Episode 37: Questions & Answers You’ve Been Dying to Hear About Running a Bookkeeping Firm with Kate Marchbank

Oct 25

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Alyssa Lang interviews Kate Marchbank, the Owner and Founder of Blix Bookkeeping where she supports creatives in managing their books. In this episode Alyssa changes things up a bit and having Kate interview her on the dying questions she has to help Kate move her business forward.

In this episode you’ll hear:

What forms of communication to use when talking with clients
How to make requests from clients for onboarding, clean ups and monthly bookkeeping
Why Alyssa doesn’t charge for diagnostic reviews
What options are available to charge clients for consulting and the process of it

Resources mentioned in this episode:

⚙️ Magnetic Bookkeeping & Consulting tech stack

💻 Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants

💻 Kickoff with Asana for Bookkeepers & Accountants

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In a flip-flop version of our regular content, this week I’m the one getting interviewed! Kate Marchbank is a bookkeeper/actor which is a super unique combo AND she happens to be a super fun hang.

Kate joined our POWER to Breakthrough Bootcamp this summer and absolutely loved the week-long journey we took her on! But she still had questions around some of the more granular details of running a streamlined bookkeeping firm.

So I invited her to come interview ME this time and just ask rapid-fire questions to help her find some clarity — hopefully it answers questions you had too!

How does your tech stack work together and stay streamlined?

You want your tech stack to support your processes and systems, bottom line. But it can be hard to know which tech does what and when. You’d have to spend some time tinkering with the systems, and there’s the potential to waste a lot of time in the “figuring it out” phase.

I have a very specific tech stack at my firm, which you can always get all the details on right here. Everything on that list was carefully chosen to work together to make everyone’s lives easier (me, the team, and our clients!).

Here are some examples:

Internal communication (between team members) is done in Slack. We don’t email each other, ever. We also don’t use Asana to communicate at all, but that’s personal preference because I just prefer to have all communication in one place so we’re not struggling to find that one comment from that one time.
External communication (with clients or leads) is done via email. We have a centralized Gmail account (support@magneticbookkeeping) that we use to communicate with anyone outside of our team. This keeps it so easy to not lose track of the last time ANYONE on the team connected with a client or potential client. But we don’t send them 100 emails when we need to request things from them for clean ups or month end — see next point!
Requesting documents and information from the client is done with Content Snare. We’ve even had the creator of Content Snare on the podcast before, that’s how obsessed I am with it! But since using this software, our monthly maintenance processes have improved, our clean ups have been able to start faster, and basically nothing falls through the cracks. And bonus: The clients LOVE using it too, since it’s all in one place and dramatically reduces back-and-forth communication.
When we’re sending proposals and that initial invoice to sign a new client, it’s Dubsado. We love this for the first step in the onboarding process BEFORE Content Snare gets involved so we know that the client has actually decided to move forward by signing the contract and (this is important) actually paying their first invoice. We don’t do anyyyy additional work until Dubsado notifies us that the first invoice is paid.
As always, project management is through Asana, which houses all of the tasks and “what” to do across the entire team. We don’t recommend inviting clients to your Asana, though, which is where Content Snare comes into play so they always know what’s expected of them without having to log into another thing.

Specific Slack Channels We Use in Our Firm

People get scared of Slack because they’ve been in a group once before where everything was chaotic and people weren’t using it correctly. Been there!

Instead of creating overwhelm in Slack, we have certain channels and rules around what can go where to keep everything organized.

A few examples of our channels at my firm would be:

#month-end: I wanted somewhere to keep conversations around month end approvals and updates across all clients, so Brooke Swan actually suggested a Slack channel and I’ve loved using it ever since!

#check-in-check-out: Each team member is required to check in and check out each day so that the whole team is aware of exactly what’s going on and the status of current projects. I do this too! Just because I’m the owner doesn’t mean I don’t have to follow the rules 🤣

#water-cooler: This is where we share fun stuff, silly GIFs, pictures of a fur baby, and random life stuff that doesn’t fit in a work-related channel.

#sales: When a new client pays their first invoice, we get a message in Slack which notifies our team that the onboarding process can officially begin! We actually have channels for all the major departments of the business like operations and marketing too.

Hiring SOS: When’s the Right Time?

It’s literally all about time. Which is why we say that tracking your time is the BEST way to know when you’re ready to hire, and exactly what you’re going to outsource first.

Start tracking your time using Clockify (or something like that) right now, especially if you’re a solo firm owner. If you have a team, have everyyyyone on your team do it too. You’d be surprised how helpful this data is!

A lot of people put off hiring because they don’t have SOPs recorded, but you don’t need everything you do to have an SOP in order to start delegating! So pick what you’d like to offload first, create an SOP, and start there!

Paying Team Members

Check with your local laws before bringing anyone on who isn’t going to be a contractor. In fact, some states require certain industries to have W-2 employees vs. 1099 contractors, so just do your research before bringing anyone on. We’ve had great experiences with WhyHR in the past for this!

Should You Charge for Diagnostic Reviews?

I know this is a highly debated topic but I can honestly say that IT DEPENDS.

If you want to get into the nitty gritty details of what the client needs to fix and how to do it, you better charge them for that. If you just want to give them a 10 minute Loom video review of problems you see on a high level, there’s no need to charge.

I love giving free reviews to potential clients so they can get a taste of my expertise and understand why we’re the best firm to take them on as ongoing clients — or why they need to wait a little longer to hire us, depending on the situation.

Then, you can start adding on additional layers to your services like consulting!

Of course, we cover all of this in wayyyy more detail in our group program, Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants! It’s all about scaling, hiring, and systemizing your business as a whole.

About our guest:

Kate lives in LA with her husband and 2 kids. She is a bookkeeper by day and an actor by night using her stage name Kate Mines. She actually fell into bookkeeping while working her first job at a law firm, shortly after moving to LA. The bookkeeper, there was retiring and decided to train Kate on her way out. Though she's a creative she has a knack for numbers, as a result, she decided to work with creatives when she started her bookkeeping business in July 2023.

Connect with Kate Marchbank:

Visit her website: www.BlixBookkeeping.com

Connect on Instagram: www.instagram.com/blixbookkeeping

Email her: support@blixbookkeeping.com

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