Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
Most of my clients are with 5 minutes of each other. I offer no per trip charges or mileage charges. My business is growing at the rate I want it to. I can charge what the guys from cities an hour away charge and clients still choose me because it costs less for them when they don't have to pay for mileage. It's also very easy to socially network a geographic area and pick up new clients that way.
None of this explains why THEY would choose YOU. It explains why you take them on as customers. I think you've missed the point. I know why the accountants in your town take on customers. What we don't understand is why any people decide to be their customers.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
A local provider charges more and delivers less because the customer feels compelled to stay local.
That's not true in my business. I'm charging less than the guys an hour away because when I do have to install something, I don't have to charge drive time and the client doesn't have to pay me drive time. In addition, I have come in behind some really incompetent providers. In those cases the client gets more and pays less.
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@dashrender said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
Why are you driving at all? Unless a device is offline.
To prevent my job from getting shipped to India... When a computer doesn't boot, or one boots and then immediately blue screens like happened today, we send someone. Clients are willing to pay a premium for this. I also recycle their old gear. I noticed that other companies don't do that and clients don't know how to destroy drives or handle Ewaste.
Does your accountant drive to you if your books go offline? Bench, not IT, has some value to being somewhat local. IT has none. Accounting has none.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
Not quite, because in theory desktops work just fine on their own without a server. The RDBMS isn't for administration, it's for arbitration. It's more like hundreds of users sharing a single workstation without different accounts. So you have to trust all other users not to mess with your files. And you have to trust that they will leave sticky notes saying what files they have been working on and if they can be changed or not. And they have to trust that you will honor their sticky notes.
It's "blind, full trust, anonymous users." It's utterly insane.Ok i see. My understanding was still a bit off then. That sounds just crazy. I investigated Quickbooks once but didn't like it. Thats why I could recommend Xero. I just didn't know how Quickbooks worked and why it was so bad. Thanks again for the explanation.
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
A local provider charges more and delivers less because the customer feels compelled to stay local.
That's not true in my business. I'm charging less than the guys an hour away because when I do have to install something, I don't have to charge drive time and the client doesn't have to pay me drive time. In addition, I have come in behind some really incompetent providers. In those cases the client gets more and pays less.
But you've defined your accountants as incompetent. So compare that here. You are placing value in one case on replacing incompetence. But then embracing it in the other.
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@dashrender said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
Why are you driving at all? Unless a device is offline.
To prevent my job from getting shipped to India...
So you're what? hiding the fact that remote access allows you to do all this work from off site in the hope that your customer doesn't realize it can't be done remotely, so they don't look to replace you with someone in India?
When a computer doesn't boot, or one boots and then immediately blue screens like happened today, we send someone.
This is the offline - and you just said - We send someone, that implies they weren't there, now I'm confused
Clients are willing to pay a premium for this.
For what? for you to be onsite? Do they really understand this, did you say - hey I can do this all remotely and I'll charge you 10% less, or I come on site for the current rate? If so, how are you saved from job exportation?
I also recycle their old gear. I noticed that other companies don't do that and clients don't know how to destroy drives or handle Ewaste.
What does this have to do with remote support. You do the remote support, then they make a pile and you go and pick it up - that's not really an IT job, that's a bench or some other type of job, that your company just happens to offer.
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In your examples of yourself, you are a provider. So doesn't apply. And your logic is that you fix incompetent service.
In the case of the accountant, they aren't competent and you are the customer. So both components are flipped.
And you do bench services with have a local component to them. Accountants have no such locality.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
That's "unless a device is offline", though.
For the times when we show up on site to do something that we could do remotely, I write that off as marketing. I've seen it happen where IT does everything remotely and the customer doesn't realize they are doing stuff in the back ground. The monthly reports get deleted before they are read. Next thing you know another provider swoops in and takes the client.
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
A local provider charges more and delivers less because the customer feels compelled to stay local.
That's not true in my business. I'm charging less than the guys an hour away because when I do have to install something, I don't have to charge drive time and the client doesn't have to pay me drive time. In addition, I have come in behind some really incompetent providers. In those cases the client gets more and pays less.
Sure, so they don't have to pay drive time, because you said you don't charge it, though, really why not? My plumber sure does. But he can't work remotely either.
The question really is, why are you hurting yourself by wasting billable time driving to a client when remote access removes that wasted time?
I know the answer - the answer is - the clients you have want to see your face - because they too are bad at business. They don't understand that seeing is actually a waste and spending time and resources tracking you instead of trusting you to do your job. If they can't trust you, then they should fire you. This really boils down more about them than you, but if you picked different clients, you wouldn't have to drive much if at all.
Look at Gene - he works from home. Almost exclusively, unless there is a problem that simply can't be fixed remotely. He's been doing it for NTG for years.
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
That's "unless a device is offline", though.
For the times when we show up on site to do something that we could do remotely, I write that off as marketing. I've seen it happen where IT does everything remotely and the customer doesn't realize they are doing stuff in the back ground. The monthly reports get deleted before they are read. Next thing you know another provider swoops in and takes the client.
Sure, but it is still not a value to the customer. It's a value to you as the provider.
This should all tell you how important it is for you as a customer to not be marketed to in the same way. Going on site wastes time and costs money and plays to bad business emotions of the customer. Makes perfect sense as the provider. I know why YOU do it. It's smart.
But as the customer, you don't want your accountant or your IT people doing this TO you. You want to look at your decisions as business ones, not emotional ones. If your customers were smarter about business, you'd not need to do that. It only has value because they aren't realizing how their own business works.
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I've had the same CPA for twenty years. They have come on site a total of zero times in all those years. If they did, I would be like "this isn't cost effective, don't you have more productive things to do? I know I do." We hang at parties together, but don't hang out in each other's offices. We communicate quickly through email, we access shared systems. It's fast, efficient and business competent. We both make more money.
Sure, it might make sense for them to show up and babysit clueless customers who forget that accounting takes time or who their accountant is. But those customers should pay more and me less. That the accountant treats them like that is fine because they act like that. But I treat it as a business concern and our relationship is fast and efficient and doesn't require all that hand holding. Hand holding costs both parties money.
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OK, so how do I find an accountant that is not using QuickBooks if the only people I personally know are all these hobby business owners? I could probably run down the yellow pages (do they still exist?) and call them up and ask them if they use something other than QuickBooks, but I don't even know what questions I would ask them to see if they are competent in accounting.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
I've had the same CPA for twenty years.
Do you have the same CPA as NTG?
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
I've had the same CPA for twenty years.
Do you have the same CPA as NTG?
NOPE. We use one of out TX because we couldn't find a Xero one close to us (there are a few in NYC but expensive is putting it mildly).
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
OK, so how do I find an accountant that is not using QuickBooks if the only people I personally know are all these hobby business owners?
Well the most important thing is... don't talk to them. If they don't do business well, you probably want to avoid their advice. They are doing business badly, so your only real reference to them is that they are not sources of good advice. That they are local isn't good, it's not bad, it's just random.
But given that the one common factor is that they are running businesses poorly, the one thing you really know is that their advice is probably going to be bad or at least highly suspect.
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@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
I could probably run down the yellow pages (do they still exist?) and call them up and ask them if they use something other than QuickBooks, but I don't even know what questions I would ask them to see if they are competent in accounting.
This is the same challenge that companies have finding you. How do they find you? (Are you in the yellow pages?) How do they vet you to see if you are good at IT?
Well, the bottom line is, they probably can't. They can't tell if you are good at IT, if they could, they wouldn't need you, right?
But what they can tell is that you are not stuck on Windows XP Home. Make sense? There is low hanging fruit that would make it REALLY obvious that you aren't even trying.
In the case of an accountant, only using QB is like that. It's not even trying. So starting from a much smaller pool of accountants who at least bother to use tools appropriate for their customers or as their customers need makes the process way easier. IT can do some similar things - eliminate the pool of people who can only deliver one thing and instead do whatever the customer needs based on their business and you knock out 90% of companies. It doesn't mean that the companies that are left are all good, but the chances of finding a good one are much higher and the number left to sift through is much lower.
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Same logic I use for jobs. Don't talk to any job that requires a college degree because if they require it I know that they either think that that is impressive having done it themselves (which really says something about what they find challenging) or that they didn't do it and make capricious decisions without doing research (not as bad, but still very bad.) So like only using QB, only taking degrees tells me a lot about an employer. By filtering them out immediately I know that I'm working with a much smaller set of candidates where all good employers are still in the pool and only bad ones are eliminated. Some bad ones remain, but that one factor eliminates most bad ones making my jobs 1,000x easier.
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@minion-queen said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
I've had the same CPA for twenty years.
Do you have the same CPA as NTG?
NOPE. We use one of out TX because we couldn't find a Xero one close to us (there are a few in NYC but expensive is putting it mildly).
And often you'd want to use someone in a place like Texas. Because Texas has lower taxes, lower property values and lower salaries. This all means that you can get more CPA for your money.
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@dashrender said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
Accounting, like IT, has no advantage to being local to you. But getting accounting right, just like getting IT right, is critical for your business.
I disagree with this. I have a great business going because I focus on a geographic area. Most of my clients are with 5 minutes of each other. I offer no per trip charges or mileage charges. My business is growing at the rate I want it to. I can charge what the guys from cities an hour away charge and clients still choose me because it costs less for them when they don't have to pay for mileage. It's also very easy to socially network a geographic area and pick up new clients that way.
Why are you driving at all? Unless a device is offline.
Why drive? While remote support is a awesome tool, and 99% of it all can be done that way.. sometimes you need to see a person. There is so much that can be done when you build a strong relationship - one in person - that will generally build a stronger remote presense.
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@gjacobse said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@dashrender said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@mike-davis said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
@scottalanmiller said in Why QuickBooks Is Not a Business Tool:
Accounting, like IT, has no advantage to being local to you. But getting accounting right, just like getting IT right, is critical for your business.
I disagree with this. I have a great business going because I focus on a geographic area. Most of my clients are with 5 minutes of each other. I offer no per trip charges or mileage charges. My business is growing at the rate I want it to. I can charge what the guys from cities an hour away charge and clients still choose me because it costs less for them when they don't have to pay for mileage. It's also very easy to socially network a geographic area and pick up new clients that way.
Why are you driving at all? Unless a device is offline.
Why drive? While remote support is a awesome tool, and 99% of it all can be done that way.. sometimes you need to see a person. There is so much that can be done when you build a strong relationship - one in person - that will generally build a stronger remote presense.
Yes, as a salesman this makes sense. As a customer, it wastes your time and raises your costs. So from the customer perspective, this is a bad thing. He would not want this from his accountant.
