Oct 24, 20237 min read

[VIDEO]- How to differentiate your bookkeeping service while working less and charging more!

Ready to just dive in and give it a try on your own? Here is the link to coupler that we mentioned:

Coupler Link: https://app.coupler.io/register/sign_up?referral_code=Pineapplecf

Online Dashboard Course:

https://www.pineapplecf.com/online-course-build-your-own-dashboard

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More information on our website here:

https://www.pineapplecf.com/quickbooks-online-performance-dashboard

[Video Transcript]

What's up y'all! If you're looking to differentiate your bookkeeping services while working less and charging more, and getting a bit outside of the commoditized industry that is bookkeeping; you are in for a treat! I'm Jack Tomkins and I can't wait to tell you all about this.

Once again I am Jack Tomkins with Pineapple Consulting Firm. We are always trying to help your small business become more data-driven and in this particular video, we are trying to help bookkeepers differentiate their services A LOT. We want to help you really stand out in the market, with some data of course.

So there are three big areas that we're going to cover. One is automation and getting a little bit more efficient of course. Two is providing a huge value add in the form of a dashboard. And three is being able to provide a concierge-level service if you want to.

So the first one, automation, getting more efficient, all good stuff. We're not talking AI. We're not talking chat GPT. We're just talking automation. There is an important difference that we'll talk through. First, transaction level stuff. If you're watching this video, you probably already know that in QuickBooks or Xero or whatever accounting software that you're normally in, there's a lot of good stuff to automate at the transaction level. So we won't go too too much into that, we're going to jump to the monthly report. The monthly report that you probably send out to your clients might be different, might be the same per client, might vary a little bit, but regardless of how it's done, there is automation to be had and it can make your life a whole lot easier.

We're going to start off with a third party software called coupler that we are affiliated with. We have a referral link that's linked below. If you end up wanting to use coupler, use that to get a couple bucks off. We're going to talk about that monthly report and how to get there from coupler. Okay so let's dive in.

All right, so here is coupler. This is a program much like Zappier if you've heard of that. It takes data from point A to point B. So how do we get this set up? We're going to do a QuickBooks to Google Sheets example. You'll have to make an account. It's pretty quick and easy and then once you make an account, you can go up here and start your import. Once you're in your account, you add a new importer and all we do here is take data from point A (QuickBooks Reports instead of QuickBooks itself). QuickBooks reports will have things like the P&L balance sheet, cash flow, stuff that you're used to seeing, stuff that your clients are used to seeing, and we're going to "save data to" which we will do Google Sheets in this example.

They have this walkthrough on how to get it set up below. I'll go through this very very briefly. You proceed there, and then you extract data, and then you select which account you want to pull the Quickbooks data from. Obviously, you have access to all those accounts. Pick the profit and loss statement and then you mess with things like, what time frame do you want to pull and then you dump all the data into Google Sheets.

It comes out looking like this. This is our coupler import. So once you have this (I think the free plan is actually pretty robust so you might be able to do that for free so far and completely automated for sure) your data will come in like this. You can group all of your clients together if you you get a little bit creative with Google Sheets. For this example, we're just going to go with through one client. So with this, again, data is automated in, big check number one, and now we want to make something that's a bit of a summary.

What I recommend is creating something like a database. So we've got that same import over here and then we've got these blue columns that are what I like to call helper columns. You can create those so that you can pull exactly what you want and have it fully automated. These are all formulas. You can copy them all the way down so that any new data that comes in still gets hit with a formula, which will still go into your automated summary. Again you're seeing the theme.

In the example summary, this is very very basic just a couple of examples that you could do. You could create an entire P&L in this if you wanted to. You could also do something like this. It is just a simple pivot table. We've got revenue. We've got net profit. And we grab this just from the database. All this is is a pivot table, nothing crazy here, but this auto updates when new data is input into the coupler import section. It is a very simple graph. Nothing super crazy here but very very easy to do.

Then finally, you can do something like some conditional formatting. This is a couple formulas. You can link revenue for March, revenue for the prior month, and these are automated based on this drop down. Then you can do a month over month conditional format thing. Green is good/up, red is bad/down, that kind of thing.

So your transaction level stuff is automated as much as possible from within QuickBooks. Then coupler will automate your QuickBooks reports that you care about (for example, profit and loss) into Google Sheets. In Google Sheets you can create some formulas that are of course automated as well and then finally the summary (whatever you want your summary to look like) these are all automated as well as new data comes in. So you've just taken a monthly report that people may or may not look at and turned it into something that's completely automated.

You will have to build this for each client but it's a one time build. It's not too hard and as you can tell, there's nothing super fancy here so far. So you've got this all completely automated and at this point you're saving a bunch of time and providing a little bit more value as well. so let's think what else could we do? What additional value could we provide from this? We'll jump into that real quick.

Now that all of your data is flowing in an automated fashion and you've got a really good setup there, let's take it one step further. Let's add some serious value with a dashboard. Let's see what it looks like. This is a big level up right, this is your new profit and loss statement looks a lot different than what folks see in QuickBooks. This is just a URL/a web based thing called Google looker Studio. I'm going to get into presentation mode real quick so we can see all of it.

Like I said, this is your new P&L. Big things on top here. We've got all the big headers or anchor points of a profit and loss statement with some month over month performance. You can flow all of your clients into this one dashboard and they can log in and only see their own information of course. We trend the revenue, break it down, talk about top expenses, 3 month trends, all that good stuff. You can do it relatively easily with the tools that we were just working with (Google Sheets and coupler).

We also get into the balance sheet and cash flow here. Everybody always wants to see what's actually in the bank account right? Profit and loss is very different than cash in the bank. So we trend that out and put some context around it up here as well with some total AP and total AR type stuff.

This is your new financial statement dashboard essentially and your clients won't just want it, they almost need it. They will want and need and crave this to run their business on a monthly basis and it it really is a game changer. This is not something that a lot of bookkeepers are doing. Putting things in a visual dashboard such as this is a huge oneup or differentiator and will get you new clients, higher retention, automate your work, better client engagement, all that good stuff. This is all just for making it more visual and saving your time and of course working smarter not harder. So we've got all that working now and again this is just automated data flow. It is not AI. It's not machine learning. It's really nothing too crazy. It's just saving you a bunch of time and creating a really compelling offer.

Now you can work on that concierge-level service.As we know, automation and AI, they can't replace that human relationship. They just can't. And now you've got more time to actually focus on that, and because you're focusing on that, it feels like a concierge-level service.

You're adding a lot of value with the dashboard and you're saving a buch of time. You can genuinely work less and charge more, and that is a big differentiator, to where you are now out of the commoditized bookkeeping industry.

We love helping bookkeepers. We need bookkeepers because we link up to financial data and if the financial data isn't good, we can't use it for our dashboards. So we love to partner with bookkeepers. We are here to help so give us a shout. I hope this was compelling. Work less, make more, get out of the commoditized Industry. Looking forward to working with you!