The Bookkeeping Show!

[00:00:02] Speaker A: This is Short Term Rental Management, the show that is all about short term rental property management with your host, yours truly, Luke Carl. Short Term Rental Management. We're going to talk about bookkeeping today with an old buddy of mine, used to be my bookkeeper, as a matter of fact, back in the day, Ben Day. He's got a company called Lion's Share Bookkeeping and knows all about real estate. Owns a lot of real estate. And I think we're going to have a wonderful conversation. So how you been? It's been a long time, dude. [00:00:33] Speaker B: I, I'm doing great. I'm, I'm excited to be here with you. It has. And I, I was telling you before, it's like every time, every time I see, I'm like, man, this guy, he knows what he's got going on. He's moving. If anything, I'm here to catch up with you, dude. Like, I'm, I'm excited to hear what you got going on and we can have a little back and forth about numbers or whatever in the meantime too, you know, we'll, we'll blend it together. [00:00:54] Speaker A: Wonderful. So you own a bookkeeping company. So let's break that down a little bit of like how I built this style, you know, like what does that even clients come to you. And let's start at the very beginning. [00:01:08] Speaker B: Sure. [00:01:08] Speaker A: What is bookkeeping? Why do I need it? [00:01:10] Speaker B: I love it. So eight years ago, I was looking for a little side hustle. I started, decided that bookkeeping was going to be the thing. I was just going to help anybody put together their QuickBooks accounts so that they can go do some numbers or whatever. Right. And that's what bookkeeping sounds like to everybody. And so that was kind of my general plan. And then I had an opportunity. So my dad at the time was a loan officer of a one branch community bank where 98% of their loan portfolio at the bank was fixed to rent homes. So all they were doing all day every day was those commercial debt service coverage ratio DSCR loans. And so he would have all manner of ugly house buyer walk in and say, Mr. Day, I've got this great deal. Look at my napkin. And he would turn it to them and say, hey, I can't give you any money because this doesn't count as real books. So why don't you go hire Ben? Ben will help you get approved for the loan. Ben will put together a profit and loss and a balance sheet and all that for you so we can approve for your loan so you can buy the house and do whatever. And then everybody's, everybody, everybody's winning. We're, you know, we're stimulating the economy with all the dollar bills flowing around. [00:02:27] Speaker A: What town was that? [00:02:28] Speaker B: That is in Oklahoma City. [00:02:30] Speaker A: Okay. [00:02:31] Speaker B: Yeah, Oklahoma City. It's a, it's a good spot. There's obviously. So anytime I talk about one branch community bank that does investor friendly loans, like that's the niche, dude, if you're, if somebody's trying to start a bank, just do that. Like you'll be fine. Like you'll, you'll have more customers than you know what to do with. [00:02:50] Speaker A: I'm curious why they never went to two. Because bookkeeping and banking are somewhat similar. You probably. Why didn't they grow? [00:02:57] Speaker B: Sure. So it's deeply about the community. Right. You know, like that bank really wanted to serve its location and they, and they continue to do a great job over there. My dad doesn't work there anymore, but it's still kind of the same mission. Most of the time community banks like that, they're not trying to take over the world. They're trying to make a really big impact with where they're at. So like a community bank, for instance, will hang on to their loan, they'll keep it on the books. Instead of shopping it out to, you know, Flagstar Round Point or whatever, they'll keep it, which means they can control the rate and they've control the relationship. And some of that I'm, I'm going to rapidly spin out of my wheelhouse on this. But for the most part, my understanding is that those community banks want those good relationships and want those repeat customers, so they'll hang on to those loans and turn around and put that money back in their community and do good things. And that, that at least my experience with what his bank did. [00:03:45] Speaker A: Yes, I do business with a bank that's exactly like that in Omaha, Nebraska, which is where I'm from. And yeah, it's a similar vibe. And I always ask myself, why don't they have two branches, three branches and some banks just don't want to grow, you know. [00:04:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and I, and I think part of it too, again, you'd have to ask old John Day instead. But I think a lot of it just has to do like there's just a ton of regulation on the back end too. So it may be more complicated from a red tape perspective to have a bunch of extra branches and oversight. Whereas when it's one branch, it's just one team, it's one set of people, it's One, it's one committee or whatever. That, that would be my major guess on that. [00:04:23] Speaker A: Got it. Okay. Let's break bookkeeping down. And from my perspective, you know, dealing with clients on a regular basis that are looking to rent their properties and do the over, you know, short term rental thing, which is what we do over here, I think a lot of them, especially new folks, I'll be honest with you, I don't even know that they know bookkeeping exists. And I think they also don't maybe even realize they need it because they may or may not think their CPA will do it for them. So can you kind of break that down for me and like, what is this? What does this look like at its core? [00:05:00] Speaker B: Yeah, so. And I would. And you've met these people. And I will continue to meet these people. Or they've got maybe one house and it's, it's their old primary residence. They decided to start renting out and they've got deposits coming in from Airbnb or VRBO or whatever. And running it like a business is just never going to make sense for them because that's not the strategy that they're into. Right. They're trying to pay off a mortgage or take care of their mother in law or whatever. And so they've just got the one and they're fine. And so folks like that can kind of, I think, and don't tell anybody I said this, right. But folks like that where they've just got the one and they're not sweating it, you can go to your tax preparer at the end of the year with your deposits and a smattering of expenses and you'll probably be okay. It won't be optimized, but we're talking about optimizing a couple hundred bucks when you start getting into a real business or you've got some units and you're trying to make this your full time thing, Bookkeeping is the best defense your business could ever have. If you've got a leaky bucket anywhere in your finances, your bookkeeping should be able to show you exactly where that is and help you immediately solve that problem. With short term, specifically, we're thinking about things like, you know, you think that you priced your cleaning revenue correctly. Did you actually, did your cleaners change something or do you have a fee coming out somewhere else? That's eating you alive. Are, are you like totally forgetting the fact that VRBO charges a fee and stripe charges a fee and booking.com charges a fee and now your margin is gone because you were just doing the quick back of the napkin math. Right. There's just stuff like that on the investor level that you will lose on if you're not really paying attention and really tracking. And that's just the operating side. Once you get into the, arguably one of the best benefits of real estate, which is the depreciation and some of the active real estate professional and all of that kind of status, every single person that you talk to, where you're trying to use those more advanced strategies, those high value strategies, are going to say the same thing to you over and over again. Show me your books. What's your P and O look like? What does your balance sheet look like? And if you can't show up with professional documents and you're prepared and your ducks are all in a row, those people can't help you. It's not that they won't, it's that they can. You're going to end up paying more interest or more fees or more professional fees or whatever in order to get the same value when you could just have good books and immediately capitalize on those professional services. [00:07:37] Speaker A: Yeah. For me, first of all, it was my very first hire ever. I think you were my third bookkeeper, give or take. And I knew that the tax man was making me a little too nervous, like. And when I say the tax man, I don't mean the irs, I mean the cpa, the other three. And we get to the point for me where I was presenting, you know, what I had to the cpa. And again, this was early in my career and they were not liking me very much. And I honestly didn't even know why. And I felt at the time it was almost like the CPA didn't want to just straight up say, you need a bookkeeper. This, your books aren't done. I'm like, what are. You know, I didn't even know what books were. Yeah, you run into that where CPAs are just like not being, you know, forthcoming enough. [00:08:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:08:24] Speaker A: So. [00:08:24] Speaker B: And there's really, there's, from what I've encountered, there's really two flavors of this from, from your cpa, from your tax professional. Number one. And this is always, I think, really surprising to folks, but depending on your engagement with your cpa, some of them can't touch your books. You give them something and that is what they have to use just due to their, their licensing and their insurance. And so that really hamstrings a lot of tax shops because they, they, they literally cannot, they're not engaged for that. That's not what they're doing. As soon as they do that for you, it's an entirely different service. That's. That's something that I learned kind of recently from somebody, whether or not they were blowing smoke or not, like, I don't know. But that explains a lot of behavior that we see from some CPAs. The. So that's kind of the first flavor of this. The other flavor is one where bookkeeping is tedious. It's boring. It's. Some would describe it as awful. And so there's nothing about some CPA who's been doing this for 30 years and is used to filling out forms and then taking off for four months in the summer to go on vacation. There's nothing about that person that wants to stop what they're doing to balance your checkbook for you on April 14th. And so most of those guys land in some arena where maybe they'll say, hey, this is garbage. You need a bookkeeper. And some of those guys will just kind of shoe it in and hope that you don't care. Because if you're turning in messy books in the first place, some of them are assuming that you don't care about what the books are. You're just trying to get your taxes done. There's definitely a lack of service in that space. So finding a good tax professional to do the filing and be honest with you is a big step. But even those guys that are super honest with you at some point are going to look at you and say, man, I don't want to chase you for receipts every week. I do not want to ask you every day, hey, what house is this for? In an email. Go hire a bookkeeper to do that instead. And that's. That's really where we step in and we shine. We'll do the tedious stuff so that they don't have to. [00:10:28] Speaker A: Yeah, it was difficult for me when I first started because the CPAs were not straight up with me. You know, I just. I really just wanted somebody to say, you need a bookkeeper. But they all, like, tried to fix my books at the end of the year and get them where they needed to be to get them pushed through for my taxes or whatever. And eventually I was like, I need another person doing my books. Long story short, and correct me if I'm wrong, don't expect your CPA to do your books for you. These are two completely different jobs. [00:10:57] Speaker B: 100%. 100% your CPU. So. And I tell people this, you should think of your CPA as less like Whatever you think an accountant is and more like whatever you think a lawyer is like, they're not taking, they're not going to court on your behalf, but they are interpreting and applying the tax law for you and then filling out a form. Their job is not to get in and sort receipts. Their job is to make sure that you're compliant with legal standards. Right. Your bookkeeper. The bookkeeper seat is where all the receipts should be happening. Yeah. Don't. If you go ask your CPA to do that, you're. You're asking a monkey to, to swim or a fish to climb a tree or whatever the saying is, you know. [00:11:39] Speaker A: Ladies and gentlemen, Smarter Short Term Rentals is now available. The new book from Avery Carl, Smarter Short Term Rentals. Build a dynamic real estate business and out host the competition. If you want to take your short term rental to the next level, pick up the new book, Smarter Short Term Rentals. Wherever books are sold. Okay, can you give me an idea? I know this is a dip. I hate to ask you this question. How much can I expect to pay at the recording of this podcast? It's going to change, obviously, based on various things. And let's say, I don't know, maybe you paint a couple of. You deal with real estate clients all the time. Maybe paint a picture of a couple of different types of clients and how much that person could expect to pay for monthly bookkeeping. [00:12:39] Speaker B: Sure. So let's start at the bottom and work our way up. Right. Because you can go on to upwork or fiverr, where wherever the kids are hiring cheap labor right now and pick up a bookkeeper for dirt cheap. [00:12:50] Speaker A: Right. [00:12:50] Speaker B: They're, they're going to advertise themselves as such. You could pay them 4 bucks an hour, you could pay them 14 bucks an hour. You pay them 24. [00:12:58] Speaker A: Second. You just made me think of something. Is this a licensed gig? Do I have to have some sort of license to be a bookkeeper? [00:13:03] Speaker B: This is an excellent question. No, you do not. Any Yahoo can go on the Internet and say that they'll do book. [00:13:08] Speaker A: Okay, go back to that and we'll come back to that. Go back to the original Fiverr story. [00:13:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So you absolutely can turn around and go and find anybody like, like we were saying to hop in your QuickBooks and make a big old mess. Right. Where the game changes and where I would high. Especially if you're in real estate, where it is complicated and there's a real balance sheet and real ramifications and big numbers, I would highly recommend, obviously I'm in the business going with somebody that's not one of those guys who can actually prove that they know what they're doing. So for us, as of this recording, when we're bringing on a new client, our minimum starts for new clients at $500 a month. And that, that takes care of a lot. If you are a landlord, if you're an operator and you've got, you know, 10ish units and they're pretty sleepy and it's pretty easy, but you need a good balance sheet and, and you need, you just need your numbers to be right. Or if you're, you know, flip the occasional house, do whatever. If you're a mom and pop your, your price tag is going to be less than a comma for sure. We bring on people all the time that pay around that 5, 6, $700 a month range. If you're not just that, if you are somebody that says, hey, I have my own stuff, and because I'm in short term and midterm rentals, I'm managing for other people, whether it's your uncle or you're an actual brokerage and you're doing the full management thing. And now you need trust accounting. Now you're looking at a price tag with a comma on it for sure. So most of our guys in that range are landing somewhere between 15 and four grand a month. And bookkeepers on that level, they're producing owner statements on your behalf, they're putting charges on, they're figuring out how much you're owed, they're, they're prepping statements. You just got to go and review them and click send to pay. [00:14:57] Speaker A: Can you define trust accounting? [00:15:00] Speaker B: Absolutely. So when you are, and everybody's going to know this regardless of whether or not you're a property manager, when you have rents come in the door, that money could be income to you if those are your units. Right. But let's say hypothetically that you've got list. Your listing is on Airbnb and on vrbo. Airbnb is going to pay you out when the stay happens, basically within a couple of days. VRBO could pay you out your 50% deposit a year in advance, if you're taking bookings a year in advance. So what do you do with this VRBO deposit for a year? Is it income to you today? Technically. But what happens if you refund it later? Now, now do you have an expense technically on the refund? And when do you want to recognize that revenue? Do you want to recognize it when it was deposited with you or when the stay actually happened. So with trust accounting, what we're dealing with here is, hey, I've got all of this money in here. How much is mine? How much is actually income to me? How much do I owe possibly to someone else? That stay hasn't happened yet. I technically owe that money back to the guest if they cancel or if I'm managing for other people. Hey, I collected a million dollars in rent this month, but about half a million of that I'm going to end up owing to the property owners. And so there's this whole extra dynamic when you're managing, doing property management, where you've got to balance how much money you have in the business versus how much money you could owe to somebody if they cancel or need to get paid out. And so trust accounting is this gigantic labor of, of love and money and stress and combination that every property manager should be doing. We've got, I've got a list of horror stories of folks that have done this wrong and they're 40, 50, 100 grand in the hole on their trust accounting just because they weren't watching it. [00:17:00] Speaker A: Thank you. Can you give me an idea on the bookkeeper side? What is short term rental more involved than long term rental for you or are they pretty similar? [00:17:13] Speaker B: It is pretty similar as long as you're willing to use some tools. So if I've got a client and they've got 10 long term rentals, I'm looking at 10 rent checks a month, right? If I've got a client with 10 short term rentals and all those short terms are averaging four stays a month. If you're really cooking, you got your weekends covered, right? I've now 4x to the amount of transactional volume on those stays. Right? If of those 10 units, all of them are owned by other people. Now not only do I have more units, but I have more statements to deal with as well, more trust accounting to do. And so short term can really explode. How you can simplify that, especially when you're trying to do it yourself or you're getting started out, is you need to go leverage some software. If you're not managing for other people, we recommend something like Tally Breeze. Tally Breeze is a cool one. It used to be called BNB Tally. That'll help you kind of keep your, your numbers straight. If you are a property. [00:18:13] Speaker A: I've never heard of that. As a matter of fact, can you. What is that? What is Tally Breeze? [00:18:16] Speaker B: Yeah, so Tally Breeze is cool. We were using for a long time cool software guy. What is this Tally Breeze I'm looking for hacks, man. So what Tally Breeze will do is it will connect to. And they're. If you've been in this long enough, you know that VRBO doesn't like to play nice with anybody in the. In the connection space. They'll break and do weird things all the time. And so the VRBO is kind of hit or miss on their connection. But what they'll do is they'll look at your VRBO and Airbnb account and, and Tally Breeze will say, hey, we're looking at this account. It looks like this stay is going to happen. So we're going to automatically create the invoice for this stay inside of your QuickBooks for you so that when the deposit comes in, you've just got to match that deposit to that invoice. And now Tally Breeze has done the work on. Here's your accommodation and your cleaning and your resolution and your fees. And they've broken it all down. Instead of you just having one line item for like Airbnb deposit on your P. L. Right. And so Tally Breeze is going to carry you a long way. [00:19:19] Speaker A: If you're a solo operator, is it effective or does it sometimes annoy you on the verbo side? [00:19:24] Speaker B: It does annoy me on the verbo side. My. My deepest. I think it's Jason over at Tally Breeze. Jason, if you're listening, please, please, please fix your verbo connection or come up with a neat little workaround because I would, I would love to love you more than I do already, but that is a little bit annoying and part of bookkeeping today. This is a kind of a good point. Everybody kind of pins bookkeeping as maybe accounting. Especially today with all of the technology and the software and AI and all of that, your bookkeeper is no longer an accountant. They also need to understand technology and tech stack and workflow. Otherwise the bill that you're going to get for labor will always be larger than the bill you would get for software. So I would absolutely make sure when you're hiring somebody that they understand the technology. And if you're not ready to hire somebody, you need to understand how the technology works to stretch your margin as far as it can. [00:20:18] Speaker A: Yeah, let's talk more about that. Any other cool softwares that you're using these days that I may have, may or may not have heard of? Yeah. [00:20:24] Speaker B: So the far and away, our MVP software and short term rental right now is Git clearing. What Git Clearing will do specific. We really, I don't necessarily love this for folks that just own units. But I do love it for folks that manage units. Git Clearing will connect to your Airbnb and your VRBO and your Stripe. It will also connect to your guesty owner as hostaway. It'll pull all of that information in and automatically create your owner statement for you. You've got to go in and adjust some settings, but it'll show you, hey, here's all the revenue you collected. Here's how much you owe the owner, here's how much you owe yourself. Then you can go in, you can do a little bookkeeping, punch in your expenses that you need to be reimbursed for, and you've got an online platform that is doing all of most of, if not all of the heavy lifting in your trust accounting for you or an owner. [00:21:19] Speaker A: Owner statements. Fancy, easy. Owner statements. Yeah. [00:21:22] Speaker B: Your owners log in, they say, oh, here's my statement. Thank you so much. You can pay them through Get Clearing as well. [00:21:27] Speaker A: Okay, cool. Apply to me, but that's really cool for those of you that are managing other people's properties or co hosting. So Get Clearing is a good one to check out for owner statements. Great. That's wonderful. [00:21:42] Speaker B: Yeah, we're huge fans. [00:21:43] Speaker A: And also I want to point out that how hard it is to find a bookkeeper that can even have a conversation about vrbo, so thank you. [00:21:50] Speaker B: I'm doing my best. [00:21:51] Speaker A: Man, you're crushing it. I mean, you mentioned owner res and everything else, and most. Most guys, you know, most. Most folks don't have any idea about this stuff. So. Bravo. What else we got? Get Clearing. Anything else cool that you're using lately? [00:22:05] Speaker B: Man, we really. I think, yeah, Between. Between Tally Breeze and Get Clearing. That should be everything that anybody needs. [00:22:10] Speaker A: In order to ask you a very loaded question. [00:22:13] Speaker B: Let's go. [00:22:13] Speaker A: And apparently cut you off at the same time. Sorry. [00:22:15] Speaker B: No, we're good. [00:22:16] Speaker A: What is your favorite virtual bank right now? [00:22:20] Speaker B: Oh, buddy, you already know. My favorite virtual bank right now is Relay Financial. [00:22:25] Speaker A: Oh, you're still doing a relay thing? [00:22:27] Speaker B: Dude, I'm all about relay. [00:22:28] Speaker A: Oh, really? [00:22:28] Speaker B: Okay, great time. I think. I'm a platinum partner with them. I was doing a tiny little speaking circuit for a while with them. [00:22:34] Speaker A: Really? [00:22:35] Speaker B: I think they're great. I think they're getting better all the time. [00:22:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You hit me to them way before they were even a thing. And I've been through the wringer with the. With, with them. But It's. It's great now. It is. It's great now. They. They fixed all their Problems, which is great. Yeah. But several good banks out there these days to, to pick from. But that's good to hear. All right. Any other softwares? [00:22:57] Speaker B: We're good there, I think, I think that covers us. Everybody needs something a little different. But between if you've got a good bank and you've got a good way to simplify your short term rental side, like the rest is just bookkeeping. We just kind of tack on stuff as we go from there. [00:23:12] Speaker A: Got it. Okay. And we do need QuickBooks. [00:23:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Like some, some folks are able, especially if you're running a management company like you can get into something like Get Clearing or I think Streamline does it too where technically you can do it all in one place. The biggest issue that I've ever seen with that is that as soon as you pick a really niche accounting software, you need a really niche account. And so like if you go find somebody like me, we can probably hang. But that means that you're married to me and you've, you've eliminated all of your flexibility. If instead you pick a software like QuickBooks Online or something that connects to everything that kind of plays well with others, that means that you can jump around on your CPAs, on your bookkeepers, on your team, you can use different software and automations without getting into any trouble. So I would, I'm a big fan of avoiding one stop shop softwares as often as possible for that exact reason. [00:24:09] Speaker A: Yes. QBO seems to be the universal language for what we're talking about here. I would highly recommend that you get it and get your bookkeeper and your CPA connected onto your QuickBooks online. I'm actually looking at Qibio's website right now. They have plans anywhere from 44amonth to a hundred dollars a month. Just to give you an idea, if I'm just a regular person, you know, do I just need the $50 a month, the cheapest one? Is that going to work? [00:24:37] Speaker B: So if you. So the kicker for your QuickBooks is that you're going to need the feature called class tracking. Class tracking, right as of this recording is available on the plus and the advanced versions which is going to put you in the top tier of those. If you only have one house and you don't care about splitting up units or whatever, or if you're in a situation where like you're never gonna need that, like you're just a brokerage or running a small business or a cleaning company or whatever, you absolutely can go with the essentials or any of those lower versions. [00:25:10] Speaker A: Okay. So it could be around $100 a month. As we start to scale, we're gonna need the hundred dollars a month version of qbo or maybe. Maybe even a little more than that. And don't let that scare you. If you're just starting out, by the time you get to the point, you need the. What was the word? Started with a C. You need the class tracking, class tracker. You're going to have enough going on in your Life that the $100 a month is probably not your biggest problem. You know, that kind of a deal. So. All right. Do you have any tips for getting my taxes filed on time? [00:25:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Truly the most boring tip, which is do your books a little bit all the time. If you're not doing them yourself, you got to stay on it, pick a. Pick a Tuesday, pick a Saturday, whatever, to do it yourself. If you have decided that you do not want to do it yourself, you cannot be held accountable to that task. Your bookkeepers want to help you so desperately. I have two different people on staff whose whole job is to herd the cats that are my clients that don't want to answer questions. Like, that's all they do all day is they call people and say, how are you going to answer your questions today? Your bookkeepers want to love you. You need to love your bookkeeper. Answer their questions and your bookkeeping will be just fine. Those are my two best tips, is pay attention either to your own stuff or to when your bookkeeper's asking you a question. [00:26:35] Speaker A: Excellent, excellent advice. I also want to throw another thing out there that I think you'll like. If you're shopping for a bookkeeper or a CPA, you're shopping for next year. That's my opinion. I see too many people trying to cram this in at the, you know, Chris, it's Christmas season. I need to find a CPA or a book. No, it's too late, man. You should be doing this for, you know, next year at that point. So can you find somebody that might be able to get things together before April 15th of that year? Maybe, but they're going to be really annoyed, especially if you're expecting them to shove this in. In three or four months. So I think that you're approaching this more from a standpoint of let's. Let's hire some folks for next year's taxes and maybe we can get them to help me out with this year in the process. What are your thoughts there? [00:27:24] Speaker B: 100%, I think. So. To each his own. The biggest. And I'll tell You like, the biggest issue that we have with folks that are jumping in, like today's October 21st. Every call that I have with a potential new client for the next 10 weeks, they're going to say, oh, man, my, my 20, 25. My books for this year are gross, but I definitely need it. And then I'm going to hit them with a price tag of 5, 10, 15 grand to get the whole thing cleaned up. [00:27:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:50] Speaker B: And that's. That's the sticker every time. That's the one that gets you. And so, yeah, I think if you're. If you just don't have the funds, you're probably going to get to buckle down and do it yourself. But if you go ahead and engage a bookkeeper, like anybody that we engage in the next 10 weeks, if they don't want the cleanup, they just want to start. Jan1, we're onboarding them anyway. We're setting up the bones of the system anyway. Ask your bookkeeper if. Or if. If you can use the bones of the system that they've set up to do your best. I had a client this morning shoot me an email and say, hey, Ben, I know that we said that we were going to handle all the back work on this, but we can't. So we see that you're doing a great job on the monthly. Can you just back this back for the last 12 months and catch us up? And the answer is, yeah, absolutely. So we're. We're here to help. We're here to be helpful. Do whatever you want. Know that there's a big sticker on the cleanup, but if you get in with somebody for New Year and then you realize, hey, I bet they could spend some time with me, help me clean this up. That's the move. That's the way to do it. Ask questions. We just want to be helpful. [00:28:54] Speaker A: Yeah. So the 500 you quoted earlier for a kind of a beginner level, you know, real estate investor with a couple of. Maybe a day job and that kind of thing. That's after everything's cleaned up, correct? [00:29:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:29:08] Speaker A: There'll be a month look like, how long does it take? How much info are you sticking. Is this a uncomfortable situation where I'm being prodded? You know, what does it look like? Sure. [00:29:18] Speaker B: So I think cleanups can be really awful. We've had a lot of horror stories from clients where they'll say, okay, I paid a bookkeeper and I. And I mailed them all on my files, and then they disappeared to the Bahamas and I never saw them Again, right? So cleanups can be really sensitive because it's a big sticker price, and then it's a big project, and then ultimately, you don't know how to do cleanup. That's why you hired for it. [00:29:40] Speaker A: Right? [00:29:41] Speaker B: How we handle it, how I think everybody should handle a cleanup project, is, hey, you've paid me for this. Let's get together at least once a week to make sure that we're still making progress and forward momentum. What I tell clients is that this cleanup will go as fast as you want it to. If I've got questions for you today, I need that answer before same time next week, and we'll keep making progress, and then you'll be able to tell if I'm just hanging out doing nothing or if I'm actually getting the work done, and we can begin to base our relationship from there. So we've had cleanups take all of two weeks. We've had cleanups take all of two years. It's a hundred percent on who needs the cleanup work done, but especially a firm of our size. We've got a bunch of people on staff at this point. Like, we can get. There is no number of transactions that we cannot code with some speed. It is always the Q and A, the question and answer after the fact, that slows us down. [00:30:36] Speaker A: Somebody coming from a different bookkeeper coming to you. Is there still cleanup? [00:30:41] Speaker B: If the. If the other bookkeeper did a bad job, we will tell you. The question that I always have for folks that are coming in is what would you like my team to be responsible for? And so if you came to us today and you said, hey, you know, my grandpa's a cpa. He was doing it. He's done it for the whole year. I think just start fresh November 1st. Then I'd say, yeah, sure, no problem. Get us the final numbers as of October 31st. I'll look at them and tell you, hey, I don't think that this is right or wrong, but ultimately, it's your decision. And then we'll start clean from there. Most of the time, as soon as I say that, people realize that, hey, you know what? I would rather, Ben, just touch everything in here so that we know that it's right. But it goes either way. If you. If you really like your like, again, if it was grandpa or a tax person that you trusted, but you're switching to us because we've got the infrastructure, then we'll leave it alone. But I'm. What you see is what you get with me. I'm Pretty honest on. Hey, this looks disgusting. This is not what you're doing. We need to change this. I'll tell you up front, if I think that that's a bad decision, what do you see? [00:31:46] Speaker A: What kind of mistakes do you see people making here with bookkeeping? I was obviously not having it, but other than that. [00:31:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So most of the time, when people have books, they have something that looks like a balance sheet. They have something that looks like a balance sheet and something that looks like a profit and loss, but there's big holes in it. They either don't know how to state their houses and their loans, or they've never actually balanced their checkbook or reconciled the account is what we was what the nerds call it. Right. And those are just the easy hits. [00:32:19] Speaker A: The. [00:32:19] Speaker B: The more complicated pieces are where you don't know how much money you're making because you don't know what's coming in and what's going out. Back to this Airbnb deposits thing. A lot of folks I see. And we've done this before. If it doesn't make sense to the client, we'll just do this. Where. Hey, I don't care what's in my deposit. I don't care if it's accommodation or resolution or cleaning or fees or whatever. Just put it all in one place. Doesn't matter. Great. We can do that. That's not a problem. When you wake up in the middle of the night and you're like, why am I losing money? Everything should be working. I don't know why. Why is this happening? Why am I not making the money that I should be? Because my bottom line is weird. That's where your P and L needs to be different. That's where the bookkeeping is wrong. The bookkeeping should help you understand. Oh, I had an extra cleaning fee in here that I just totally missed. And now that I've split out my cleaning revenue and cleaning expenses, I could see it plain as day. There's the issue. I need to change what my payment process is here. Or for managers, it's, oh, I never got reimbursed for that 2500 dollars trip to home Depot to buy space heaters for the winter or whatever it is, you know, like, there's just. There's pieces to this puzzle, and when bad bookkeeping is around, it's hard to see the whole picture. Good bookkeeping helps see the whole picture every time. [00:33:36] Speaker A: Do I need a bookkeeper for a W2? [00:33:40] Speaker B: You do not. Actually. If it's. If It's a real W2. W2 is coming to you. That goes straight on your return. That's not a big deal. [00:33:47] Speaker A: Very simple. [00:33:48] Speaker B: Very simple. [00:33:49] Speaker A: Okay. Not necessary. All right, so in other words, If I have six rental properties and a large Dr. W2, you wouldn't have any need to look at the. The W2 income? [00:34:01] Speaker B: I mean, I may be deeply curious about what a large Dr. W2 looks like. [00:34:05] Speaker A: Yeah, maybe ask him on a date or something. [00:34:07] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. We may, we may talk about it a little bit, but no, I don't. I don't care about any of that at all. Give me the houses. [00:34:14] Speaker A: You have any idea how hard it is to have a podcast with a bookkeeper and laugh, bro? [00:34:20] Speaker B: You're telling me. [00:34:22] Speaker A: Wonderful. All right, well, anything we missed, man? [00:34:25] Speaker B: I don't know. There's. So there's a ton of different ways to do bookkeeping at the end of the day, obviously. Like, we chunk it out into corporate level books like your business, your houses, and then we have a chunk for property management, your business, other people's houses. We've got CFO services that we layer on top for the folks that are crazy. [00:34:45] Speaker A: Explain that. What is that? [00:34:46] Speaker B: Yeah, so most folks don't need CFO service, but a good CFO should be able to look at a multi LLC conglomerate with a ton of partners and a ton of properties and whatever and be able to have conversations with you like, hey, your business is rather seasonal in these areas, so you may want to have XYZ amount of cash on hand just to make sure that you can survive and you feel comfy. [00:35:11] Speaker A: Cozy financial advice about the future of your company. [00:35:15] Speaker B: Exactly. We're get where it's way more closer to way more closer. There's the good English. It's way, way closer to plumbers on the coaching. Exactly. [00:35:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:35:25] Speaker B: I paid a lot of money to talk good. You know, it's way closer to coaching and then helping you kind of connect the dots on some of the more complicated accounting side so that you can go be the operator that you need to be. [00:35:36] Speaker A: What, you do that as well. If I want to be a bookkeeper, I can come to you and you'll teach me how. [00:35:42] Speaker B: So for some of our CFO clients. Yeah, like we'll help them source a. We've helped. We'll do interviews with folks. It's like, hey, I really need an in house bookkeeper. But I also know, I mean, if. [00:35:52] Speaker A: I'm just a regular average Joe and I've decided I want. I like what Ben's got to say. I want to be like, Ben, you can teach me how to do that. So. [00:36:01] Speaker B: So we're not officially offering any sort of course, but I know exactly who it is that will do that for you. So, yeah, blow me up. [00:36:06] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. All right. And that is one thing I'll say about this guy. He's very responsive. Writes back right away, which is awesome. That's the goal. [00:36:18] Speaker B: Appreciate it. [00:36:19] Speaker A: Anything else we need to know? [00:36:20] Speaker B: Dude, I think that's it. I think that's the. That's the magic 30 minutes there, however. [00:36:24] Speaker A: I loved it. We got all day. I got. Where am I gonna go? But I appreciate your time, brothers. Great to catch up. Been too long. How do we find you? [00:36:32] Speaker B: You can stalk me all over the Internet, Bend a lion, share bookkeeping, dot com. And then if you want to. If you want to have a pretty casual chat about what you got going on and how we can help, just hop over to the website, fill out the form, and we'll talk to you soon. [00:36:47] Speaker A: Okay, great. You got, like, a calendar link where I can schedule an appointment? [00:36:51] Speaker B: I sure do. [00:36:52] Speaker A: Wonderful. Cool. All right, well, we'll put that in the show notes. Thank you, Ben. Tremendous. Great to catch up with you. And as always, don't overthink it.