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From a very young age, we’re introduced to storytelling.    We’re told stories by our parents, grandparents, teachers and other adults around us.

Stories are a great way to communicate ideas, to pass on history and traditions and even teach lessons.  Many of these stories have lessons contained in them. 

Whether it’s learning not to tell lies with Aesop’s Fable of ‘the boy who cried Wolf’, or learning about helping others with the bible story of 'the good Samaritan’.

These lessons could be ta…

The process of onboarding new clients is your opportunity to set expectations and boundaries for the future of your relationship.  

The process of onboarding has become more time consuming over the last few years. Money laundering checks are becoming more in-depth, with online checks costing money to carry them out.

The checks can sometimes involve a bit of back and forward to ensure that you have the documents to let you tick all of the boxes required.

It's not just a legal process, but also…

Making a resolution is one thing, keeping it another completely. 

In this article, I want to share four tips to help you reach your goals and to reward yourself for a job well done.

Recently, we've all hung up the new calendar and it's a great excuse to make personal and business resolutions for the coming year. 

It is also a way to bring about certain frustration if the goals that you set for yourself are unreachable, unattainable or just something you have no interest in doing. 

Making res…

Let's just get that header out of the way first.  We can try as hard as possible to minimise them, but mistakes can and do happen.  We're human.  It's inevitable.  

So, what should you do if a mistake happens in your business?  The first thing is not to panic.  Most people will forgive a mistake if you handle the follow-up properly.  In the main, it's not the mistake that is the big headache, it's the lack of proper communication.

When you're growing a business you're taking risks.  Mistakes w…

For the longest time, I’ve recommended IAB as the professional body of choice for any new bookkeeper starting out.  When people were left in limbo during the new member freeze, I was the first to fight their corner, but now I fear they’ve lost their way.

We are only looking for a few things from our professional bodies, but we want them done well.

Certification.  To know that new entrants to the profession and old hands alike are at the pinnacle of their game.  We want the confidence when we s…

When you find that you have a client who is making you miserable, or you've ranked your clients and find that a D has appeared, what is the best way to move on?

Firstly, you need to remember that this is your business.  You are perfectly entitled to choose who you work with and who you don’t.  If a client has managed to slip through your net and is now making you miserable you have two choices.  You can train them, or you can bin them. 

The decision is yours to make, but is likely to come down…

It’s easy to fall into a rut.  You do the same things today that you did yesterday, and tomorrow will be the same (unless it’s one of those rare weekends where you don’t work). 

Every day merges into every other day a bit like that Bill Murray film, Groundhog Day. Maybe you feel that it’s one step forward, two steps back all of the time? The reasons for feeling like this can vary, but from my experience it’s normally one or more of the following:

• You don’t have enough clients, and worry abou…

In this short post I've tried to gather together all of the main concerns that bookkeepers have voiced to me over the past 10 years, and some of the concerns I had before I started my practice and answer them for you.

Whether you start your practice or not will probably come down to fear.  An irrational fear.  The fear of failure.  There's only one guaranteed way to fail in your bookkeeping business and that's not to even start.  You'll avoid the feeling of failure because you'll tell yourself …

Sometimes we can only truly understand the progress we've made and how far we've come when we are able to take a glimpse at the past.

Today's post is a bit personal for me.  It's a bit of a walk down memory lane and it's sparked a few emotions.  

Tonight, I was doing just that courtesy of the WayBack machine, an archive of web pages.  I was looking at the site for my very first business I started when I was 20, 17 years ago.  It was a web design business and it really started memories flooding…

The client who always dumps a box of receipts on your desk right before the tax return deadline.

The client who asks you for financial advice and then does the opposite. Every. Single. Time.

The client who seems to vanish off the face of the earth until you've sent out multiple 'payment overdue' reminders.

The chances are you recognise at least one of these nightmare clients. If you have been really unlucky, you'll be familiar with all three — and a few more besides!

All you want to do is he…