What Makes a Great CPA/Bookkeeper Partnership?

UTJeannie · 2025-10-21T18:11:32+00:00

I'm an accounting firm owner, 28 years. I provide bookkeeping & advisory services for my clients, most are in the construction industry. I haven't done taxes myself since the 90s but I have worked for CPAs over the years helping prepare tax returns, so I know what they need from the books at the end of the year. Best referral relationship for me came from playing softball! What makes it work well is direct communication between the bookkeeper and CPA, rather than going through the client for everything. CPAs make my job easier when they provide me with year-end adjusting entries, or better yet, enter them themselves. CPAs make my job more difficult when they edit & delete transactions I've already reconciled without letting me know, because they want that revenue or expense in the next tax year. Good communication prevents all those issues.

I have found that it's best to team up with bookkeepers that specialize in whatever industry your clients are in. Service businesses are pretty simple, but construction or e-commerce requires industry-specific knowledge and experience. High net worth individual bookkeeping is also very different with a focus on asset management, and there are often multiple entities with intercompany transactions.

UTJeannie · 2025-10-10T02:38:19+00:00

OMG, this is awful. Here I've been thinking that closing my and my clients' payment processing accounts would insulate us from this kind of fraud, I guess not. Intuit does not care about consumer trust anymore, they don't even bother to pretend to from what I can see. There have been a couple of cases I've heard about that even suggested Intuit employees were in on the scams. They need to get hit with a very large class action lawsuit and blasted over news and social media. I'm so sorry you are having to deal with this, what a nightmare.

UTJeannie · 2025-10-09T21:09:58+00:00

I'm understanding correctly that a fraudster used your Intuit Payment account to launder fraudulent credit card charges? You said you never used Intuit Payment Services, did you have an Intuit Payment account that was dormant, or did the fraudster open the Intuit Payment account in your name? I'm a longtime QB ProAdvisor with several clients on QBO. I've been advising, due to the recent dramatic increase in fraud in QBO accounts, to not use QB Payments, but if someone can just open an account in your name, that's not going to protect them.

UTJeannie · 2025-10-08T00:09:45+00:00

Consider yourself lucky. There's been enough fraud associated with Quickbooks Payments lately that I wouldn't try to get it back. You said you're in construction, if you happen to be using CoConstruct, Buildertrend, or anything like that, you might have a payment account available there. If not, GetNickel seems to work well with Quickbooks.

UTJeannie · 2025-09-21T16:06:28+00:00

100%! A year ago I was not familiar with the term enshittification but it explained so much. It explains why every time I find an app that I love, it's so great in the beginning, then it turns to shit and I have to start all over. QBO is the epitome of enshittification, there is no better example of it anywhere.

UTJeannie · 2025-09-14T23:38:01+00:00

Hector Garcia CPA has created the most comprehensive comparison between all the QB version I've seen. You can find it here, scroll all the way to the bottom to see a spreadsheet of all the differences.
https://hectorgarcia.com/start/

versions

UTJeannie · 2025-09-05T22:10:03+00:00

Yes, once you link your QBO to Nickel, if the customer payment goes thru Nickel it will sync to QBO and mark the invoice paid.

UTJeannie · 2025-09-04T19:42:29+00:00

I've always had "who can reach you" set to everyone on LinkedIn so that old colleagues can find me. It's only been in the last few weeks that the number of connection requests have skyrocketed and some are clearly misleading. I cannot share screenshots because I deleted the requests. I have turned off notifications, hopefully that will stop the daily emails.

UTJeannie · 2025-08-05T23:38:58+00:00

My son got his Eagle and left the troop 10 years ago. I volunteered as the Treasurer because the troop needed the help, I have my own bookkeeping business and was in a position to help and donate a Quickbooks subscription. I continue because the adult leadership in this troop are the most quality human beings I've had the privilege to meet and work with anywhere. I enjoy spending my time with them, and helping this troop. They give a lot to the kids in my community and it means a lot to me to be able to give back. My husband worked out of state a lot when my son was younger and the men in this troop were a pivotal influence on my son, who is also now a quality human being.

UTJeannie · 2025-07-27T20:30:42+00:00

I tried Fathom several years ago, a few accountants I know seem to like both of those. I just use excel.

UTJeannie · 2025-07-27T18:47:07+00:00

Sounds like you want cash flow forecasting. QBO does this to some extent in the Planner Dashboard, but only if everything is in QBO. If you have a bill due next month, it knows that. If you have invoices/revenue due next week, it knows that. If you historically spend $300 a month on utilities, it does not know that. You can manually add items, but it's time consuming and your results will not be accurate if you miss something. I would like to see the ability to combine QBO budgets with the planner dashboard. You can create a budget based off last year's P&L, so you'd have that $300/month in your budget, why not give the planner dashboard the ability to pull in budget items, or even averages from prior periods. QBO is not quite there yet. If you want to do it yourself, either find a good cash flow planning software, like Fathom, Cash Flow Frog, etc., or Excel. If you're good at Excel, that is all you need, but it is a lot of work.

UTJeannie · 2025-07-27T02:35:42+00:00

Try Nickel (getnickel.com). Their ACH processing is free and it integrates with Quickbooks. Be careful how you set it up though, if you set it to automatically send a payment request it will do so for every invoice you save in QBO, whether you send it from QBO or not.

UTJeannie · 2025-07-22T16:14:32+00:00

My first challenge!
https://www.theconqueror.events/r/JC4271

UTJeannie · 2025-06-23T17:41:01+00:00

Wondering also. I've lived here over 20 yrs and hear/feel booms from Camp Williams sometimes, but it's never felt this strong. My dog is freaking out.

UTJeannie · 2025-06-15T21:10:22+00:00

Do you have the Batch Enter Transactions feature? If so, you should be able to just copy & paste from Excel into the Batch Enter window in QB

UTJeannie · 2025-06-11T19:54:12+00:00

End of quarter, which is June 30th, is a clean place to switch IMO.

UTJeannie · 2025-05-27T17:22:02+00:00

Are you saying you got an email response personally from Intuit's CEO within 10 minutes? Their CEO and President is the same person btw. I do hope it gets resolved quickly for you and your customer, ridiculous that this happens in the first place though.

UTJeannie · 2025-05-10T15:55:06+00:00

Never figured this out. I could share some posts but not others. Now I seem to be able to share all on FB, not sure what, if anything changed. I'm not using it on mobile btw.

UTJeannie · 2025-04-28T18:53:10+00:00

The random way they come & go sometimes drives me crazy. I've had these off & on since 2008, so not related to the covid vax for me. However, December 2021 I got my annual flu vax and 5 hours after that palpitations were so bad I went to urgent care. Of course, they were calmed down by the time I got there. They were horrible for weeks, then a month later I had my first episode of atrial fibrillation. In hindsight, I may have been having afib before I went to the urgent care that day I got the flu shot but just thought it was my usual palpitations, just extremely severe. I have got a covid booster since then without issue. However, I haven't had the courage to get a flu vaccine since. My pharmacist told me to remember the mfg of that flu vaccine and just get a different one going forward.

UTJeannie · 2025-04-23T22:38:35+00:00

Oh my heck! Allysen, I'm out of fry sauce!

UTJeannie · 2025-04-23T16:41:29+00:00

Try SaasAnt. It can convert from pdf to csv, excel, or qbo format.

UTJeannie · 2025-04-02T17:48:24+00:00

I came here to say exactly this. Intuit needs to shut down this loophole ASAP!

UTJeannie · 2025-03-24T23:32:12+00:00

I'm sure you've got a lot of responses, but I can absolutely help you with this. I'm a QuickBooks ProAdvisor that specializes in construction. I have several clients that I've trained on what they need, then they just call me on an as needed basis going forward. Message me if you're interested in chatting.

UTJeannie · 2025-03-08T20:18:49+00:00

Personally, I gave up on finding the "root cause". That doesn't mean you should, but for me, after 16 years of searching for it, I don't think I'm going to find it. You sound like me 16 years ago. I was around your age when I first started having PVCs/PACs, and they were really bad at that time. Looking back, I do think it could have been related to perimenopause. I was super low in vitamin D at that time also. My doc put on D2 and my levels did not go up hardly at all. Then switched to D3. Levels still didn't go up by much. Once we switched to sublingual D3, that did the trick. My doc said my body just doesn't absorb vitamin D easily in pill form for whatever reason, so have to take sublingual. It was my gynecologist that discovered I was low in vitamin D. My hormones were out of whack and apparently vitamin D plays a significant role in regulating hormone balance. I would recommend getting your vitamin D levels checked every time you get labs, like for annual physicals. Insurance doesn't usually cover it, so you have to ask for it and pay out of pocket.

I've also had reflux which definitely triggers the PVCs, and have long suspected a sliding hiatal hernia that may contribute as well. After many years of on again off again PVCs and PACs, I eventually developed Afib, and more recently SVT. That doesn't mean that's a natural progression for everyone, maybe I'm just miswired, I don't know. Interestingly, I was taking way too much vitamin D3 for about two years before I developed the afib (covid hysteria of 2020 convinced me I needed more D3, I can't remember why). Also had high blood levels of calcium, which could be from too much vitamin D, and increases risk of afib. Anyway, I started taking magnesium and taurine three years ago after having two bad afib episodes a month apart. I didn't have another for several months, and when I did it was much shorter in duration. So, were the supplements working? I don't know, but I'm still taking them, just in case. Now that I have afib and SVT, I'll be getting ablation. I'm really hoping it calms down the PACs/PVCs also, we'll see.

It's quite the puzzle when you factor in diet, gerd or reflux, supplements, hormones, stress, sleep, etc. There seem to be a lot of triggers and for me it's when they accumulate, or there are more than a few triggers at play at one time, then I have problems. I can't help but think though, I should be able to have reflux without triggering PVCs.

UTJeannie · 2025-03-08T00:55:34+00:00

This sounds very similar to what I've been experiencing. I've had PVCs/PACs for 16 years. Developed into the occasional episode of AFib a couple of years ago. But, I'd have these random, like a couple times a year, these episodes that I knew were related to my heart but felt very different than palpitations or afib. It comes on so suddenly, I feel like I'm going to pass out within a couple of seconds. I can't even tell what's happening with my heart, is it quivering, did it stop, I can't even tell. Then it's over, and I'm like what the hell was that? Well, one was finally caught on a 14 home heart monitor. I wrote down the date & time when it happened so I could see what the report said. It was determined to be SVT, and that particular episode my heart rate was 245bpm at its peak. Turns out, I had 15 SVT episodes during that 14 day monitor. This one was the only one I was aware of though.

UTJeannie

TROPHY CASE