BALANCE? You’ve got to be kidding right! Elusive…mysterious…maybe even mythical! As an accountant or bookkeeper at this time of year, you may well believe that WORK/life balance is to be found somewhere just past the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, slightly to the left of the last silver-lined cloud, tied to […]
Resource Category: Blogs & Articles
Improve Your Tax Season by Changing Your Client Communications
As a bookkeeper in practice, I always worked hard (way, way too hard most of the time!), I have a high tolerance for pressure and can sustain long working hours for extended periods. However, every January, without fail, I nearly broke myself. The sheer volume of work, communications, checklists, and correspondence were overwhelming. The pressure […]
How to Improve Your Tax Return Season
It’s that time of year again. That time of year when suddenly you realize that the 31st of January is fast approaching, you somehow need to deal with Christmas, and if you’re lucky, getting some time off to spend with your family and loved one. You realize that, despite the letters you sent out in […]
How to Become More Confident
This article is part of our content series How To Build A Better Bookkeeping Series: The Journey of Continuous Improvement. The final, and possibly most important ingredient, is confidence. You have to have the confidence to put up your prices with your existing clients and charge the right level of fee to new clients. You […]
How to Choose the Right Delivery Methods
This article is part of our content series How To Build A Better Bookkeeping Series: The Journey of Continuous Improvement. Once upon a dim and distant past, the main job of the bookkeeper was to move a pile of paper from the left-hand side of the keyboard to the right-hand side of the keyboard (or, […]
Bookkeeping Automation: Threat or Opportunity?
Like it or not, software automates much of what we do for our clients as accounting professionals. While most of us would love to have most, if not all, of the “grunt work” involved in bookkeeping, automated, how is this changing the way clients view the value of what we do? What’s the current situation? […]
How to Provide the Right Level of Customer Service
This article is part of our content series How To Build A Better Bookkeeping Series: The Journey of Continuous Improvement. What do you think your customers want from you – more than anything else, what is the most important thing you do for them? Is it getting the VAT right? Is it saving them tax? […]
How To Get Great Results From Your Bookkeeping Business
I see the low hourly or fixed rates that are still too often being charged. I know that many bookkeepers must be working an extraordinary number of hours to make a living – I know I did, before I figured it out. So how do you not only survive, but also thrive and achieve your […]
How To Find The Right Price For Your Services
This article is part of our content series How To Build A Better Bookkeeping Series: The Journey of Continuous Improvement. Just for a moment, I want you to imagine what you want to earn out of your business – personally. What should your income be for the work that you do, to enable you to […]
How SmartVault Users Save Time
What goals did you set for 2020? Grow your business? Spend more time with family and friends? Dedicate more time to a hobby or passion of yours? The common denominator in all of these goals is time – something most of us feel we never have enough of. At SmartVault, we believe in getting your time back […]
7 Ways A Client Portal Saves You Time
In this digital age of new technology and changing industries, the old adage, “time is money”, has never been truer. With the start of another new year, the traditional methods of exchanging files with clients are unnecessary and time-consuming. So then in this day and age, how do businesses streamline their workflow? Enter the client portal. […]
Before You Scale You Have To Standardize
How to Scale Your Business for Long-Term Growth For anyone who’s started a business, you know that it can be challenging to go from start-up to scale-up. As a start-up, you simply do what you need to survive, with your primary focus on adding customers and revenue any way you can. But as you scale […]
10 Benefits of eSignature
Convenience is king for most people. We can access all sorts of data right from our phones, and we don’t like waiting around. So, in this digital age, why make your accounting clients print something to sign it? Modernization and mobility are pushing eSignature adoption for accounting practices. Here are 10 benefits of including eSignature […]
Deep in the Heart of Taxes
Did you know SmartVault is located in Houston, TX? We love working with our customers all over the world, but it’s always extra special to work with clients in our great home state. In honor of our 10th birthday, we decided to ask tax firms located all around Texas for their take on the profession, […]
Create Your Firm’s Disaster Recovery Plan in Five Easy Steps
As accountants, most of us like dealing with certainty. As business owners, however, we have to be able to handle a certain degree of uncertainty, including situations over which we have no control at all: disasters like hurricanes, floods and fires. That’s where a disaster recovery plan (DRP) comes into play. Creating a DRP shouldn’t […]
Online Security for Bookkeepers – Safe Email Handling
If you’re working via the Internet to provide bookkeeping services for your clients (as opposed to going on-site to their offices), you’ve found a highly efficient, convenient, and more profitable way to run your bookkeeping practice. But with online services comes online security concerns. Has this ever happened to you? You request needed information from […]
App Backwards: The #1 Mistake to Avoid
If you’re a bookkeeper who’s committed to increasing your efficiency with bookkeeping apps and automation, here’s a mistake you’ll want to avoid. While it may seem a bit counterintuitive, to avoid this mistake you’ll need to do the opposite of what nearly everyone else is doing! What is the mistake? Using an “app backwards” approach […]
How to Get the Info You Need from Your Clients More Quickly
Getting clients to give us the information we need in a timely way is one of the biggest workflow challenges bookkeepers face. But there’s a reason why this is often a difficult chore. Why Clients Are Slow to Respond The truth is, clients hire a bookkeeper to relieve the administrative burden of keeping updated and […]
4 Things I Hate About You: When to Rid Yourself of Toxic Clients
How do you feel about the prospect of firing clients? For many firm owners the process can be intimidating. It can also be difficult to determine whether you should fire a client or try to salvage the relationship with some frank discussion about what needs to change if you are going to continue to work […]
Using the Right Tech to Build a Better Bookkeeping Business
By Gabrielle Fontaine In our last post, I discussed the fact that one of the keys to having a successful bookkeeping business is to be able to get the information you need from your clients in a timely way. Depending on clients for this is one of the biggest challenges many of us face—so how […]