What our bookkeeping community can do to help? Let them in on our secrets.
In the coming days, a lot of small businesses, our clients, will be closing their brick and mortar doors to customers, vendors and employees to work remotely maybe for the first time. Their work-from-home success will be a huge contributor to their business survival. As a community, bookkeepers have adopted to working remotely. We have been a work-from-home community for a long time. We have experience with remote staff members, working in the cloud, and we lead the way in delivering our services efficiently. We have learned to re-think our old ways of doing business. Our bookkeeping community has innovated new services, new methods and new tools. Let’s get pro-active, creative and help our small business clients learn how to handle a disruption to their business model.
Individualization is key
While a lot of our tools and workflows will be appropriate and helpful to some of our clients some will have more individualized needs. You will need to ask each client to describe their current workflow in detail, their concerns about changes and their internal and external current communication methods. The employees’ emotional response, readiness and anxiety around a new work-from-home situation.
An employee not knowing what is expected of them at home will get worse over time and add to the anxiety during a rough time for the business owner. Employee guidelines making expectations crystal clear but with flexibility for home life and responsibility of childcare will ensure a successful transition. An employee handbook could and should be created. Some of us may already have similar documents that can be customized or edited. Those of us that have remote workers will have an immediate understanding of these challenges and will have overcome a lot of them. Pass on that knowledge and experience to help your company and your client survive. If layoffs are necessary, get the Record of Employment filed quickly online and provide resources to the employee regarding how to apply for benefits online and the new regulations regarding qualifications. Automatic payroll delivery will need to be considered.
Budgets
Going remote will have some costs associated with it. Help to put together a budget for the transition. If a drop in revenue is likely or additional expenses expected revisit, create and or revise the budget and sales forecasts.
Cash Flow
This is where we can shine. Clients are going to be forced to look at things in detail. Introduce just in time inventory control measures, Strategies to tighten up on days outstanding in accounts receivable. Introduce online payments and purchase order controls. Prepare a worst-case scenario sales forecast and revisit every expense, eliminating anything non-essential.
More Revenue
Brainstorm other ways to bring in revenue, serve their clients better and retain valuable employees. Throw everything on the table and see what might stick to help. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary ideas.
Team Building
Introduce them to how you keep your remote team connected. Suggest zoom meetings and coffee breaks around the virtual watercooler every day. Restaurants will be offering delivery shortly, order and have Friday lunch delivered to their home with a Zoom lunch party together every Friday. It will give everyone something to look forward to. You know communication tools are essential for remote work. Decisions about what apps to use will need to be made quickly. Let them know the pros and cons of all the ones you know and have researched so they can move quickly. Get them started quickly with a free version and only move up to a paid version if needed. A great free simple to use training tool that I recently heard about is Loom. Here is a link to a YouTube video by Hector Garcia. Send this link to your clients and their staff to be able to get up and running quickly with how-to-use Loom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqGV5LTuPKI. Or create your training video with Loom.
This change may be long-lasting
The impact of COVID-19 has turned small business upside down and scrambling to survive. Analyzing your clients will uncover which ones will be most vulnerable and how you might support them. Showing them how valuable having a pro-active bookkeeper contributing to their survival in the bad times will create loyalty in the good times.
Dianne Mueller
CPB-Certified Professional Bookkeeper
Trifold Bookkeeper Advisor
Trifoldbka.ca
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Soma Small Business Solutions
Soma Small Business Solutions 