Efficiently Onboarding New Bookkeeping Clients [Step-By-Step Guide]

let's talk about onboarding clients how do you onboard new bookkeeping clients for your bookkeeping business more importantly how do you do it fast and effectively my name is Zach pascarell I have had my own bookkeeping business for four years and I make these YouTube videos for two reasons reason number one I love my bookkeeping business I genuinely love talking about bookkeeping and my bookkeeping business reason number two I actually enjoy teaching other people how to start and grow their own bookkeeping business that's the only reason why I make these YouTube videos 90% of my Revenue

comes from actually bookkeeping running my bookkeeping business so everything that I talk about is stuff that I actually do in my bookkeeping business stuff that I've learned over the past four years mistakes that I've made and lessons that I've learned everything that I teach is based on my own experience I'm not teaching from a textbook I didn't take a course to learn all this information it's simply through my own personal experience trial and error okay let's stop wasting time let's get into this video I'm going to tell you exactly how to onboard new bookkeeping clients

for your bookkeeping business this is so important when I got started I had no idea how to do this this process is super important because it is the transition from Marketing in sales to customer service it's a little bit of sales it's a little bit of customer service it's that sweet spot that in betweene point onboarding clients this will be your first impression with your new client they're going to judge you and your business how you operate based on how efficiently how easily how effectively you can onboard new clients everything starts with the sales consultation

I try to keep my sales consultation short simple and to the point if you're struggling to figure out what to say on a sales consultation check out my website Harrisburg bookkeeping.com store I have a ton of free digital downloads for you I also have a sales script on my website you can download it you can use it for your next sales consultation it's exactly what I talk about during the sales call you need to get one thing you need to get information so that you can give your client a quote obviously you want to answer

all their questions you want to try to pitch your services but at the end you need to get the information necessary so that you can give them a quote all you need one of two things either an invitation to their QuickBooks account or their three most recent bank statements and credit card statements you need this information because you need to count their transactions for the past three months that is how I recommend that you quote somebody add up all of their Bank transactions and their credit card transactions and then I multiply that by three so

I figure out their aage average number of transactions per month and then multiply that by three so if you want to add up 12 months of transactional data divide that by 12 and that will be your average number of monthly transactions 6 months divided by six you get the idea figure out their average number of monthly transactions and then multiply that by three when I was just getting started I actually started with $2 per transaction because I was new I didn't know and I was desperate to get clients but now I'm charging $3 per trans

trans action and a ton of clients are signing up with my services so it's working for me I hope it works for you the key here is to do this quickly as soon as somebody sends me bank statements as soon as somebody invites me to their QuickBooks I stop what I'm doing I check it out and I quote them just last night somebody invited me to their QuickBooks at 8:00 p.m. I had a couple minutes of free time I opened up my computer I logged into their QuickBooks quickly added up their transaction and the same

night I sent them a bookkeeping quote it's not necessary you don't have to do it but the faster you can get this done the faster you can potentially onboard a new client and that's why we are here we're trying to get new bookkeeping clients I don't have a fancy pamphlet that I send people I don't have a fancy CRM software that automates a sequence of emails I simply have one email template that I use to send people a quote the subject of the email is bookkeeping quote and the the body of the email starts with

your monthly bookkeeping fee will be X number of dollars per month my services generally include categorize your transactions reconcile your accounts and generate your financial reports I do all of these things every week and I tried to send Financial reports in the first 5 to 10 business days of every month so if you were my client you would have updated and accurate Financial reports in your inbox for the previous month this quote is only valid for 10 days that's all I do I send them that email and then I wait for their response if they

don't respond in 7 days I will probably follow up with them just asking if they have any questions now whenever they agree to the quote the next thing I do is I will send them the first invoice and I'll send them my client agreement this is a really important step you need to protect yourself don't start working on the client as soon as you send the quote I can't tell you how many times I send a quote and then I just never he from the potential client so don't start working don't waste any time don't

do anything for the client until they agree to the quote take it a step further don't do anything for the client just because they agree to the quote they might respond and say yep that looks perfect let's get started don't get too excited the onboarding process is not done you need to get paid first before you do anything this is important because from my experience I have had a ton of clients who agree to the quote even sign the client agreement but they never pay the first invoice I always require everybody to pay upfront so

for example if I'm going to start doing your bookkeeping in May you need to pay me in May before I get started and then on June 1st I'm going to send you another invoice June 1st invoice needs to be paid due upon receipt as soon as possible because that June 1st invoice covers my services for June I don't Bill June first for May I don't bill in July for services performed in the month before this protects me I rarely ever have issues with clients not paying but in the event that I do I'm only out

on a couple weeks of bookkeeping or maybe a month of bookkeeping if a client decides to not pay and ghost me I don't bill for the month before I bill for the month in the future all of my clients are okay with that so hopefully you don't have any issues building that way as well I use Panda do to electronically deliver documents if you're interested in exploring Panda do there is a link in the description of this video totally recommend check out Panda do before I started working with panda do I was using a PDF

that I would email to my clients and then they would print out the PDF sign the PDF take a picture of it and email it back to me that process is unnecessarily difficult the whole point of this onboarding process you want it to be fast and easy for your clients so that they can quickly pay you for your services you don't want anything to get in the way of them paying you so make it as easy as possible use Panda do to electronically deliver your documents and you can save a template so all I have

to do is edit the date and the amount of the monthly services on the template and then I send it to the client it's so super simple I can do it in less than 5 minutes and then the client can easily electronically sign the document the whole process can be done in less than 20 minutes and then finally I use QuickBooks Online to send the invoice the client needs to pay the invoice before I get started before I do any work Beyond quoting the client I need to get paid I require full payment upfront even

if it's a full year cleanup I require full payment upfront I used to do 50% upfront and 50% when the project was complete however some clients struggle to communicate effectively they struggle to answer your questions which means the end date for the project can often be pushed out by several months simply because the client is unable to answer your questions if I'm billing somebody $6,000 I don't want to wait two or three months to get the second half of the $3,000 payment just because the client hasn't been able to answer my questions so I require

full payment upfront no questions asked that is my policy so once the client agrees to the quote they sign the client agreement they pay the first invoice I do a couple more things and then that's it for the onboarding process I have two trackers I have a weekly workflow tracker so all of my clients are on my workflow tracker it's just an Excel spreadsheet I don't use fancy CRM software it's just an Excel spreadsheet I have every client's name I have their email address and then I assign everybody a day of the week so right

now I have 66 clients which means I'm working on 12 to 14 clients every single day Monday through Friday I don't work on the same client twice a week I only touch each client once a week so if I on board a new construction company I might assign them Thursday which means every Thursday I'm going to log into their QuickBooks and categorize their transactions it's very important as your business grows you need to remember as soon as you onboard a client you need to add them to your workflow checklist because if you don't you might

forget about them in the beginning when you have five or 10 clients not a big deal you can probably just remember all 10 of your clients off the top of your head but as you get 20 40 60 clients it becomes impossible to remember all 60 of your clients so as soon as you onboard them as soon as they pay that first invoice immediately add them to your your workflow checklist and then I also have an invoice spreadsheet where I just have all the clients I have the the month and year that they started and

the amount that they pay me I add everybody to my invoice checklist Excel spreadsheet super basic just so I can track how many clients I got in April how many clients I got in 2023 how much monthly recurring Revenue I'm making from my monthly clients and then finally the last step in the onboarding process before you actually start doing the bookkeeping I create a recurring transaction in my Quickbooks account so I create an invoice that's going to go out on the first of every month for however much they pay me every month for bookkeeping and

I use QuickBooks as a payment processor so they can pay with a transfer or a credit card or a debit card straight through my Quickbooks invoice it gets automatically sent directly to their email so every month my work is done I don't need to manually send an invoice on a recurring monthly basis to my clients that's it that is my onboarding process I try to keep it simple obviously I left out some specific details there will be a few more questions there will be more emails that go back and forth but generally that is the

process sales consultation invitation to QuickBooks quote accept the quote client agreement first invoice add them to my tracker add them to my monthly recurring invoices and that's pretty much it guys you have to check out all the links in the description of this video I made a ton of resources some free some paid they are all designed specifically to help you start and grow your own bookkeeping business and finally let me just add I always say starting a bookkeeping business is a four-step process step number one you got to learn bookkeeping and QuickBooks that's pretty

obvious step two marketing and sales you got to get clients first and that's the hardest part getting your first couple clients is the hardest part and then step number three deliver highquality customer service that's the most important part you got to do a good job so that you can keep your current clients and so that your your bookkeeping business can get five star reviews on Google and people will spread your business through Word of Mouth referrals that's the most important part doesn't matter how good you are at marketing and sales if you can't actually deliver

a good product your business will fail and then step number four you got to work really really hard that's it for the videos guys if you liked this video today please subscribe to my channel it's a great way to support me so that I can continue to help you and everybody else start and grow a successful bookkeeping business