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My tip for you today is don't do what I used to do when it comes to capacity planning.

Don't wait until you're so far past capacity, when you're stressed and stretched soooo thin, before starting your recruiting process.

That's when mistakes happen. That's when you rush the recruiting process and anyone starts looking attractive to you. That's when you hire You'll Do.

That's when your onboarding process looks like dropping them in the deep end and then getting frustrated at the amount of...

I’m writing this the week following Xerocon 2022 in Sydney, Australia.  

I have family in New South Wales – including my mother – so it was a good opportunity for me to head over the ditch after a few years of not being able to do so. 

2022 was the first Xerocon in 3 years thanks to Covid and was my second Xerocon, the first one being 4 years ago in Brisbane, BC (before Covid).  

That first one blew my mind, just the sheer scale of it. 

Like, I...

Were you excited to come back to work this week? Or do Mondays come with a sense of heaviness and dread?

Are you feeling stretched too thin, at the beck and call of others with a thousand tabs open in your brain and not enough hours in the day and desperate to reclaim your life?

Freeing up time is one of the first things I look at when I start working with a bookkeeper.

The reality is that there are only 3 ways for you to free up your time:

Reduce your workload 

You can do this by firing...

Next time you hear the term time management, conjure up an image of cowboys in Wranglers with lassoes trying to capture and tame a flock of unruly ducks.

It's comical, right? 

Try as we may, we cannot "manage" time, it flies away before you can even catch it.

Maybe a better term would be time budgeting. 

We all have the same 24 hours in a day, right? How we choose to spend our time comes down to the following things:

• our values and priorities
• how...

I'm writing this at Auckland Airport as I wait for a flight to Christchurch to attend the ICNZB Bookkeepers Conference.

I can hardly believe that it's been a year already since the last one.

A whole year.

12 months.

365 days.

There are 2 things that come to mind about that, that I'd like to remind you about.

All of those days have flown by so fast. Cliche but true.

It's sometimes easy to feel like nothing has changed, nothing is changing, when we're head down working away each day and all we...

I'm heading down to Christchurch for the ICNZB Conference next week.

I love attending these industry conferences. There’s a general sense of camaraderie and excitement and optimism, and it’s a chance to catch up with fellow bookkeepers, some of whom I’ve known for years and some of who I’m meeting for the first time.

The theme of this year’s conference is Future Focussed, and it’s got me thinking about where we've come from.

...

I want to talk to you about how to say no. 

It's something that we come up against quite a lot because, as bookkeepers, we don't want to seem like we're not being nice.  

You could say this is a female thing, and I think it probably is more prevalent in females, but it's not only females. 

We often find ourselves saying yes to things which we really don't have the time or the capacity, or even the desire, let's face it, to do. But because somebody has asked us, we feel...

"The customer is always right" was a catchphrase used by some department store retailers in the early 1900s and came to be quite widely used in the business and sales world.

But run a bookkeeping business for any length of time and it will soon become very apparent that the customer is not always right. Moreover, it would often be dangerous and unethical if we acted as if they were.

Business owners often hire us bookkeepers for our knowledge, experience and expertise, and bringing that...

This may seem a little ridiculous at first glance. I'm going to talk to bookkeepers about bookkeeping. You guys already know this stuff, right?!

But I'm going to talk bookkeeping to bookkeepers anyway. Because sometimes your bookkeeping businesses are not being shown the love that they deserve. 

And in some cases, bookkeepers want confirmation that they're doing things right, because a lot of us just picked this stuff up as we went along. 

So, let me ask you this - Is your business...

Last week I decided to delete the Facebook app from my phone as I was finding myself feeling anxious as I was scrolling through my feed.

The world is an odd place right now and I realised that it was not helpful for me to be continuously bombarded with news and opinions about Covid and the government's response to it. 

And to be honest, I was on Facebook just too darn much. There is an addictive element to social media, right? I think we can all admit that. I was feeling that I may have...