Podcast

Dealing with accounting (and accountants!) can often take a back seat to more exciting business things. But keeping our books and taxes in order is pretty helpful to everything else we want to do in business. So how can we be effective and efficient when working with our accountant?

Resources referenced:

• 3 Red Flags I Ignored When Dealing with my Accountant
• A Deep Dive Q&A With Tax and Accounting Experts (with Kim Padgitt and Julie Pesek)

Sponsored by: Acuity Scheduling & The Jojoba Company.

Transcript:

Sponsor Message This episode is sponsored by Acuity, our 2018 software of choice. Acuity Scheduling is your online assistant working 24/7 to fill your schedule. No more phone tag. Clients can quickly view your real-time availability and self-book their own appointments and even pay online and reschedule with a click. Handle all of your forms before the appointment so you can get right to doing the massage you do best. Look and act professional by offering convenient scheduling to your clients that matches your brand and your voice. Customer support is a delight, and Acuity’s style will help you relax and have fun running your business again. Check out the special 45-day free offer at massagebusinessblueprint.com/acuity.

Allissa Haines Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Massage Business Blueprint podcast, where we discuss the business side of massage therapy. I’m Allissa Haines.

Michael Reynolds And I’m Michael Reynolds.

AH And we are delighted, delighted to — that you are joining us today. That’s what’s happening.

MR Delighted.

AH How are you? I feel like I haven’t talked to you in forever, Michael. How are you?

MR I am great. It’s been, like, a week, so I guess that’s forever for us. [Laughing]

AH Kind of is. [Laughing].

MR Aside from Slack messages back and forth throughout the week like, hey, blah, blah blah. So yeah. It’s been about a week or so, so good to catch up with you, Allissa. Good to catch up.

AH How’s summer going? Are you doing the things that you want to do and having fun with the kid?

MR Summer is going as expected. Yeah. It’s good. Not a lot of travel. I did some travel a couple days ago actually for business. But yeah. In general, it’s good. We’re kind of just hanging out at home. We’re — got some rain, so the grass is not dying as rapidly as it was before.

AH Excellent.

MR Yeah. Doing summer stuff. So yeah. How about you?

AH Good, man. It’s happening. We — I’m so grumpy right now. I’m trying really hard not to be, but I’m super grumpy because our air conditioning — our house, we have central air — broke on —

MR Oh, that would make me super grumpy.

AH — on Tuesday evening. It’s been kind of warm, and we are expected to have high humidity and hundred-degree heat for the next couple of days. So someone is coming tomorrow, and I’m really hoping that they’re able to fix it because if not, we’re definitely not going to get — we’re not going to have air conditioning in time for this massive heat wave.

So I had to move the big — and this is so not horrifying. Like, there’s no one here with health issues that can’t handle the heat. We have a pool. And I dragged the air conditioner from — that — where I use outside in my tiny office that I haven’t even installed yet for this season. I put it into the bedroom so at least we had air conditioning last night. But I’m super grumpy about it because I’m just anticipating — I only take — I take every other weekend off. So it’s my weekend off, and I’m anticipating it just a horrifying, muggy — but yeah.

So I’m trying really hard to perk up, but I’m just grumpy today. And thank goodness that Michael is — every so often, Michael just pops in and he’s like, hey, I’ve got a bunch of podcast episode ideas, and he does all the work. And it’s always something that I would not have thought of — it’s a topic I wouldn’t have thought of, and it always enlightens me.

So with that, Michael, tell us today what we’re talking about, and bring it.

MR Well, I would love to bring it. Today, we are talking about how to work with your accountant.

So should I take it away?

AH Take it away. I want to know more.

MR All right. Let’s take it away.

AH How — Michael, how do I work with my accountant?

MR Oh, thank you for the set up. [Laughing]

So I was thinking recently about a few episodes ago we talked with Kim and Julie from the Tax Advantage. They were a sponsor and an interview — they were guests on our interview episode a few episodes ago. It was a great conversation, and it kind of prompted me to talk a little more about working with your accountant because I see a little bit of a trend sometimes — not just dealing with massage therapy businesses but also any type of small business — that accounting and taxes and bookkeeping and all the stuff like that seems to kind of get shoved aside a little bit.

And I would argue it’s one of the most important things in your business, and so I wanted to talk about it just a little bit and just offer some encouragement, some advice, some insight into kind of lining up your business to work well with an accountant because I think a good accountant can really add a ton of value to your business in a lot of ways. So —

AH So before you launch in, I have — and you might be preparing to answer this already — but when you say “accountant,” do you mean strictly an accountant? Or do you mean a bookkeeper? Or do you mean someone who does both? What — or is this, like, could be multiple people?

MR Yeah. That’s a great question. So in my scenario, I’m envisioning someone that does your bookkeeping, gives you basic financial reports, and does your taxes. That’s kind of what I’m envisioning.

AH Okay. So you’re talking about the potential for an all-in-one provider.

MR Yes. Yeah. And I do address that a little bit later as well. But yeah. I’m thinking of someone — someone not — nothing fancy — someone who does your bookkeeping, someone you meet with quarterly for some — a basic financial report and some conversation about it, and then yearly taxes. That’s really what I’m talking about, and that’s really what most small business needs. You don’t need a CFO. You don’t need someone to do all sorts of fancy analysis and forecasting. You need someone that does the basics.

AH Hey, Michael?

MR Yeah?

AH What does CFO stand for?

MR That stands for chief financial officer.

AH Thank you.

MR I’m kind of bad — I dish out acronyms a lot, and then people yell at me because they don’t know what they mean. So thank you for —

AH You bet. And really, in your business, you are the CFO. So there’s that.

MR Right.

AH You are — yes. You are everything and including the chief financial officer. But even in big honking companies, the CFOs don’t do everything on their own. They have bookkeepers and accountants to help guide them.

MR That’s true. Very true.

AH Okay. I’ll be quiet now.

MR No, no worries. Be as loud as you want. [Laughing]

So accounting can be kind of stressful. I think that’s a lot of the reason why we put it off and don’t want to think about it. I talk to a lot of small business owners in general including massage therapists who — they’ve gone years and years by just kind of throwing receipts in a shoebox, and they’ve done their taxes maybe themselves or maybe they have someone do it. But throughout the year, they’re not really getting any kind of financial reporting; they’re not really doing a ton of bookkeeping, so it’s messy at tax time. Maybe they don’t even have software, they just have a spreadsheet or maybe nothing at all. I’m not saying that’s terrible. It’s not the end of the world. If your business is really tiny and simple, that’s probably fine. But some business owners I’ve talked to, they kind of put it off because they just don’t want to deal with the money/finance part of it because it’s stressful.

And money and finance can be stressful for a lot of us. I mean, many of us do not like to open spreadsheets and analyze numbers. Many of us do not like to open up QuickBooks and categorize things and analyze profit and loss statements and balance sheets and looking at income and revenue. It’s just stressful, and it’s okay that it’s stressful. I want to make sure that we’re admitting that it’s — not everyone has a knack for dealing with money, and that is okay. But I don’t want that to be a reason to put off something that could really help your business. So let’s acknowledge that accounting and finance and bookkeeping can be stressful, but let’s not ignore it.

Also, there’s apathy. It’s not just always fear, but sometimes just apathy. It’s like, hey, it’s more fun to run Facebook campaigns or to go to my networking events or to work on my office or to buy new plants for my massage room. Like, those are all fun things, but in the grand scheme of things that are fun and not fun, accounting and finance is probably not near the top of the list. So it may not be that we’re fearful or full of anxiety around finance. It’s more just apathy. It’s like, oh, you know, I’ll get around to it, and money’s coming in, and money’s going out, but it’s not that important. So don’t let apathy keep you from getting help as well.

So a good accountant or accounting firm or bookkeeper or whatever you want to call it — accounting and bookkeeping are pretty much interchangeable in this context — a good accountant can really save you time and money in a very tangible way. A good accountant, first of all, that keeps your books in order can make your tax experience a lot more pleasant and a lot less expensive as well. You can save a lot of time and money by having your books organized, your receipts all organized, everything kind of organized in one place, your financial statements. And when it comes to tax time, you’re not going to have to spend a ton of time with tax prep, and whoever does your taxes is going to have a very organized system to work from. So that can save you time and money right off the bat.

Also, having that type of financial information and having all of your books in order can give you really good insight into decision making. So if you look at the last three months of your business and you can see exactly how much money you made from certain services or how much money you’re trending or up and down and you can see how much profit you’re making, those things can all inform you as you make future decisions. And if you make fully informed future decisions, your business is going to grow faster or grow in the direction you want it to go or be more stable or all these things that can help your business be more successful. If you’re working kind of blind with no financial information, no reporting telling you how much money you’re making, then you don’t have a lot of great tools to make good decisions. You’re flying blind. We don’t want to do that.

So the whole first half of this episode is me just kind of outlining how valuable I think accounting help can be. A lot of people think they want to do it themselves. And maybe some people are great at it. If you’re great at it and you love doing it yourself, by all means do it yourself. That’s great. You know who you are, and you’re good to go. But a lot of us are much better served by outsourcing it to an accountant, whether it’s a single person or a small business accounting firm. It will free you up to do the things you love to do.

I can’t count how many times I talk to business owners who are bogged down in bookkeeping and accounting and they spend hours every week — or even maybe it’s like 30 minutes to an hour; maybe it’s not that much time. But the mental anguish they feel every time they open up QuickBooks or open a spreadsheet or do anything with finance, the mental anguish they feel is more significant than the time spent. It just sucks away their energy. And so what we want to do is we want to direct your energy towards things that you love to do and outsource the stuff you don’t. And for many of us, accounting is one of those things.

Even if you’re only saving an hour a month or whatever, think beyond just the time spent. Think about the stress and the anxiety that you’re lifting from yourself and how much more productive that will make you to focus on things that grow your business.

So that’s my spiel on the why. Let’s do halftime, and then I want to talk about just kind of ways to set up your business to work well with your accountant.

So halftime. Our halftime is, drum roll —

Sponsor Message Jojoba. So yeah. This episode is sponsored by The Jojoba Company. You know already, people, that I firmly believe that massage therapists should only be using the highest quality products because our clients deserve it. And also, my body deserves it because I’ve got my hands in this for 15 to 20 hours a week. I’ve been using jojoba for years because it’s nonallergenic. I can use it on any client and every client without fear of an allergic reaction. And hey, a little seasonal note since we’re recording when it’s going to be like 100 and something degrees here soon, my clients love that jojoba does not sit on their skin and feel oily or gross. And that’s because jojoba’s not an oil. It’s actually a wax ester, and it’s the closest thing you can get to the sebum that your body actually produces in the skin. Your skin doesn’t produce oil. It produces something called sebum, and jojoba is the closest thing you can get to that. Jojoba Company is the only company in the world that’s carrying first — pure, first-pressed quality jojoba. Other companies try to get as much extract as they can from the seed, but Jojoba does a light press called a first press, and they don’t get as much, but what they get is a much higher quality jojoba. You, my friends, can go to massagebusinessblueprint.com/jojoba, and you will find through that link you get 10% off the price of the product on orders of $35 or more. Again, massagebusinessblueprint.com/jojoba, that’s J-O-J-O-B-A.

All right, Michael. You’ve talked to us about why we might want to get off our butts and get an accountant. What — tell me the best way to work with one.

MR So one of the first things we want to do is to graduate beyond the spreadsheet or the shoebox and get proper accounting software. Now, it doesn’t have to be fancy. My recommended software is QuickBooks online. Now, that’s not for everybody, but one of the advantages of QuickBooks online is that pretty much 99.9% of accounting services or people or firms you go to are going to be on QuickBooks online.

AH Okay.

MR That is the gold standard.

Yeah. Go ahead.

AH So I’m going to jump in here, and then I — I’m going not jump in again for a while. [Laughing]

MR No, go right ahead.

AH But I want to express that while Michael likes QuickBooks, I hate it.

MR Yeah. I was going to go there, but go ahead.

AH Okay. Sorry.

I’ve tried it multiple times, and I hate it. Whenever it — and I had a bookkeeper for a couple years. They set up QuickBooks for me. They were managing it for me. It’s something I needed when my business was bigger. It made sense, but I hated it, and I had a really hard time doing anything myself in it. But I want you to know that there are plenty of other options that plenty of accountants work with. Even if a spreadsheet is the best thing for you — but I don’t necessary think it is — there’s other programs. There’s plenty.

I’m using Wave right now. I’m also a big fan of the old Quicken. It’s essentially an electronic check register. I like web-based stuff, and they don’t have that web-based anymore. Otherwise, I’d probably be using it. But there’s — if you’re on a Mac, you can use iBank. There’s plenty of other options that operate a little bit simpler than QuickBooks. So if hearing the word QuickBooks makes you think, never mind, this is never going to work for you, calm the heck down and know that there are plenty of other options, and most accountants are going to be happy to work with you with whatever program is easiest for you, whatever makes it easiest on your end. That’s my shtick.

MR And that’s where I was going to go with that. [Laughing].

AH Sorry.

MR So I agree. [Laughing]. That’s okay. I agree.

So my point here is that QuickBooks is the gold standard, and so we just need to be aware of that. So if you don’t have a preference, if you don’t hate QuickBooks, if you don’t really know any better, necessarily, and you’re just looking for something, my recommendation is try QuickBooks because it’s going to make your life as easy as possible when working with accountants.

Now, that being said, Julie and Kim that we talked to a few episodes ago, they’re fine working with Wave just like Allissa uses. That’s perfectly fine. And you will probably be okay finding accountants that also work with other mainstream systems like Wave or Xero or whatever else is out there. You may have — you may encounter a few that don’t work with those systems and they do work with QuickBooks, but for the most part, Allissa’s right. You can find someone that will help you if you’re not using QuickBooks online. I like QuickBooks online. That’s just me. Not everybody likes it, but just be aware of what the standard is among the industry.

AH And if you’re having trouble finding someone who will use the program that you like, then we’re going to give you the hookup, and you can call Kim and Julie.

MR There you go. We love Kim and Julie.

AH We really do.

MR All right. So the point is don’t just kind of get by with nothing or just a spreadsheet. Having a web-based system is much more convenient than either of those methods. Having it web-based is important because then your accountant, if they’re remote or they don’t come to their office all the time or don’t come to your office all the time or vice versa, they can login with their account and do your bookkeeping online in the cloud. You don’t want them to have to drive to your office and open up your QuickBooks desktop and sit at your computer and do all that. That’s ridiculous. We want cloud-based online and web-based software.

Next, outsource your bookkeeping. The bookkeeping is mainly categorization of transactions. It’s really just keeping your transactions clean and organized and categorized so that when you do report, you can see categories of information like, oh, I’ve — maybe I have revenue coming from massage services, maybe I have revenue coming from retail sales. I can separate those and see the difference on my financial reports. What are my expenses? I’ve got rent. I’ve got supplies. I’ve got software. I’ve got internet. You can kind of separate those things as well and see how much money you’re spending in each category. So when you categorize your transactions, you lump them into these buckets that give you insight into where your money is going.

And it’s not hard. I mean, yeah. You can login to QuickBooks online, you can categorize things, but your time is most likely better spent serving your clients and doing marketing and networking and the stuff that you like to do. There are always little nuances here and there that your accountant’s going to know better than you where to categorize things anyway. So I’m an advocate of letting the experts do the bookkeeping and handle that because they can do it a lot faster than you probably, as well, and take that off your plate. So if you’re doing your own bookkeeping, I’m not saying it’s terrible, but consider if that’s really the best use of your time. I recommend outsourcing that for most people.

Next — you’ve got your accounting software set up, you’ve got your bookkeeping going on a monthly or quarterly basis from your accountant, next, you want to meet on a regular basis. I like a quarterly schedule for most small businesses. You don’t need to meet monthly, typically, unless you have a really high-volume business. Maybe you’ve got a lot of transactions going on, a lot of fast decisions you have to make. That’s really not most of us. So if you are the average solo or small business, then quarterly reporting is probably just fine.

Allissa and I meet with our — with Kim and Julie quarterly, and they give us a quarterly report. That quarterly report is a couple of things. It’s called a management report they give us. It’s the PNL, which stands for profit and loss, and the balance sheet. The balance sheet is really just what our assets are worth in the company — assets and liabilities and kind of what’s — what things are worth in our company on the balance sheet. The PNL is what’s more interesting because that really tells you how much money you’re making. The profit and loss is literally that. It’s how much profit or how much loss you have in your business.

So if you look at the year-to-date and you see that your profit is X dollars and you would like it to be bigger, you can start looking at things in the statement and say, oh, well, maybe I need to cut down this category or maybe I need to increase revenue over here. You can start to see what levers you need to pull to work on your business.

If you have a loss that — a statement will tell you if you’re losing money. If you have a loss of $3,000 year-to-date, maybe that’s a red flag. You really need to make some significant changes in your business. So the numbers will tell you the real story of what’s happening in your business. And a quarterly rhythm, I think, is very appropriate. It gives you enough time to make changes, but it’s not so often that you have to pay for a lot of reporting or spend a lot of time worrying about reporting.

I like to store these somewhere safe like your Google Drive account or someplace secure. I do everything digitally, so I like the fact that my accounting firm sends me everything via PDF. I can look at it, meet with them, have a conversation about it, and then store it away in my Google Drive folders by year. And any time I want to go back to those reports and pull the information, whether it’s — for whatever reason, I’ve got the data right there at my fingertips, and I can start looking at trends.

I can say, well, in 2017, I made this much in profit. In 2018, I made this much. In 2019, I’m on track for this. So what’s happening in my business that is causing this trend? Is it down? Is it up? What can I look at to identify what the trends are? And an accountant typically will be able to give you a little bit of insight into some of this. I mean, they’re not going to be able to be a business coach typically, but they will be able to say, oh, well, it looks like year over year, you’re spending more and more on this particular expense. Why is that, or is that something that can be reduced? You can say, well, let me scratch my head, and say, can it be reduced? And you have a conversation about it. So if nothing else, they can be sort of a thinking partner when it comes to looking at the numbers.

Next. Super simple. Seems to make — seems obvious, but make it a priority to respond to their questions. When my accountant has a question about a category, they email me and say, hey, it looks like these three — or these three transactions don’t have a category I recognize. Where would they go? And you’d say, oh, well, that’s a software product; or oh, that’s a — that was a networking event; or oh, that’s something I bought for my massage room. And then they can say, okay, great. I’ll categorize it appropriately. So be sure to respond quickly and make sure that you ask how they work. Typically, they’re going to email you questions, and you just respond back. So be responsive. Be quick to give them the data they need. That keeps your reports up to date and in real time.

Next, keep your data clean and current. So whether you’re using QuickBooks online or Wave or whatever it is, make sure that your bank feeds are working correctly. So when you set up QuickBooks online, for example, it’s going to ask you to link up your business bank account. When you do that, you log in, you sync it up, and then every night, it should sync up and get the latest transactions. Some banks don’t sync up automatically as well. For example, I’ve got one bank that every week I have to go in manually and just redo the sync because it doesn’t automatically do it. So if your bank is not as real time as it should be, hop in there once a week or so, run the sync, re-log in, and make sure you bring the transactions over so that your accountant has the most current data and is up to speed on what’s coming in and out.

Keep your receipts. There’s a lot of apps that we’ve talked about in the past for keeping receipts. There’s Evernote, there’s Google Drive, there’s Shoeboxed. QuickBooks online has a mobile app that you can use to scan your receipts and keep them. Any of those are fine, but just keep all your receipts for business. It’s really easy. I use Scannable, then I dump it into a cloud folder, and then a couple times a year I just move them into folders in Google Drive. It’s really easy. The hard part’s taken care of by me just hovering my phone over the receipt and snapping the photo of it, then I can just shred the receipt. So it’s really super simple. So keep your receipts. It’s rare that you’re going to have to comb through them to find something, but you want to have them there if your accountant has a question or if the IRS has a question, more importantly.

Next, don’t mix business and personal transactions. I’ve talked to a lot of business owners that they are a little loosey-goosey with how they run their money. They do personal — they — personal purchases go out of a business account sometimes, or business purchases go out of a personal account of like, oh, well, I’ll just figure it out later. No, no, no. Separate business purchases from personal purchases, and income as well. When you get money in for your massage business, it goes in your business account. When you pay for something for your massage business, it’s paid for out of your business account. You don’t mix that with personal. That is going to mess up your accounting. It’s going to cause issues. It’s going to cause issues with taxes. It’s just not a good idea. So keep everything separate. Be very, very clean. Have a big, strong barrier between your business finances and your personal finances, aside from obviously paying yourself. That’s money going one way to the other.

Next, ask them to calculate your quarterly statements — or quarterly estimates, I’m sorry. So this is a little bit of a challenge I’ve noticed, for some, is paying your quarterly estimates. Quarterly estimates are a few times a year. If you are self-employed, you need to pay a certain amount of money into — or to the IRS to basically pay your taxes that are estimated for the year. You don’t want to wait until the end of the year or the — or tax time to pay that one big tax bill. The IRS asks you to pay a few times throughout the year in advance. Well, it’s not really in advance because you’ve been paid the money.

So you want to be sure you get those calculated correctly. It’s very hard to get exact, but a good accountant will be able to look at your previous history, look at your projections, you know, estimates for the income for the year, and they’ll say, hey, you should pay this much every quarter for your estimated taxes. There’s ways you can calculate it yourself, but a good accountant will do that for you, and they’re used to doing it and it will make it easy for you. They’ll give you a little paper that says, hey, every quarter pay this much.

So what I like to do is I like to have a whole separate personal bank account that is just for quarterly estimates. So what I do is — I basically take whatever my quarterly estimates are for that year, and then I add them all up and divide it all by 12 so I get a monthly budget number, and then every month I put aside X number — X dollars from that budget item into my personal tax account. And that tax account is just for taxes. I don’t touch it for anything else. I don’t have a debit card attached to it. I can’t write check out of it. It’s typically a high-yield online savings account.

And then, when it comes for quarterly estimates, I go to the IRS website, irs.gov/pay, I just put in my account numbers, I do an electronic payment, and I’m done. That makes tax time a lot less painful because you’ve paid along the way so you’re not expecting a huge tax bill, and you don’t get penalized because the IRS typically will charge you a penalty if you don’t pay your quarterlies on time.

So I know it’s kind of a challenge, but a lot of people I see just don’t pay them. They don’t calculate them, and they just don’t pay them, and they get in trouble. That gets you further and further behind. I’ve seen people rack up two- and three-year’s worth of back taxes because they haven’t paid their quarterlies. They get behind. They get in a bind at tax time because they have this huge tax bill plus penalties and the snowball just goes in the wrong direction. They just get stuck and really overwhelmed. So pay your quarterlies on time. Have your accountant calculate them. I think I’ve soapboxed about that enough.

AH If you’re freaking out because you got behind on them, calm down, know that it can be fixed, and know that the IRS is actually delightful to work with. They are really great about payment plans, so if you’re — you know this is a problem and you know you’re going to owe them money but you haven’t resolved it yet because you’re afraid, please know that they are wonderful to work with. You can pretty much pick your repayment amount monthly until you’re paid off, and the interest is not ridiculous. It’s better to hop on that and get that handled than it is to let it prolong and stress you out.

MR Yeah. I’ve noticed that. The IRS has a reputation for being evil, but they’re actually — they’ve gotten a lot better, I think, and their customer service is not bad. Keep in mind they’re used to — like when something goes on their radar, it’s because it’s some major, disastrous, tragic tax situation where someone is probably breaking the law and doing some really awful things. You’re not that much of a blip on their radar. So if you’re behind a little bit, they’ll work with you. You’re not the worst case they’ve seen. [Laughing]

AH This happened to me. I got bad advice. I didn’t pay quarterlies. I ended up owing thousands of dollars, and I was just paralyzed for a couple of weeks. And then I called them, and the worst part is that if you call them in February, March, April, and into May, you’re going to wait on the phone for a half an hour or an hour to talk to somebody, but once you talk to somebody, they’re so great.

And actually, nowadays you can do it all online. You can set up a payment plan online most of the time, and it’s so not terrible. And the feeling of relief once I got it set up and — you know, it took me a couple years to catch up and a lot of other stuff, and I’m almost debt free, but — definitely debt free for the IRS now. But that was a — it was a hard lesson to learn that way. I know a lot of you have learned that lesson that way because you just didn’t know you were supposed to pay quarterlies straight out of the gate, or you just managed to put it off in your head and not pay quarterlies even though you knew you were supposed to. So know that it’s actually one of the easier financial problems to fix. That’s my shtick.

MR I also recommend setting up an IRS account so you can track everything. So if you go to irs.gov, look for — on the homepage it says “view your account.” If you don’t have an account set up, you can activate one there. It takes maybe five minutes to set one up, and that way you can actually see how much you’ve paid. For example, every year your accountant is going to ask you, hey, how much did you pay in your quarterly estimates? And if you forget, they’re going to have inaccurate numbers. But if you log in to your IRS portal, they’ll tell you exactly how much you’ve paid on what date, and you can just send that to your accountant. So it keeps a record of what you’ve paid and what your tax bill is and all of your history. So set up an account with the IRS. It makes life a lot easier.

AH Yup.

MR So finally, just a little parting word of advice. If you don’t jive with your accountant, it’s okay to get a new one. A lot of people, I think, are stuck with their accountant because they just think, well, all accounts are like this, and they all act like this, and I just have to deal with it. That’s not true. Some accountants are very dry and kind of the stereotypical numbers people, and some people get along with that personality really well. Others, it drives them crazy. They want someone that can speak their language better and someone who can — by “language better” I mean like speak in terms they can understand and simplify complex financial principles.

They have different personality types to get along with, and if you’re not jiving with your accountant, there is someone out there that is a better fit for you. Don’t spend three years just hanging out with an accountant that is killing your soul. It doesn’t mean it’s them, doesn’t mean it’s you. It just means it’s not a great fit, and that’s okay.

I think I’ve gone through probably four or five different accountants in my over two decades of being in business, and I get better and better at picking the right ones because I just — things change, and I realize what I’m looking for. Allissa and I love the accountants that we work with now. They are delightful. And we’ve gotten to that point because we’ve been able to say, you know what, sometimes it’s time to move on and pick someone else that’s a better fit.

So be aware that not all accountants are the same. Some work better with different personality types. And if you’re not jiving and you’re not communicating well with your accountant, it’s okay to change. It’s really, really, really, really, really, really important that you and your accountant communicate really well. That’s my shtick.

AH We actually have a blog post about three red flags that I ignored with my accountant who gave me the bad advice about quarterlies a while back and also just screwed up a bunch of other stuff. It took me, even after all those red flags were raised and I had so much trouble, it still took me like two years to change. And once I did, whole new world, man, whole new world.

MR Yeah. Change is hard. Change is hard.

AH Yeah. So we’ll put a link to that blog post in the notes as well.

So thank you, Michael. You got anything else on this?

MR Just that it’s more affordable than you might think. They’re our sponsors, so I don’t mind giving them a shout out again. Kim and Julie at the Tax Advantage, they have a really nice low-cost package for massage therapists that is super, super affordable. So go back and check out that podcast episode. It’s more affordable than you might think.

AH We’ll link to that in the notes as well. Yeah. That’s everything.

MR Cool. That’s what I got.

AH Thank you, Michael. That was in-depth and really, really helpful.

Everyone, if you have questions about accounting or any part of your massage business or marketing, you can shoot them to us at podcast@massagebusinessblueprint.com. Michael and I both answer those emails, so you will hear from one or both of us should you email us. We love it. We love hearing from you.

And if this podcast helps you run your business, hey, maybe tell a massage therapist friend. Maybe show them on their smartphone how to listen to podcasts and have them subscribe to ours. Otherwise, that’s all we got for you today. We hope you have a super successful day.

MR Thanks, everyone.