You’ve decided to work with us for outsourced bookkeeping, accounting, payroll, and tax services – and our first meeting 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 are a few key tips on maximizing our time together in our first meeting and what you can expect during that time.
Your Initial Strategy Session Meeting
First, we have planned for an hour-long session with your new accounting team. If you are near our office, we would love to host you in our office for this meeting.
If you are virtual, we will provide you a Zoom link in your calendar invite to join. Your salesperson will join as well as a few key members of our accounting team.
Fact Finding
This conversation will be like all the conversations you have already had with our sales team, so it may feel redundant to you. This is intentional. It is important that you reaffirm critical business operations and transfer all of that knowledge about your business to your new team. Remember, we want to serve you as if we were in your office, so a lot of this meeting will be fact-finding on your current processes, and confirming many things you’ve already told us.
Business Goals & Questions
Next, we will talk about goals and answer your questions. This meeting is your time to ask all of 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 good idea about your business goals, you can ask our team any of those questions you need answers to. Remember, in our monthly services, you can always call, email, or schedule a Zoom with our team. That is what you pay us for! We want to establish good communication with you early on, so ask away during this meeting!
Gaining Access To Your Systems
Towards the end of our meeting, if you are still feeling confident that you have made the right decision to work with us for your accounting needs, we will try to gain access to:
- QuickBooks Online or Restaurant 365 (if we do not 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 that we do not have to ping you for MFA requests while we do our monthly work. Getting as much access during that meeting keeps your after-meeting to-do list short and enables us to start work immediately after this strategy session. So, make sure you know your passwords, as we will try to log in!
Sign Closing Documents & Discuss 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 of the IRS forms require wet signatures, so at the end of our meeting, we’ll spend a few minutes collecting signatures from you. If you are joining us virtually, here are our closing documents.
Download Closing Documents
You can print, sign, and scan it back to us before this meeting. Remember, we will also need a voided check from your business operating account and your payroll account (if you use a payroll clearing account.) We have included a list of items you’ll want to bring to this initial strategy session in your meeting invitations. Here’s what to bring to ensure a productive and effective session.
Download Install Checklist
Next, we will double-check our engagement and ensure our monthly fee and your one-time investment is correct. We will work with you to establish the date you want to pay for your one-time investment and outline when your monthly fee will start.
After this meeting, we will resend our signed service agreement and your investment schedule as a backup. Remember, our services are month to month, so you can terminate at any time without penalties or fines.
Last, if you have not already started payroll with us, we will schedule your payroll kick-off call with our implementation team. This is a 30-minute Zoom conversation that we do on a different day. Again, this is intentional so we can spend this meeting really digging into your pains.
Timeline After Initial Strategy Session
Our goal is to get you up and running in 30-45 days. During this meeting, we will 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 and to-dos from the accounting team after this meeting. Remember, we provide financial statements to you by the 25th of each month, so our goal is to get you in process as soon as we can so you have good insight, and we can build an accurate tax return.
Communication is Key
Remember, we expect every single member of our team to communicate and be responsive to you. We expect the same promptness from you. We know you are busy, but for us to help you accomplish your goals, responding quickly and answering questions we have early on goes a long way in your long-term success. Failing to report or provide what we need to file taxes, appropriately plan for taxes, 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 are here to help you so talk to us!
Have any questions? Join us during our office hours for a more personalized chat or you can always give our office a call at (901)755-5858.
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