Editor’s Note: Our new series by Esther Friedberg Karp spotlights some of today's ProAdvisors who offer unique specializations and fascinating niches. If you have a great specialty or niche—or know a ProAdvisor who does—reach out to us in the comment box.
Kellie Parks is larger than life, even though she’s only 5 feet tall. A self-proclaimed “relentless organizer,” Kellie finds peace and calm in organizing clients’ books (as many of us do). That’s her jam. But unlike most others, she has taken that jam and turned it into something the rest of us can buy and use.
Kellie is the brains behind Calmwaters Cloud Accounting, which is truly a labor of love, because she gets to bring order to her clients’ lives with cloud apps and workflows designed to keep them in line. Kellie also is the founder of The WorkFlow WateringHole, an app-agnostic Facebook group that affords its members a platform in which to discuss, recommend, and help each other find and use apps and workflows that make their professional lives better.
While this group was formed mainly to help accounting professionals, the apps, automations and workflows discussed here also can benefit other professions. Therefore, the membership includes accounting professionals as well as forward-thinking practitioners outside the accounting space.
In addition to working with her cloud bookkeeping clients, Kellie consults on projects. For example, she consults with end-user businesses and accounting professionals to ensure their processes are clear, well-documented and easy to follow. She makes sure the apps she recommends are thoroughly vetted so that they form an integrated piece of the solutions she brings to the table. As these projects have a beginning and an end, as many of my projects do, we had a good laugh when we discovered that we refer to them in a similar fashion: Kellie called hers “love ‘em and leave ‘em,” while I called mine “serial monogamy.”
Kellie takes her love of client training to new heights by creating operating procedure guides and workflow templates for them to prevent duplicate data entry, errors, and time lags.
Further to that, Kellie works with app partners in order to make sure they offer features that are what her clients need.
She also speaks about this at conferences, and, despite the fact she is an absolute scream in person, Kellie gives her audience members scads of invaluable information to use right away in their own practices. (Spoiler alert: You’ll likely discover that you’re under-utilizing Chrome...and the various Google offerings...just sayin’...)
As if that isn’t enough, Kellie takes her love of client training to new heights by creating operating procedure guides and workflow templates for them to prevent duplicate data entry, errors, and time lags. Because her background is in marketing and communications, Kellie is able to communicate the correct processes for each client in a clear and concise manner.
And because she doesn’t believe in doing anything twice, she then realized that these templates were absolute gold for other accounting pros, and so now she’s made them available to the community via her latest business, SaaSy Accounting Coach. Here, you’ll find customizable templates to create SOP (Standard Operating Processes) guides, client handbooks, as well as onboarding and bookkeeping communication and workflow templates for various apps (such as 17Hats, Asana, QBO, ClickUp, and more).
We know that overhauling how your clients do things in their business (or how you do things in your practice) is hard. In fact, just the thought of it can be overwhelming. That’s why Kellie holds her clients’ hands (virtually) throughout their metamorphosis. She’s fond of saying, “Just do one
thing,” to let people know that it’s okay, and actually common, to approach making changes to your processes as baby steps at first. As her SaaSy website says, “The hardest part of going for a run is putting on your shoes.”
If you’re looking to “up” your accounting game and are looking for a coach to guide you through it, reach out to Kellie Parks. She’s done much of the research and heavy lifting for you, so you’ll save time and effort, and undoubtedly money in the long run.
And for those who are resistant to change (“this is how we’ve always done it…”) and have their feet planted firmly in the manual processes of the yesteryear, Kellie has this nugget of wisdom for you: “Change is hard; not changing is even harder.”