Startups tend to operate on shaky ground. Look at the facts: 82% of small businesses fail due to poor cash flow. 90% of startups will fail - period.

From the moment a CEO starts pouring time and money into an idea, a rock-solid financial foundation is key to increasing the odds of success. If company owners don’t have a realistic view of their financials and are not set up for capital raising, reports, and tax prep, their dream may fade away before they ever get a chance to open their doors.

As an accountant or bookkeeper, you can help prevent startups from going under or losing profitability. The key is understanding a startup's challenges and providing solutions to facilitate company growth.

You may hear some accounting professionals talk about horror stories related to startups. Maybe startups couldn’t pay them or could only pay in equity once the company was up and running.

The truth is... startups need you. Desperately. If you know the processes and tools to help...

Increase Your Value and Boost Your Services with Two CFO-Level Accounting Tools

As technology develops at breakneck speeds, some companies are under the impression that bookkeepers are no longer relevant, or that they are no longer able to provide valuable services. You may face potential clients who turn you down because they feel a bookkeeper is a “low level” position, or try to make you offer “á la carte” services to compliment their automated solutions. Either way, you might be struggling to get consistent work or charge the higher fees that you’ve been wanting.

Thankfully, bookkeeping is far from irrelevant -- you just need to learn to adapt as the industry changes. Yes, automations can crunch numbers, but there is so much more to providing accounting services than calculations. As a bookkeeper, you’re able to offer something that is so much more valuable to your clients than anything a computer ever could provide: an indispensable,...

5 Reasons Why Your Remote Bookkeeping Firm Isn’t as Successful as You’d Hoped

Even though working remotely as your own boss is the dream of many bookkeepers and accountants, it’s too easy to find yourself struggling to make ends meet, hunting down payment from clients, and settling for any client who throws work at you. Getting started and then maintaining momentum is tough, making you feel like you have to pay your dues before you can establish a solid practice. You may have even been trying to run a remote bookkeeping or accounting firm for some time now, without pulling the income you know you deserve, and can’t figure out what’s going wrong. 

The good news is that you don’t have to necessarily “pay your dues.” You just have to know which mistakes to avoid. Once you know what not to do, you can jump in and build (or expand) your practice more quickly.

1. You treat your remote practice like a “side gig.”

Whether...

Being your own boss, working your own hours, hand-picking your clients and your rates, taking actual vacations and spending more time with your family… this is the dream, right?

For many bookkeepers and accountants, working remotely is a reality that has breathed energy back into the passion they feel for their work and their life. It takes hard work and dedication to sustain your own remote bookkeeping practice, but countless remote or virtual bookkeepers and accountants agree that the rewards are well worth the effort. 

Although the path to establishing a remote practice is full of challenges, the steps are fairly simple. Four main keys contribute to you taking the leap from working for your corporate job to working for yourself. Your understanding of these keys begins here. 

Maximize Your “VIP” From Day One

At CFO Bookkeeper, we use “VIP” to refer to “Valuable Expert, Instructor, Participant.” When you’re a VIP CFO...

Properly quoting (and collecting) accounting fees can be an overwhelming hurdle for many bookkeepers, especially those just opening up their own practice. If you don’t have a pricing system in place, you run the risk of undercutting your value and inviting potential clients to hire a cheaper (or automated) option. 

Fortunately, that overwhelm you may be feeling can be easily dissolved with a few tips and reassessment of your value. Learning how to package your services, create clear offers to reflect your value, and develop a system for charging appropriately for cleanup, onboarding, and ongoing work will enable you to confidently set your prices and find clients who will happily pay it.

How to Properly Package and Price Your Bookkeeping Services

1. Take Control and Own the Value of Your Work

Position yourself as an elite service provider from the very beginning of your relationship with all prospective clients. Your responsibility will be to lead the client through the...