Setting up a Bookkeeping Engagement in BillQuick

Setting up a bookkeeping engagement in BillQuick makes a lot of sense. You’ll have to capture people’s time and keep track of your costs vs budget for any bookkeeping engagement and BilQuick does this really well.

To start with setting up a bookkeeping engagement in BillQuick, we need to be able to set up customers and engagements in that order.

Setting up customers in BillQuick is easy. When you start the process you will be prompted to use the wizard. You may want to. I chose not to in this exercise because I wanted you to see what this looks like when you truly set everything up from the ground up. In general wizards make things easier, but when I am learning a new product like this I don’t want easy. I want to know everything it can do. So I want to begin setting up a bookkeeping engagement in BillQuick without ANY help.

If you skip the wizard while setting up your first customer you will be looking at a blank customer screen. You’ll need to create a client ID. This is a short code identifying the client. I don’t like using numbers for this. Numbers don’t make sense. How do I translate a number into a client? If the client’s name is “MHI Studios, Inc.” then I sill set MHI as the client ID – that’s how I am going to want to refer to them.

As you go through the fields in the customer dialogue you will find it’s pretty clear what goes there. When you get to the Manager, you may need to go out and set up an employee so you can make them a manager.

Once you have the client set up then you can set up the first engagement for that client. Setting up a bookkeeping engagement in BillQuick should be similarly straight forward as compared with setting up a customer. Of course you’ll have to associate the engagement with the customer. You’re also going to see the contract details. This is where I want you to stop and think for a minute. How will this work? In order to build a bookkeeping practice that scales well you really want to create a structure where you are billing monthly and not by the hour. The reason is simple. As you improve your processes and streamline your bookkeeping business, while charging the same monthly fee, you become more profitable. BillQuick will help you manage this really well.

Setting up a bookkeeping engagement in BillQuick will lend itself really well to this process because you can see at any moment how your costs are stacking up against your revenues. Notice how I set this one up. It’s a straight $500/month plus $100/month for “expenses.” The expense reimbursement is meant to cover other apps I may use with the client such as Bill.com or a secure file management service like Box.com, or ShareFile. As I add more clients to these services the cost per client will scale, and the $100/month/client will stack up. It’s a subtle way of increasing profits as you scale your business.

As you are setting up a bookkeeping engagements in BillQuick you will be able to adjust your contract settings with each new engagement. If you find that your costs are coming too close to the $600/month then increase the rates on new clients. You don’t want to upset existing clients by raising their rates. What you should do is put a to do item with a reminder set for a month before their 1 year anniversary as a client to increase their rates.

If you’re starting out you may take a loss on your first few clients if you undersell, but the great news about this is you are going to scale it. This means you are going to get better and more efficient at it, and what takes you 3 hours now will take 1 in a year from now. Make sure your systems are set up and working. This means everyone is entering their time in BillQuick so you can manage the costs well and improve the scale. This is why I think it’s a no brainer to use BillQuick to manage a bookkeeping practice. The intelligence you have will make it really easy to be successful.