Listen, you can…
💪 Be the best salesperson in the world (Sales)
💪 Get your business ultra-organized (Systems)
💪 And offer an amazing client experience. (Service)
But if you don’t continue mastering your bookkeeping skills… you’re eventually going to have a big problem. Ultimately, clients come to you for your expertise.
And that’s exactly why Skills is the final of my 4 S’s (Sales, Systems, Service, and Skills) that are used to build a successful and highly profitable bookkeeping business.
The Importance of Improving Your Skill Set
As a bookkeeping business coach I am a HUGE advocate for constant evolution and learning.
No matter how experienced you are, honing your skills doesn’t just refer to understanding how to complete tasks and address technical concerns. It’s also about taking what you already know and becoming a faster, more efficient bookkeeper.
Continuing to improve efficiencies and growing your skillset is crucial. It’s also a good way to stay relevant in the fast-paced accounting and bookkeeping industry.
Mastering Tax Time
I’ve found that one of the biggest skill sets my students could improve on was mastering tax time.
It’s not that they didn’t know what to do or couldn’t get forms out the door to clients, it was that tax time was KILLING them year-after-year.
Like the world’s worst-kept-secret, it creeps up on bookkeepers every year and causes panic, chaos, and many sleepless nights.
And you know what? For years, my team and I were no exception.
We’d pull 12+ hour days trying to track down W9s and get 1099s completed and sent to our clients’ contractors in a timely manner. To put it lightly, it was a freakin’ nightmare. And at the end of it, we’d always say, “Okay, let’s not do it like that again next year.”
And then… 🦗🦗🦗 pause for dramatic effect… we’d do it all over again the next January.
I was FED UP with myself for allowing this to happen year after year. I knew that if I set aside some time and got to brainstorming, I could find a way to improve our skills as bookkeepers, improve our bookkeeping clients’ satisfaction and kick the stress of tax season to the curb.
The result? I built a YEAR-LONG tax system that helped my firm get over 90% of our clients’ books completed and shipped out by February 15th. Don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty sexy number to me!
How did we do it? I equipped my team with checklists and workflows they followed every month and every quarter to stay on top of their tax time obligations wayyyy in advance.
This made tax season chill as a cucumber and sweet like summer rain. 😎
Before improving our tax time skillset, did we have the technical skills to complete tax season? Yes, we did.
But did we do it in a way that virtually eliminated us missing deadlines and saved an immense amount of time and stress? Nope, not at all.
And THAT my friend is why I think “Skills” is worthy of being a part of my “4 S’s.”
Because every bookkeeper that wants to scale their revenue and grow their business must be open to evolving their skillset and implementing practices that improve efficiency.
To making skills sexy,
Justine
P.S. 💡I cover my full, year-long tax time system including all worksheets, email templates, dashboards, checklists, and more in my Tax Time Training.
