Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
A local provider charges more and delivers less because the customer feels compelled to stay local.
That's not true in my business. I'm charging less than the guys an hour away because when I do have to install something, I don't have to charge drive time and the client doesn't have to pay me drive time. In addition, I have come in behind some really incompetent providers. In those cases the client gets more and pays less.
Sure, so they don't have to pay drive time, because you said you don't charge it, though, really why not? My plumber sure does. But he can't work remotely either.
The question really is, why are you hurting yourself by wasting billable time driving to a client when remote access removes that wasted time?
I know the answer - the answer is - the clients you have want to see your face - because they too are bad at business. They don't understand that seeing is actually a waste and spending time and resources tracking you instead of trusting you to do your job. If they can't trust you, then they should fire you. This really boils down more about them than you, but if you picked different clients, you wouldn't have to drive much if at all.
Look at Gene - he works from home. Almost exclusively, unless there is a problem that simply can't be fixed remotely. He's been doing it for NTG for years.
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
That's "unless a device is offline", though.
For the times when we show up on site to do something that we could do remotely, I write that off as marketing. I've seen it happen where IT does everything remotely and the customer doesn't realize they are doing stuff in the back ground. The monthly reports get deleted before they are read. Next thing you know another provider swoops in and takes the client.
Sure, but it is still not a value to the customer. It's a value to you as the provider.
This should all tell you how important it is for you as a customer to not be marketed to in the same way. Going on site wastes time and costs money and plays to bad business emotions of the customer. Makes perfect sense as the provider. I know why YOU do it. It's smart.
But as the customer, you don't want your accountant or your IT people doing this TO you. You want to look at your decisions as business ones, not emotional ones. If your customers were smarter about business, you'd not need to do that. It only has value because they aren't realizing how their own business works.
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I've had the same CPA for twenty years. They have come on site a total of zero times in all those years. If they did, I would be like "this isn't cost effective, don't you have more productive things to do? I know I do." We hang at parties together, but don't hang out in each other's offices. We communicate quickly through email, we access shared systems. It's fast, efficient and business competent. We both make more money.
Sure, it might make sense for them to show up and babysit clueless customers who forget that accounting takes time or who their accountant is. But those customers should pay more and me less. That the accountant treats them like that is fine because they act like that. But I treat it as a business concern and our relationship is fast and efficient and doesn't require all that hand holding. Hand holding costs both parties money.
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OK, so how do I find an accountant that is not using QuickBooks if the only people I personally know are all these hobby business owners? I could probably run down the yellow pages (do they still exist?) and call them up and ask them if they use something other than QuickBooks, but I don't even know what questions I would ask them to see if they are competent in accounting.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
I've had the same CPA for twenty years.
Do you have the same CPA as NTG?
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
I've had the same CPA for twenty years.
Do you have the same CPA as NTG?
NOPE. We use one of out TX because we couldn't find a Xero one close to us (there are a few in NYC but expensive is putting it mildly).
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
OK, so how do I find an accountant that is not using QuickBooks if the only people I personally know are all these hobby business owners?
Well the most important thing is... don't talk to them. If they don't do business well, you probably want to avoid their advice. They are doing business badly, so your only real reference to them is that they are not sources of good advice. That they are local isn't good, it's not bad, it's just random.
But given that the one common factor is that they are running businesses poorly, the one thing you really know is that their advice is probably going to be bad or at least highly suspect.
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
I could probably run down the yellow pages (do they still exist?) and call them up and ask them if they use something other than QuickBooks, but I don't even know what questions I would ask them to see if they are competent in accounting.
This is the same challenge that companies have finding you. How do they find you? (Are you in the yellow pages?) How do they vet you to see if you are good at IT?
Well, the bottom line is, they probably can't. They can't tell if you are good at IT, if they could, they wouldn't need you, right?
But what they can tell is that you are not stuck on Windows XP Home. Make sense? There is low hanging fruit that would make it REALLY obvious that you aren't even trying.
In the case of an accountant, only using QB is like that. It's not even trying. So starting from a much smaller pool of accountants who at least bother to use tools appropriate for their customers or as their customers need makes the process way easier. IT can do some similar things - eliminate the pool of people who can only deliver one thing and instead do whatever the customer needs based on their business and you knock out 90% of companies. It doesn't mean that the companies that are left are all good, but the chances of finding a good one are much higher and the number left to sift through is much lower.
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Same logic I use for jobs. Don't talk to any job that requires a college degree because if they require it I know that they either think that that is impressive having done it themselves (which really says something about what they find challenging) or that they didn't do it and make capricious decisions without doing research (not as bad, but still very bad.) So like only using QB, only taking degrees tells me a lot about an employer. By filtering them out immediately I know that I'm working with a much smaller set of candidates where all good employers are still in the pool and only bad ones are eliminated. Some bad ones remain, but that one factor eliminates most bad ones making my jobs 1,000x easier.
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@minion-queen said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
I've had the same CPA for twenty years.
Do you have the same CPA as NTG?
NOPE. We use one of out TX because we couldn't find a Xero one close to us (there are a few in NYC but expensive is putting it mildly).
And often you'd want to use someone in a place like Texas. Because Texas has lower taxes, lower property values and lower salaries. This all means that you can get more CPA for your money.
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@dashrender said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
Accounting, like IT, has no advantage to being local to you. But getting accounting right, just like getting IT right, is critical for your business.
I disagree with this. I have a great business going because I focus on a geographic area. Most of my clients are with 5 minutes of each other. I offer no per trip charges or mileage charges. My business is growing at the rate I want it to. I can charge what the guys from cities an hour away charge and clients still choose me because it costs less for them when they don't have to pay for mileage. It's also very easy to socially network a geographic area and pick up new clients that way.
Why are you driving at all? Unless a device is offline.
Why drive? While remote support is a awesome tool, and 99% of it all can be done that way.. sometimes you need to see a person. There is so much that can be done when you build a strong relationship - one in person - that will generally build a stronger remote presense.
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@gjacobse said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@dashrender said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
Accounting, like IT, has no advantage to being local to you. But getting accounting right, just like getting IT right, is critical for your business.
I disagree with this. I have a great business going because I focus on a geographic area. Most of my clients are with 5 minutes of each other. I offer no per trip charges or mileage charges. My business is growing at the rate I want it to. I can charge what the guys from cities an hour away charge and clients still choose me because it costs less for them when they don't have to pay for mileage. It's also very easy to socially network a geographic area and pick up new clients that way.
Why are you driving at all? Unless a device is offline.
Why drive? While remote support is a awesome tool, and 99% of it all can be done that way.. sometimes you need to see a person. There is so much that can be done when you build a strong relationship - one in person - that will generally build a stronger remote presense.
Yes, as a salesman this makes sense. As a customer, it wastes your time and raises your costs. So from the customer perspective, this is a bad thing. He would not want this from his accountant.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
This is the same challenge that companies have finding you. How do they find you? (Are you in the yellow pages?) How do they vet you to see if you are good at IT?
So far almost every single one of my clients have come through a referral. When they interview me, I run some of my current clients until I find someone they know. I make sure their reference is on the proposal when it goes out.
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
This is the same challenge that companies have finding you. How do they find you? (Are you in the yellow pages?) How do they vet you to see if you are good at IT?
So far almost every single one of my clients have come through a referral. When they interview me, I run some of my current clients until I find someone they know. I make sure their reference is on the proposal when it goes out.
Yes, but none of that tells you anything. You did that with accountants and all it does is tell someone that they use them, you know it doesn't tell them if the accountant is even minimally qualified. Word of mouth is actually very bad for business unless you really know that the thing you are asking about is a competency of the person you are asking. In the cases of IT or accounting, that is not the case. So you finding an accountant or someone finding you is discovering a relationship, but not determining anything about the service.
You just ran through earlier why this didn't work for you finding an accountant. In fact, it reinforced using one most of us wouldn't even consider talking to. So if anything, it seems to have lowered the bar for you and made you more likely to accept a bad accountant rather than to help you find a good one.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
Yes, but none of that tells you anything. You did that with accountants and all it does is tell someone that they use them, you know it doesn't tell them if the accountant is even minimally qualified.
You lost me here. So would you go to Xero's advisor directory and try to find on in Texas because if they are using Xero they must be competent and if they are in Texas they must be more accountant for my money? Then what do I do? Ask them questions about accounting, of which I know little?
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
Yes, but none of that tells you anything. You did that with accountants and all it does is tell someone that they use them, you know it doesn't tell them if the accountant is even minimally qualified.
You lost me here. So would you go to Xero's advisor directory and try to find on in Texas because if they are using Xero they must be competent and if they are in Texas they must be more accountant for my money? Then what do I do? Ask them questions about accounting, of which I know little?
Knowing Xero doesn't make them competent. But not Only using QB gives them the possibility of being competent. So you are starting from a dramatically better position.
What did you do with your current situation? You went with someone that the ONLY thing you knew about them was that they were not competent, yet you used them anyway. So .... given that you are currently okay with zero vetting or actually negative vetting, why not go to the Xero (or the right tool for you) listing and see who is recommended in a low cost area?
Things that you would know...
- Potential for being good, instead of knowing that they are not.
- Using the tool you want them to use, instead of one that you know you don't.
- Is in a low cost area instead of a high cost area.
- Doesn't have the stigma of being recommended by people known to give bad advice.
Every aspect is more likely to turn out well than the current process. If the question is "is this a good process", the answer is "not really". If the question is "does this dramatically improve the worst possible process" the answer is "absolutely." So, start by improving.
Don't look at it as "how could this work" look at it from the "what I'm doing now is completely broken, I need to improve things." You can't find an accountant that you trust without starting with one you might be able to trust. So take the first step.
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Plus, accountants are federally certified and bound by a lot of laws. So there is some negatives there industry wide, but some advantages for looking for one without personal references.
Or talk to NTG's, as you know that they are a reference, use the tool you want, handle your type of firm, and work in a low cost area.
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QuickBooks is the worst. If you've ever had to run around in a company with like five users on QB and deal with connection issues, shared drive issues, file corruption... it doesn't take much before QB becomes the main thing you are supporting.
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I agree QuickBooks sucks to support. Getting people to switch is even harder...
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
I agree QuickBooks sucks to support. Getting people to switch is even harder...
I've actually had decent luck with that. QBs problems are such that it's often possible to make a business case for switching that makes sense. Relatively clear cost and risk issues that owners can understand.
Cost of software, lack of support, high maintenance costs, no hope of improvements, high risk of financial data loss.... mostly things you can assign dollar values to and compare against something else.
