Issue #52 - It’s Time for a Summer Glow-Up
Of your firm’s workflows, that is. Here’s where to start. ✨
Welcome to “Get Work Done,” where we discuss the complexities of efficiently running accounting and bookkeeping firms. This newsletter is brought to you by Financial Cents and delivered to your inbox every 2 weeks.
Small Change, Big Results
Workflows not, well, working? It’s more common than you think, even if you put a lot of time and thought into designing them the first time around.
The truth is, your firm’s workflows will always be a work in progress. And summer is the perfect season to focus on refreshing and improving them.
But for most of us, when we * finally * block off time to fix our processes, we beeline straight for the biggest, ugliest one in the pile—the “franken-flow” with dozens of steps and a whole roll of duct tape holding it all together. Kellie Parks, CPB, says that’s the wrong approach.
In the second session of our month-long Summer Workflow Camp, Kellie (owner of Calmwaters Cloud Accounting and a self-described “relentless organizer”) walked campers through her formula for an effective workflow reset. Rule numero uno? Start with the minnows, not the marlins.
“It’s nice to get into a cadence or a rhythm and see what works for you with some of the smaller ones before you really pick off some of those huge ones,” she said. Impact, not size, is what should drive your priority list. When deciding what to rebuild first, Kellie asks herself three questions:
Does it give someone freedom? (That includes firm owners, by the way. If a workflow lets you and your team stop doing work you don’t want to be doing, it’s a great candidate.)
Does it create a great client experience? (Kellie’s file-review workflow, for example, is often a new client’s first touchpoint with her firm—so it has to feel seamless.)
Is it critical even if it’s simple? (Kellie illustrated this point with a non-accounting example: the one-page SOP she wrote for locking the front gate in her community. It’s not complicated, but it removed her as the bottleneck.)
The bigger lesson running underneath all of this is that a good workflow is never truly finished.
“I built this thing years ago, and I have been honing it ever since,” Kellie said of the onboarding workflow she walked through during the live session. “You will never be done honing.” So, don’t wait for perfect. Build for today, test it in the wild, plug the holes as real clients surface them, and run it back again.
👉 Read the full “Workflow Reset” recap →
And if this has you itching to dig into your own workflows, camp isn’t over yet. The finale, “The Send-Off,” is happening next Tuesday, July 28. It’s the last session of the series, it’s free, and we have some super-fun surprises in store for live attendees!
👉 Save your spot for the Summer Workflow Camp finale →
Community 🫶
Find your peeps in the Bookkeepers Helping Bookkeepers group
Running a firm can feel lonely, but it doesn’t have to. Bookkeepers Helping Bookkeepers (BHB) is exactly what it sounds like: a no-ego Facebook group where you can ask the “is this a dumb question?” questions and get real answers from people who’ve been there. It’s hosted by the team at Bookkeeper Testing, who are on a mission to raise the bar for the profession through education.
Stay on top of tax changes with NATP
If you do tax work, then the National Association of Tax Professionals (NATP) should definitely be on your radar. As the tax code keeps shifting under your feet, they’ve got your back with professional advocacy, expert guidance on applying the latest federal rules to your clients’ situations, and a community of tax pros to grow alongside. They just wrapped Taxposium, their flagship conference, and next year’s event is already on the calendar for June 21–23, 2027, at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston (registration opens this fall).
H🔥t Today
50,000 pennies for your thoughts? Take our quick AI survey to win $500
Everyone’s talking about AI in accounting, but we want to know how it’s actually showing up in your day-to-day: where it’s saving you time, where it’s falling flat, and where you think it’s all headed. Your answers get distilled into a public data report that will shape the next issue of Two Cents Magazine. It takes 10–15 minutes, and if you complete it by July 31, you can enter our drawing for a $500 gift card. 💸
The IRS just put a target on your back (but they gave you a shield, too)
On July 7, the IRS and its Security Summit partners kicked off the 2026 “Protect Your Clients; Protect Yourself” campaign, a five-week series aimed at tax pros. Why the urgency? Firms are prime targets right now, with malware-laden “new client” spear-phishing emails and scammers hunting for your EFIN, PTIN, and CAF numbers. The series walks through phishing defense, building a Written Information Security Plan (which you’re required to have), and vetted tools that can help.
Why wait times for the IRS phone line feel so out of control
A June TIGTA report put hard numbers on something you’ve probably felt: IRS Taxpayer Services lost more than 11,300 employees, and the agency had to involuntarily reassign nearly 1,200 workers just to get through the 2026 filing season. Translation for your firm: when a client’s notice requires speaking to a human at the IRS, expect delays (and set expectations accordingly). Otherwise, you might be fielding a lot of “why is this taking so long?” emails.
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Relatable? 😆
Firm Spotl💡ght
How Alisa McCabe grew First Steps Financial 20–40% a year by cutting her client list in half
A few years ago, Alisa McCabe started breaking up with clients, and her team thought she’d completely lost it. “We can’t get rid of clients,” they told her. But Alisa had a theory borrowed from Mike Michalowicz’s The Pumpkin Plan: prune the vine, and the core grows bigger.
So, she trimmed her roster from nearly 100 down to 41, all while growing the firm 20–40% year over year. Today, First Steps Financial is an 11-person, fully remote firm serving clients across the US, Canada, and the UK, built around three niches (including a unique focus on women in life sciences) and one non-negotiable bar: every client has to be growth-minded, collaborative, and treat the work as a partnership. Fewer clients and more annual revenue? It might sound paradoxical until you read the whole story, which you can do below! 👇
Check out Alisa’s full story in Two Cents Magazine →
Events
📍 Summer Workflow Camp: The Send-Off — Camp Talent Show + Stress Test Finals — July 28 (Virtual, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)
Summer Workflow Camp wraps this Tuesday with our most fun session yet: a talent show and a live stress test of the workflows campers have been building all month. It’s free, it’s the series finale, and it’s the perfect way to put everything you’ve learned this month into practice. Whether you show off your workflow or not, come cheer on your peers, get inspired, and help us close out camp with a bang.
📍 IRS Nationwide Tax Forum — August 4–6 (New Orleans, LA)
Three days, 40+ seminars, and the latest on federal tax law, IRS procedures, and emerging issues (plus, continuing education credits). If you’ll be in NOLA, come say hi to our crew: Financial Cents will be repping at booth 258. 👋 Stop by to see how firms are cutting the busywork out of their daily operations.
👉 Learn more →
Noteworthy
The month-end close problem every bookkeeping firm has (and how to solve it for good)
Picture this: It’s the fifth business day of the month, and you’re staring at a $4,200 charge to a vendor nobody recognizes. So you export the transactions, start another spreadsheet tab, fire off another email, and wait. It’s not really hard, but that’s why it’s dangerous.
Month-end close is death by a thousand small tasks, and without an automated system, firms burn roughly two hours per client, per month on it. For a 100-client firm at $70/hour, that’s six figures a year in billable capacity you’re giving away. This article lays out the five most common places the close actually breaks down: uncategorized transactions, missing details, the annual 1099 scramble, reconciliation with no audit trail, and questions buried in your inbox. Then, it shows you how Month-End Close in Financial Cents fixes every single one. (By the way, if you tried the Month-End Close feature early on and it didn’t cover your process yet, it’s definitely worth another look: 14 releases have shipped in seven months. 👀)
That’s all for now. See you in two weeks. 💚