Why I’ve Avoided Bookkeeping for Five Years in My CAS Firm (And Why I’m Reconsidering It Now)
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Luke Templin:No ongoing fees. Just you and your team. Learn more at teamup.ph. That is teamup.ph. Now let's get into this week's episode.
Luke Templin:So I've been avoiding doing bookkeeping in my fractional CFO firm since the beginning, which has almost been five years. And one of the main reasons I've been avoiding it is I got burned out in public accounting. So to me, I have always had the idea to do bookkeeping really well outsourced. You've gotta offer full service bookkeeping, which entails doing payroll, bill pay, in some cases invoicing. But I think invoicing by far is one of the more slippery slopes and we usually were pretty good in public accounting at avoiding it.
Luke Templin:But all of those services to me are a zero sum game, so there's no breaks. Payroll's gotta run on a biweekly, weekly, monthly basis regardless of what you're doing vacation. I remember a time I was traveling with my family to Colorado. My team back home was also on vacation so I ended up having to process payroll in a car on the way to Colorado. The other thing with it is you can't make any errors, right?
Luke Templin:So you can't be off in payroll and can't be off in bill pay. Now there's plenty of great technology out there that helps kind of mitigate some of those things but that's really the reason why I stayed away from it and then there are a couple of stories where we just got completely burnt on doing the services. So one was payroll. I had an employee call me one day when I was out of the office and she said, Hey, look, I forgot to process payroll. Today was the day.
Luke Templin:What should we do? Luckily, this was a small nonprofit that was on the way to somewhere I was traveling. So I said, how many checks do you got to print in order for me to essentially go cash these in their bank? So there was maybe five to seven employees. So I had her print the checks and I literally went to two or three local banks and said, This is probably the weirdest thing you've ever had requests, but I need to deposit these checks in these people's accounts because we forgot to process payroll.
Luke Templin:Again, you know, there's a lot of ways around that we could have avoided but we didn't. The other one was within a large regional CAS practice that I was working for. So the client was set up to do bill pay through bell.com but consistently went around the kind of procedures that the team had in place for how to do bill pay and would request wires outside of the bill pay process for vendors. Well, Bad was very in tune to what was going on and replicated the client going around the processes to request a wire and ended up wiring I think it was over 50,000 players. So bad actor, the client, and the firm ended up splitting it because they both agreed that they were in the wrong for doing it.
Luke Templin:So those those between full service being a zero sum game have kinda kept me out. Now I'm considering bringing back bookkeeping for the first time. One of the biggest reasons is I've got a client that I have sent to multiple people I trust that do outsword bookkeeping to try and have them work with them because their current accountant is way behind the times and really slow on getting the books done. So they do what I recommend no one do and essentially they're dual purposing their bookkeeper with tax work so anytime there is a deadline the bookkeeper shoves all the recurring work to the side and focuses on the deadline. Again, biggest killer in CAS that there is.
Luke Templin:And so he knows there's a problem. He knows I've given him a solution plenty of times. One of the biggest sticking points is the bookkeeper is also a client of his business because he's an outsourced IT company, that that also is an issue. But it it's affecting my team. The books are constantly behind, so whenever it becomes time for meeting, most of the time, we're two to three months behind, so we're not giving him relevant information.
Luke Templin:And I finally got to the point like, look. If we do this ourselves, would you be open to the idea? And he is. And so we're currently in the process of that. All of our other clients have, for the most part, an accountant.
Luke Templin:We do offer light touch bookkeeping mainly bank fee reconciliations and bank rec for one client and essentially we're gonna do what we're doing with that client with this potentially new client and some of the things that the accountant are doing. They are they are processing payroll through Gusto. But what we did with the client, we currently do like bookkeeping, is we essentially taught them how to do the process themselves so our team doesn't have to worry about doing the process. And that's that's really how we're gonna go forward starting with this client. I know most people will kind of start looking into the tech to run this.
Luke Templin:I'm a big advocate of get started and then figure out the tech later. So in the upcoming issues, we'll kind of talk about what tech gonna put in place. And then also look into with this being an MSP, I think there's a lot of problems we can solve, especially on the bookkeeping side with MSPs and kinda my thought process on niching and going after a niche from a a marketing perspective and an execution perspective. So stay tuned. Hope you enjoy the episode.
Luke Templin:Feel free to drop a comment down below if there's more information you want, and thanks for listening to the CAS cache. For more, visit our website cascache.com.
