Check out podcast guest Brian Kelly from Kellcat Bookkeeping:
My background and what I do now:
My accounting career began at my mother’s small CPA firm when I was growing up and got involved in her accounting business. My mother was a CPA and CFP who started her own tax and financial planning practice in 1980 and had been running this business for over 30 years. I had been working for her firm as a bookkeeper and tax preparer/Enrolled Agent since my high school years. It was where I had built my knowledge and skills in accounting, bookkeeping on QuickBooks Desktop and tax preparation. This experience gave me insight that accurate financials and streamlined processed can boost a company's profitability and free up a business owner's time. This gave me the foundation and passion for my bookkeeping business to help small business owners and real estate investors with their books.
I'm currently a Certified Advanced QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor and a seasoned bookkeeping professional. I started Kellcat Bookkeeping last year with a simple goal: use modern technology to take the burden of “keeping the books” off real-estate investors and small-business owners so they can stay focused on what they love doing. Also, one thing that breaks my heart about the state of accounting industry is that I have heard from CPAs saying that they have not seen any books that are tax ready from bookkeepers. They have to spend more time cleaning up and getting the books to be tax ready. That’s the common frustrations that I have heard from CPAs. They want to spend more time on taxes and high level advisory and not have to spend more time cleaning up books. Also, I have kept coming across clients’ books that are messy and not up to the CPA standard. That’s why I am doing this business and give my commitments to keep clients' books to the high standard that CPAs love to see in books. That’s why I emphasize quality for books in my business.
Tech Stack:
- Quickbooks Online as my main accounting software
- Uku - accounting management software for tracking time, setting up tasks, place for tracking emails and client notes and client portal for communicating with clients
- Anchor - proposal and invoicing software
- Keepful - website, funnel site, email marketing, client scheduling, site review tracking, automation of sales and client onboarding, AI for automation of marketing.
- Zapier - automations between software
- Dropbox - documents storage and folder sharing with clients for documents
- Still experimenting Keeper.app and Xenett as Quality Control tools to be sure that the books are clean and accurate and there are no accounting issues with the books
- Ramp for A/P and receipt management and payments for business expenses
- Hubdoc for receipt management to help with bookkeeping tasks
- Microsoft 365 for emails/OneDrive/Office software
- Google account for productivity software, website analytics and SEO work
How do I determine which tools to use? How do I narrow down to those software?
My priority is the ability to automate the process to save more time on manual tasks. I am all about having an automated and efficient system that helps to get job done faster while reducing the manual tasks. I want to be able to automate much more tasks to save my time while being able to serve clients much better. Since I love using Zapier to help to automate the workflows, one of my big criteria is software's feature of integration with Zapier and Quickbooks Online. Also, I need to be sure that the software cost is reasonable.
The reason why I picked Uku as our main accounting work software over Karbon or Financial Cents is that it has the best UI design that makes it so easy to use, automation of tasks, central place for client communications and its ability to customize the client portal. On top of it, I have a good relationship with the founder of Uku software who is so much like me where his mother is an accountant who runs her own business.
My top 3 challenges in my business:
- Having to keep up with the evolution of technologies in the accounting field especially with the automations and AI that would help reducing the manual bookkeeping tasks and allow us to evolve to be more of an advisor role.
- Need to ensure that we have capacity to handle amount of workload for clients and be sure we don't miss communications or deadlines that would reduce quality of our work and delivery to clients. It's where we needed software/system setup to help with automation and tracking work status of each client to keep on top of tasks.
- Having time and commitment to market my business to keep prospects and earning new clients for our business. Just need to balance the time of deliveries to clients and marketing our business for new clients.
My primary clients are Real Estate Investors including House Flippers, Rentals and other strategies. I also do help home builders/remodelers and real estate professionals. Their big and main challenges that I typically see and always help out with are:
- Typically, real estate investors have maintained numerous LLC's for their properties and this brings challenges with the Quickbooks subscription. Additional LLC may cause new Quickbooks Online subscriptions that adds up the costs. So, I help to allievate the pain of multiple Quickbooks subscriptions by using the Location feature to track different entities on just one subscription to save their money on QB software costs.
- Real Estate investors don't have background and training in accounting. They have done DIY work on Quickbooks online and they came to me with books that are not recorded and tracked accurately. I have to do clean up work on their books to be sure that their file is set up correctly, clean, accurate and up to the CPA standard.
- Bookkeeping work is too much for them to handle. They would rather to focus on real estate deals that make them money than spending time on mundane bookkeeping work. This is where I come in to do the bookkeeping work to free up their time to focus on what they love doing.
- With multiple properties that bring a unique challenge to track all in one Quickbooks file, we have to setup correct chart of accounts to ensure the scalability and ability to keep the reports simple for tracking multiple properties. We need to use QBO's class feature to track each property. Also, I like to use QBO's project feature to help track the profitability of each property for Real Estate Rehabbers or Flippers.
Check out podcast guest Brian Kelly from Kellcat Bookkeeping.
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