Editor's Note: This is another installment in our ongoing series highlighting this year's Insightful Accountant's "2018 Top 100 ProAdvisors." Over the remainder of the year, we will introduce you to our winners, getting their insights on a wide range of topics, including what it is like to be a leader in their profession, how to stay on top and what the future holds.
Mario Hernandez
Mario Hernandez, the President of Miami Accountant, Inc., is our 2018 Top 100 profile this week. "In 2000, I applied for a job as I was finishing my Master’s degree in a local accounting firm. In this firm, I worked on both accounting and taxes. The vast majority of the clients used QuickBooks. I got my first certification for QuickBooks in 2003. Working there, I learned a lot about systems and accounting with QuickBooks by visiting many different clients in different industries," he said. "In 2007 I decided to start my own business. I then began to develop my own practice."
Tell us a little about your practice.
We offer many different services in our practice that include accounting, payroll, bookkeeping, consulting and training.
We specialize in businesses that need to manage inventory, including point of sale, warehouse management and manufacturing. To this end, we work with Fishbowl Inventory, SOS Inventory, HandiFox Inventory, QuickBooks Advanced Inventory and QuickBooks Point of Sale.
We also specialize in custom reporting, network optimization and database work including migrations from other systems, database repair and database optimization. Much of what I learned during my Accounting Information Systems courses has helped in having an easier time understanding the database structures and relationships between the tables that make it up.
Give us a snapshot of today's accounting landscape. What are seeing out there?
I continue to see a shift towards online accounting. While we still get mostly QuickBooks Enterprise clients calling us due to their heavy inventory usage, the percentage of QuickBooks Online clients that call in does continue to increase. These clients would have likely been calling us in prior years with QuickBooks Pro or Premier. Clients using QBO also seem to be more in tune with the connected app ecosystem whereby they have already tried out connecting an app to QBO to fulfill some business need.
Name the biggest technological advancements you saw this year.
I would say the improvement of automation technologies in online banking have been impressive. Especially with QuickBooks Online banking. What used to be a somewhat time consuming process of connecting to your banks and downloading the banking transactions into QuickBooks is now all done for you. This combined with document fetching technologies that log in to your banks' and vendors' websites, automatically fetch supporting documents and attach them to your transactions in QuickBooks, have all been big technological advancements. These have perhaps not been specific to just this past year, but they have been impressive to watch over the past few years.
How has your ProAdvisor practice changed or evolved over the last couple of years?
It has been slowly changing. We have been trying to focus more on our specializations with clients managing inventory. This has led to learning more inventory management software in order to be able to offer clients more options that can better suit their needs.
Why is continuing to enhance your skills and acumen critical to staying one step ahead of the curve?
Clients continue to evolve and they tend search out solutions on their own. The web allows them to quickly find software and features on their own. You need to stay on top of the software that is important to your business specialties in order to be able to support new clients and existing clients with their questions and business needs. Even the software you already know is always evolving and either changing the way things work or adding new features. One great way to stay ahead of the curve is beta testing QuickBooks software. This allows you to be ready day 1 when the new QuickBooks software is released. You also get to contribute to the development of the software.
What is the story that best describes how you help your clients?
We have had quite a few clients where we have been called in to provide training and consulting for clients that have already been using the software for a number of years, but never received a formal training. Many times, we get to teach the clients new ways of doing their tasks and features they never knew were there. To get to see their faces light with excitement when they realize they will be saving a lot of time versus the way they used to do things is a very rewarding feeling. We don’t just go in to a client engagement to collect a paycheck. We genuinely want to help our clients and very much enjoy getting to help them save time and improve their processes.
What does it mean to you to be recognized out of more than 300,000 ProAdvisors in the world?
It takes a lot of hard work to stay up to date with the different software. Being recognized as a Top 100 ProAdvisor is an honor. I wish to thank the team at Insightful Accountant for all the hard work they put in to the Top 100 program.
What goals have set for this YEAR?
I wish to finish updating my website so that it better represents what our practice offers and can showcase our specializations.
I also want to continue to improve our processes to allow us to spend less time with administration and more time focusing on clients.
How do you create balance in your work and personal life?
I always try to prioritize. I have a wife and 2 young daughters, ages 6 and 8. When I am working late at home, I always stop my work to spend time with them and help them with their math homework. I don’t miss any school functions, as I’ll never get those experiences back later. The key would be that it takes a lot of organization in terms of building the school calendar of events into your own work calendar in order to schedule your life accordingly, prioritizing family and still getting to manage your work.
What was the best piece of advice you ever received?
Joe Woodard said, “In order to be successful, you have to stop doing what made you successful.” That, and the advice Joe has given regarding the need to develop a specialization.
What advice would you give to today's accountants?
Every accountant should strongly consider working with QuickBooks Online. Even if it’s not the core of their business or they prefer desktop. It is still important to be knowledgeable with it. I’ve had quite a few new clients come to me and tell me that they have an accountant who they’ve worked with for a number of years, but their accountant was not tech savvy and was not connected to the online accounting world. They were otherwise happy but have ended up leaving those accountants. It is important to keep up with the changing times.
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