Mentoring is on my mind...

Start-Up week is over. 

You might want to follow @Start-up_Canada on Twitter to see what all the fuss is about. Apparently there are so many young people starting businesses that Intuit Canada has partnered with Start-Up Canada to offer QuickBooks Online to start-ups for a full year for free.

If you're not a Start-up and you don't have a deal yet, you might want to consider contacting me because I can get you 30% off your QuickBooks Online subscription for a lifetime if you're my client.

Now you're not likely to want to switch accountants, and I'm great with that, as I don't want to do year ends or corporate tax.  But I love helping people master QuickBooks. That is what I want to do full time.

So I'm offering a Service Pack - and here's my thinking.  I've been working with several business owners on getting them caught up because they are a few years behind. I've been doing that pretty consistently for many years.  It takes time, and the business owner needs to build skills like how to organize their paperwork. It's about new habits, building them and maintaining them.

I've got several owners with whom I have a weekly meeting. We meet online because they live far away, and I'm not going to want to drive to them, or them to me. It's very convenient, we meet on the phone, and hook up our computers using a secure encrypted GoToMeeting hosted by Citrix. I pay the monthly subscription and can hold as many meetings with up to 25 people as I want to.  Been using it for years.  Try it out yourself, free for 30 days.  You can even hook up your webcam so you can see each other.

Anyway, that led me to thinking what if I offered a Service Pack for other business owners, just to make sure their QuickBooks data files were healthy. There's a lot to check up on. Everything from security, preferences, the chart of accounts setup, how the Items are linked, are the reports set up property, why doesn't the opening balance agree to my last S100 and S125 schedules on my T2 Corporate return, why doesn't my bank that is supposedly reconcile show me the right balances on my financial statements, that sort of thing. That's what I'm really good at, figuring out how to fix all of that stuff.

And that's what costs you big time at year end, if you haven't dealt with all that stuff, your accountant will get a headache just dealing with all those loose ends. And that's what costs you so much at year end.

So, what if, for $99 a month, you could have someone work on those things with you, to guide you to where your year end was a mere formality, and your accountant was sooooooooo happy with your bookkeeping that their bill was way less than last year end.

Don't believe me, go look at your last year end bill, and tell me whether you think it was too much, and what your accountant said was the reason.  I'm not here to replace your accountant, I want to make sure they like you because your books are complete and correct.  BTW, complete and correct record keeping, it's actually the law, it's not an optional thing  Sometimes CRA sends out auditors to blanket a town to check that everyone has books and records that are complete and correct. If they find that business owners don't have complete and correct records, they will issue demand letters with deadlines at which time they will come back to check to make sure you've caught up.  That means up to current, not just up to the end of last year end.

I can help but you'll have to work with me.  How does once a week sound? On the phone at your desk, no tidying up, just you and me, talking about your record keeping.

http://eileenreppenhagen.fullslate.com/