The nomination process is over, now it is time for nominees to complete their formal
Top 100 Logo
applications for the Top 100 ProAdvisor Awards (including ProAdvisor of the Year and our 10 Categorical winners). I want to take this opportunity, to remind you of the importance of accurately reporting your details within the application form(s).
Nominees for Insightful Accountant's "Top 100 ProAdvisor" awards should begin receiving notifications (sent to the email address from in your nomination) sometime this week. The email will provide you with a link to the portal where you can login to complete your formal applications.
Do not share the web address you receive for accessing the application portal.
The email you receive with the application web address also will advise you as to the deadline (date) for completion of your application. If you plan on taking additional training or certification tests prior to the application deadline, you should wait to complete the application until after you have completed such training and certification, you will understand why as you read on within this article.
Important: We will not accept applications after the deadline.
Things to remember and think about as you complete your formal application.
These are ‘individual’ awards.
It is important to remember that these are ‘individual’ awards. We are evaluating individual ProAdvisors, not firms, practices, or partnerships. All the questions in the application forms are geared toward you specifically, so when we ask you to tell us the number of clients you have we mean just that, “the number of clients YOU have”, not your firm as a whole.
Complete the ‘correct’ Application form.
You need to be aware that there are two different application forms, the ‘short’ form and the ‘long’ form. If you have NOT been a Top 100 Award winner for either of the last two years, you MUST complete the long (full) application form. All first-time nominees must complete the long application form. Any nominee this year who was listed in our Top 100 Awards either in 2016 or 2017 may choose to complete only the short application form. The application form guides you into the form based upon these criteria.
The short application form is designed to simply capture updated information as it regards certifications, training and practice focus. The reflective scoring from those updates will be added to the individuals score from their most recent year in the Top 100 to determine their pre-vote tabulation for 2018.
As I mentioned, eligible nominees have the option of completing the short form; however, they are welcome to complete the long (full) application form rather than the short form should they choose to do so. Obviously, this gives you the chance to clarify and potentially enhance your tabulation by completion of additional data including any of the more than 200 new 3rd-party products added to this year’s application form.
Think differently about this process.
While Insightful Accountant’s process for the Top 100 hasn’t changed since the day of inception. Most people think that our Top 100 is simply one long list of 100 names out of the 600 or so nominees. In reality, the Top 100 consists of the top 10 ProAdvisors within each of the 10 categorical classifications we examine during this process (10 x 10 = 100).
Many of the questions within the formal applications are geared toward these categorical classifications. Additional questions within the applications impact individual standings within each category. Not all questions we pose are related to all categories. If you think about the process in this way as you go through your application, you should begin to see the relationship of how your answers to specific questions drive the points you earn in each category.
While an awareness of this methodology may not benefit you ‘this year’ since most of the training and certification opportunities will have past before the deadline for application, it should benefit you in future years by giving you a better idea of what you can do to improve your standing within any given category or set of categories related to your own ProAdvisor practice.
What Counts.
Last year, nearly 20% of competition applicants either failed, or chose not, to answer critical questions. Remember these questions help define each applicant’s categorization(s) and ‘generate points’ but within each category. So, don’t simply ignore questions.
One of the single biggest factors in our competition scoring is ‘certification’ related to the Intuit Ecosystem, and that means QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Online-Advanced, QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Desktop-Advanced, QuickBooks Enterprise and QuickBooks Point-of-sale. It isn’t enough just to ‘be certified’ you need to be ‘current’ in ALL certifications.
A person’s certification ‘history’ comes into play, and those people with a long history of having been certified do rank highly in their respective areas of certification. But you may not have realized that the current year’s certification in any category is worth more points than the prior year’s certification. This is why we have high ranking historical certification participants drop several points over their previous ranking because they haven’t yet completed the most recent certifications at the time they submit their applications.
So current certification counts for a lot, and since Intuit has just launched the most recent (2018) certification (and the new re-certification) for QuickBooks Online you probably want to make certain that you have earned the newest certification prior to completion of your Application form. One of the places you can prepare for these new certifications (prior to our application deadline) is at the QuickBooks Online Virtual Certification Bootcamp being held this week (March 21-22, 2018).
Not only does our process value certification highly, but it also values training (including continuing-education and advanced certification credit) related to your standing as a ProAdvisor.
The Insightful Accountant Top 100 process doesn’t mandate a minimum number of training hours, but we ‘reward’ each course in a variety of ways. Many courses will apply to the general standing of an applicant, but at the same time other specific courses are key components of the categorical classification(s). For example, ‘QBO’ related courses go toward your standing within the ‘QuickBooks Online category’ and ‘QB-Desktop’ related courses go toward an applicant’s standing within the ‘QB-Desktop’ category.
So, I will just mention (again) that the QuickBooks Online Virtual Certification Bootcamp being held this week (March 21-22, 2018) is a good place for you to increase the number of your QuickBooks Online categorical training points before our Application Deadline.
3rd-party Products matter in this process. We list 100’s of 3-party products that work with both QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online. In fact, we just added more than 200 new Apps to the full application form. This can be a very time-consuming part of the application process, but we no longer require you (as we once did) to give an answer for each product, but we have no better way to evaluate the extent to which you assist your clients with solutions above and beyond QuickBooks. When you consider that the average QuickBooks Online user has from 3 to 6 Apps tied to QBO, these 3rd-party products are more important now then they were with QuickBooks Desktop.
We reward you with points earned for each response based upon the extent to which you are involved with each product. We value a ‘certification’ in a product higher than just being a ‘referral partner.’ But a word of warning, don’t fudge…we routinely ‘spot check’ credentials in this area to verify your status.
Lastly I want to address the issue of ‘numbers’. There are several questions that ask for ranges of numbers or percentages to help measure your practice. For example, how many clients do you have using QuickBooks Online as opposed to QuickBooks Pro? Knowing exactly what makes up your ‘personal’ ProAdvisor practice is critical to this process.
As I mentioned earlier, you may be part of a big accounting firm, or a member of a small bookkeeping practice, but regardless of where and how you work, this competition is based upon each ‘individual’, unlike Intuit’s Firm of the Future competition where the entire firm is being considered. So, when you answer the various numeric or percentage questions, be sure you are doing so solely on the basis of yourself, and not the ‘firm’ as a whole.