Episode 51: Why a Good Bookkeeper Can Change Everything

  📍 Welcome to the Creative Minds Smart Money Podcast, where we turn financial confusion into creative confidence. I’m Samantha Eck, bookkeeper and fractional CFO for creative entrepreneurs. Each week I’m sharing my financial expertise and actionable strategies to help you build a thriving creative business. Plus, you’ll hear from industry experts who bring fresh perspectives on growing your business beyond the numbers. Because building a successful creative business starts with strong financial foundations. Your next chapter starts now.

You are listening to the Creative Minds Smart Money Podcast, and today is all about why a good bookkeeper can change everything. We’ve talked about tons of topics, and it’s been almost a year since this podcast has launched, so I really wanna touch on the importance of a good bookkeeper and why they can change everything and not necessarily just for me.

But for other bookkeepers out there, because I wanna advocate for all of us, and I want people to know that how important the profession is, but also how important it is for you to eventually get to the point where you can hire a bookkeeper. A lot of people think hiring a bookkeeper is because either you’re bad with numbers or you can’t understand things, but a bookkeeper isn’t about being good or bad with numbers.

It’s not about being good or bad with math. It’s about building support and building confidence in your business so that you don’t have to second guess your decisions. So. What I always tell my clients is that when we’re working together, I’m gonna give you as plain as day the information in these reports and helping you read them and giving you opportunities where you can grow your business so that you can make decisions out of clarity and confidence instead of out of fear or outta scarcity, or because you’re not sure, you know, you can make six figures.

And still be completely confused behind the scenes and not know if you can hire someone and not know if you can afford something. Because if you don’t have the clear picture of your business, you’re not going to be able to grow it in a way that matters. I. So this episode is for those of you who have been feeling tired of guessing, you are done dreading tax season every year because tax season comes around every year and you’re feeling disconnected from your money, but you wanna be able to understand it so that you can grow your business and make meaningful decisions.

 You don’t wanna be a statistic, you don’t want your business to have to shut down in two to five years. You wanna get past that. You want to be someone who has a long-term sustainable business because a good bookkeeper will not just track your past, but they help you shape your future.

They help you understand your future. And I just wanna talk a little bit and touch a little bit on that as well of like how myself as a fractional CFO can also help you. So if you brain just goes completely blank every time you open your accounting software, this one is for you. And let’s get into each other into it.

So we wanna talk about what a bookkeeper actually does that most people tend to miss, first of all. It’s not just categorizing expenses and reconciling bank statements. That is the utmost basic level of what a bookkeeper does. Like categorizing and reconciling bank statements is so basic, like that’s not what bookkeepers do anymore.

And we don’t actually like, yes, we do categorize. We do reconcile your bank accounts, but it’s not the baseline. It is not the baseline. That is the most basic baseline a bookkeeper can do. Strategic bookkeeping, which is what I offer and a lot of other bookkeepers do as well, is consistent tracking of your income and expenses, delivering your monthly financial reports, and then explaining what they mean, not just sending them.

So if your bookkeeper right now is just sending you reports and saying, here you go, here’s what your numbers look like, it’s not good enough. And I’m not trying to shame someone or say like, leave your bookkeeper. I’m just saying that you need more, you need more support than that. You need to understand your numbers in a way that makes sense to you so that you can make confident decisions and not have to second guess a damn thing.

You don’t wanna second guess anything. You wanna be able to look at your numbers and say, okay, I can afford to buy this course this month. And if you are looking at your numbers and you can’t figure that out, then you really need someone who’s going to help open up that box for you. A good bookkeeper will also help you prepare for taxes all year, not just in April.

For me personally, I help my clients prepare with quarterly taxes all year. if they’re sole prop or a single member, LLC, I’m in their inbox at the beginning of the quarter when we are due our so quarterly taxes and I’m telling them, Hey, your quarterly taxes are due. Here’s where you go and pay with them.

I will give you an updated number a little bit later on. closer to when it’s actually due. So then a couple weeks from then I will say, Hey, I did your numbers. Here’s the amount that I believe that you should pay. And they will go ahead and pay that. Like one of my clients paid exactly what I told her to you.

Sometimes it can be a little bit extra, but, and I know that this is a bad thing ’cause you don’t want to pay more money to the IRS than you need to. But at the end of the day, because we don’t know how much your business is gonna fluctuate. Over the next, you know, six to nine months, I want you to get a refund from the IRS rather than owe them money.

Do I really want you to overpay them? Absolutely not, but I would prefer that you get money back than having to owe them more money. Come April 15th. And then of course one of the last things they do, like I’ve been mentioning, is they offer you insights that lead to real important business decisions. And I want that to be clear.

A good bookkeeper will offer insights that lead to real business decisions. So what I was mentioning earlier is that what I do for my clients is I show them their wins. I explain their books in ways that make sense, and then I give them what I like to call opportunities. So opportunities are things that.

I think of that might improve their business and ways that we can implement things that might help them have a stronger business. That’s not to say, okay, you need to do this. This is more being that strategic partner and saying, here’s what I’m thinking. What do you think? And if they’re like, yeah, that, that actually makes sense.

And they do that for their business and it helps ’em then great. But if they’re like, yeah, that doesn’t really make sense for my business, then okay. But we base it based off of what you are shooting for in your business. Raw real example, I had a meeting with a client yesterday. I. Her goal is to hit $125,000 in revenue this year.

She did not hit her target every month for the first quarter, so instead of being like, Hey, I’m just gonna continue going, she wanted to adjust her goal for the rest of the year to make, to see what she needed to make monthly so that she can hit that 125,000. So we updated the spreadsheet so that her goal was now whatever else was remaining so that she would hit that 125,000 by the end of the year.

And that’s what we wanna do, is we wanna help you to connect your goals to your business. And of course, again, this isn’t just me. There’s tons of bookkeepers out there who will actually help you do that and help you understand your numbers in a good way. So, of course we understand what a book, now that we understand what a bookkeeper actually does, what can a bookkeeper actually like make you feel like, how do they, how does it feel to have someone who is supportive and can help you grow your business in meaningful ways?

First of all, you’re gonna have that peace of mind knowing someone is watching the money side of your business. There’s so much anxiety and fear and dread and like terror around money, especially as women business owners. We just we’re scared. We’re scared of talking about it. It’s taboo. We don’t wanna bring it up.

We’re scared of giving it off to someone else. We, but once you pass it off and you actually give it to someone and they actually talk about it, the peace of mind knowing someone is watching the money side of your business is just gonna blow your mind. You’re gonna feel so at peace, you’re gonna feel calm.

You’re not gonna dread when your CPA emails you and says, Hey Amanda, like, can I get your profit loss and your balance sheet, and all that good stuff so I can do your taxes? Because. Your bookkeeper ideally will be there to support you and be like, Hey, I got you. Here’s your PL and your mail sheet.

Sometimes they’ll communicate directly with your CPA. Sometimes they’ll give you exactly what you need to give your CPA. It depends on who, which bookkeeper you’re working with. Then you also have the freedom of knowing what’s working and what’s not. So let’s trade. Say you tried a new ad strategy, your bookkeeper is gonna be able to tell you if that ad strategy is actually bringing you in more clients if they’re not.

Because if we’re gonna say, okay, like whoa, like your revenue went up like six times this month. and I noticed your ad spending was also up. So there’s a correlation there. Like we can see that that’s connected, whereas. You know, I’m not saying that you can’t do this as a business owner and look at that, but you might not see that correlation, and that’s not to say that you’re blind or you, you don’t understand your numbers.

It’s more to say that your brain works differently. You know, your zone of genius is in a different area than a bookkeeper zone of genius. You are gonna start feeling safe with your money instead of confused or ashamed. Because a lot of times when I have clients that come to me, they say that, oh, I’m so ashamed I have all this mixing, I have all this going on in my business.

I’m just so confused. So when we actually start to get into it and we actually talk about it and we really like connect. They start to understand it on a deeper level. And then of course you’re gonna make more confident decisions with pricing, hiring, investing, because it’s all gonna become clearer when you can look at your numbers every month and say, oh, hey, yeah, I understand that.

And when you can sit down and ask like, Hey, Samantha, do you know if I can afford to hire someone this month because I really need, I really need a contractor this month. Whatever it is, because I have a client right now who, she’s been talking about hiring a contractor for a long time, and I told her and I said, Hey, like you made a lot of money last month.

You have a lot of money left over after you paid yourself after your expenses. If you wanna hire a contractor, you wanna hire a va. Now is the time. You know exactly you, you know, this is exactly what you have. And if you are wanting to plan for the future, that’s where that CFO level service comes in because.

Bookkeeping looks at the past. CFOs fractional CFO and CFO work will look at the future. So it’s connecting the two of them and kind of bringing them full picture so that you can really like transform your business. I would say as someone who is a bookkeeper and a CFO, like you, a fractional CFO, you need many people on your financial teams.

Like you don’t just need one person, you need a CPA, you need a bookkeeper, everything like that. And I know a lot of people are saying like, you know. You need two separate services, everything like that. I don’t think you do. You can have someone who is a bookkeeper and someone who is tax prepar in the same firm, as long as it’s two different sets of eyes.

I think that that’s important to notice that I think that two separate people, or multiple people should be looking at your books. It shouldn’t just be one person because we’re all human. So me as a human could miss something that someone else might see. And then let’s talk about how a bookkeeper can support your growth.

So this is me advocating really hard for why you need a bookkeeper, but of course this is very important because a bookkeeper is something that’s very vital for your business. They help you track trends so you can pivot intentionally. Like with my clients, we don’t just look at the profit and loss. The single profit loss, like we look at a profit loss on a year over year basis.

We look at a profit loss on a year to date basis so that we can really see the trend that their business is taking so that they can make those pivots. Before it gets too far, you know, they help you plan for taxes, they help you plan for big investments. They help you plan for slow seasons. So if we’re, while we’re looking at these trends, we might say, okay, last year, you know, you had a dip in March.

I don’t know if that’s expected again, but we should probably plan to see if maybe we’ll have another dip in March and do any bigger expenses in February so that we are not kind of going back into that dip in March. They keep you in the loop of what’s really happening in your business. There have been many times with my clients where I’ve lo noticed software subscriptions and I’ve said, Hey, you know, like you have this software, but did you know that this other software can do the same thing?

And to them that’s like, whoa. Like I didn’t even realize that. Like, thank you for telling me Now I just save $15 a month. And you might be like, okay, well that’s just $15 a month, Samantha. But imagine that compounded over the course of two to three years, you know? So. It just helps to have someone there.

It gives you visibility, which allows you to have more power in your business, which allows you to generate more profit again, because you are sticking to your zone of genius and the bookkeeper is sticking to theirs. It’s just gonna give you that better visibility. And when you know your margins, you know your numbers, you know your burn rate, you know everything that’s going on behind the scenes, you start to lead like a CEO.

So you’re less stuck and caught up in the behind the scenes and you’re more into what’s going on as a business owner. So I already talked about this in a separate episode, like signs they or times and signs that, you know, it’s time to hire a bookkeeper, but let’s just. Do the highlights. Let’s do the highlights and talk about this.

First of all, you’re making money, but you don’t know where it’s going, and if you can’t confidently make decisions from it, then you absolutely know you need a bookkeeper. You’re avoiding your software, your accounting software, like it’s a plague. I just zoomed in on me. My camera just zoomed in on me for no reason, but that’s okay.

You’re avoiding your accounting software. Oh, it’s ’cause I’m using my fingers. You’re avoiding your bookkeeping software like it’s a plague because. You know, you don’t wanna look at it. It’s the monster under your bed. You’re not setting an aside enough for taxes or you’re unsure how much to set aside.

’cause you, again, you’ve never been taught this, you don’t know what you’re looking for. You’re spending emotionally instead of strategically because you feel like you have that extra money. You wanna grow, but your finances feel like chaos behind the scenes, and you wanna feel supported and stop carrying this alone because you’re just not you.

You don’t understand your numbers, and you need someone to explain them to you in a way that makes sense. Okay. And I love that. I feel like that’s so important. And I know this was an episode just basically zing up what a, a bookkeeper is, but that is, it’s the core essence of what a bookkeeper is and it’s so important to understand that and why it’s important for you as a creative, and not just you as a creative, but use a business owner.

📍 So whoever’s listening to this is a business owner, why it’s important because bookkeeping isn’t just a service, it’s a relationship. And when you find the right person to walk with you, it’ll change everything in your business. If you find this episode helpful, please leave the show a review and share this with a friend.

And of course, if you need a bookkeeper, I’m here for you. Reach out and let’s have a conversation about how I can assist you. If you, as always, if you have any suggestions for the show or you wanna see something else, another topic talked about, please, please, please fill out the form in the show notes and let me know what you wanna see on the show.

Otherwise, I wish you all the best and we’ll see you next week. Farewell fellow Travelers.