developing a training program for bookkeeping and accounting workflows. In 2002, Breslin was invited to India to teach these workflows and software applications to Indian chartered accountants after setting up outsourcing initiatives in Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, and Chennai.

In 2014, Breslin and two of her students started MoneyPenny, LLC, a transparent outsourcing company that promotes the safety and growth of its employees in Chennai.

She can be reached at MoneyPenny LLC here: https://moneypennyllc.com/.

Damien Greathead

Greathead is Head of Accountant and Advisor Marketing for Intuit QuickBooks, based in Sydney, NSW, Australia.

He’s passionate about helping accountants and bookkeepers make a lasting impact on their small business clients. He’s worked with hundreds of firms around the world to help evolve their business models for significant growth and profitability.

Greathead speaks to accountants and bookkeepers on cloud technology, service definition and pricing, and marketing. Before joining Intuit, he was head of marketing at Practice Ignition and Vice President of Business Development at Receipt Bank, North America (now Dext).

He can be reached on Linkedln here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/damiengreathead/.

Liz Farr, CPA

Farr, a special contributor to CPA Trendlines, began as a tax preparer at H&R Block. After 15 years as an accountant in the Albuquerque, N.M., area, she traded in her ten-key for a pen and has been writing, editing, and managing communications strategies full-time since 2018. She can be reached at Farr Communications, https://farrcommunications.com.


It’s Not Just the Numbers: How to Move Beyond the Numbers and Deliver Real Value for Your Clients. ISBN: 978-1-7354123-5-1. New York, N.Y., USA. Copyright 2022 by Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead. All rights reserved. Published by CPA Trendlines, an imprint of Bay Street Group LLC, New York, NY, USA, which is the sole owner of exclusive rights of the work in all media and forms and the authorized agent of the author in all matters pertaining to the work. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise. Workbook-size format, 247 pages, paperbound, with digital accessories.

It’s NOT Just the Numbers

$265.95$295.00

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