What to Expect During Your Initial Strategy Session with Patrick Accounting

You've made the decision to work with us for outsourced bookkeeping, accounting, payroll, and tax services—and our first meeting with your new accounting team is set. Our goal is to give you an opportunity to thrive by simplifying financial and people complexities. You're taking that first simplifying step, and we're excited to become your back-office partner.

Here's what you can expect during your initial strategy session and how to maximize our time together.

The Fact-Finding Phase: Why We May Ask the Same Questions Again

Your accounting firm onboarding begins with an hour-long session with your new accounting team. If you're near our office, we'd love to host you at:

Patrick Accounting Address: 5570 Murray Avenue, Memphis, TN, 38119

If you're virtual, we'll provide a Zoom link in your calendar invite. Your salesperson will join along with key members of our accounting team.

This conversation will feel much like the conversations you've already had with our sales team—and yes, it may feel redundant. This is intentional.

We need to reaffirm critical business operations and transfer all that knowledge about your business to your new team. Remember, we want to serve you as if we were in your office, so much of this financial strategy session will be fact-finding on your current processes and confirming details you've already shared.

Think of it as building the foundation for everything that comes next in your Patrick Accounting client experience.

Business Goals and Burning Questions: Your Time to Get Answers

Next, we'll talk about goals and answer your questions. This meeting is your time to ask all those burning questions like:

• Am I structured correctly for taxes?
• Do I have anything I need to be looking out for in the future?
• Can I ditch the receipt shoebox?
• When will you take over sales taxes?
• What types of things should I be doing now to get a good tax answer at year-end?
• Should I put my vehicle on the books?

After we get a clear picture of your business goals, you can ask our team any questions you need answers to. Remember, in our monthly services, you can always call, email, or schedule a Zoom meeting with our team. That's what you pay us for!

We want to establish good communication with you early on, so ask away during this meeting.

System Access: Building Your Financial Infrastructue

Towards the end of our meeting, if you're feeling confident that you've made the right decision to work with us for your small business accounting needs, we'll request access to:

• QuickBooks Online or Restaurant 365 (if we don't already have it)
• Online bank access
• Online credit card access
• Point of Sale system login
• Sales tax login and any other online tax logins we may need

Our goal is to create our own login to each of these accounts so we don't have to ping you for MFA (multifactor authentication) requests while we do our monthly work. Getting as much access during this bookkeeping onboarding process keeps your after-meeting to-do list short and enables us to start work immediately.

Preparation tip: Make sure you know your passwords because we'll try to log in during the meeting!

Closing Documents and Initial Investment Schedule

Many of our documents put us on the hook for filing your taxes (and if we're ever late, we pay the fines, not you!). Unfortunately, many IRS forms require wet signatures, so we'll spend a few minutes collecting signatures at the end of our meeting.

If you're joining virtually, you can download our closing documents, print, sign, and scan them back to us before the meeting. We'll also need a voided check from your business operating account and your payroll account (if you use a payroll clearing account).

We've included a list of items to bring in your meeting invitation to ensure a productive and effective session. You can also find that checklist here:

Next, we'll double-check our engagement and ensure our monthly fee and your one-time investment is correct. We'll work with you to establish when you want to pay your one-time investment and outline when your monthly fee starts.

After this meeting, we'll resend our signed service agreement and your investment schedule as backup. Remember, our services are month-to-month, so you can terminate at any time without penalties or fines.

Finally, if you haven't already started payroll with us, we'll schedule your payroll kick-off call with our implementation team. This is a separate 30-minute Zoom conversation on a different day—intentionally, so we can spend this meeting really digging into your needs.

What Happens Next: Your 30-45 Day Timeline

Our goal is to get you up and running in 30-45 days. During this meeting, we'll establish our timeline for our next meeting, which will be the first time you get to review clean financial statements. We can make tweaks to your financials so the categories make sense to you as well.

Be on the lookout for:

• Invitations to our client portal
• To-dos from the accounting team

Remember, we provide financial statements by the 25th of each month, so our goal is to get you in process as soon as possible so you have good insight and so we can build an accurate tax return.

Communication is Key to Long-Term Success

We expect every single member of our team to communicate and be responsive to you. We expect the same consideration from you.

We know you're busy, but for us to help you accomplish your goals, responding quickly and answering questions early on goes a long way in establishing your long-term success. Failing to provide what we need to file taxes, plan appropriately, handle sales reports, etc., ultimately slows our team down and hurts our ability to truly help you.

Communication is key to a long-term partnership. We're here to help you, so talk to us!

Have any questions? Join us during our office hours for a more personalized chat, or give our office a call at (901) 755-5858.