Behind The Hustle Andrew Parks
I’m leading with the straight sale, y’all. But I believe in what I’ve written. Skip to the regular sections of the newsletter that you know and love if this opening part isn’t for you.
If you are in the “Launch” phase or the “I’m Stuck” phase of starting your bookkeeping business, and you are someone who likes to read (or who likes to take writing and feed it to Ai and ask Ai to summarize it), you can get The Bookkeeping Side Hustle GuideBook: Actionable Steps To Start Your Virtual Bookkeeping Business Without The Overwhelm for 30% off with the code BACKTOSCHOOL.
This sale is inspired by this email I received this week from someone who has been following Bookkeeping Side Hustle for a year or so. My own story of starting my business and earning my first dollar as an entrepreneur was when my youngest child went to Tuesday/Thursday preschool for the first time. I wanted to be a good steward of my “kid-free” time.
P.L. wrote…
“When I first bought it about a year ago, I found it helpful that you gave a good overview of the world of bookkeeping as it was still a new landscape as a potential business idea. I especially loved hearing your personal story of how you got started, which is also what I love about your “Behind the Hustle” interview series. As useful as it is having all of the strategies in one place, I really appreciate the encouragement and emotional support from your words. My kids just started school today, so I find myself asking the big questions of what I want to do with this time and new season of my life.”
My eBook doesn’t replace a course. It doesn’t replace investing in mentoring.
But it is an affordable way to see the big picture of how bookkeeping as a business can be a viable career. Lucrative, even.
Bookkeeping changed my family’s life. I explain the steps of how that happened in the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Guidebook.
💰 There is a new client onboarding tool on the block called Portico*. They have agreed to be one of the newest advertisers for this newsletter. The first 200 licenses get a lifetime deal. Who is going to take that bet?
From their website 👇:
Forms, documents, e-signatures, payments, reminders, and a branded portal — in one flow, behind one link. Clients complete intake, sign the agreement, and pay in a single session — without stitching four separate tools together.
💰 I saw a discount code on LinkedIn for the Women Who Count Conference in Hilton Head in October. (Sorry guys, this one is targeted to the ladies, though I do think that some men attend this one). The discount is baked into this link. I promise you, even though the code has the name Katie in it, it is not my code and I get no benefit. Just love sharing deals!
Please always send me any news of deals that you hear of that others might benefit from.
Items with a “+” are hosted by me. All these events can be viewed and registered for in the DESCRIPTIONS of each event on the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Calendar.
📅 August 19: XeroCon Showcase Live. If you can’t attend XeroCon in person in Denver, you can at least check out part of it from the comfort of your own home/office. Register for XeroCon Showcase Live where Xero is going to unveil what’s next for Xero.
📅+August 26: Behind The Hustle: Tiffany Kohl. You can watch this live, a replay on YouTube or listen on Spotify once it is posted! Don’t miss these inspiring stories.
📅September 29: Digits Summit. SoCal, listen up! Digits is hosting a free one-day gathering for accounting pros down in San Diego. If you live within a couple of hours of here, why wouldn’t you go check it out. Touch grass. Don’t do business alone. The venue is small–ish, so these tickets are first-come, first-served. Don’t wait.
📅October 19-23: Women Who Count Conference. Check above in the Deals section for a discount. But I’m also proud to share that The Accounting Cornerstone Foundation partnered with this conference to offer scholarships for tickets. For this conference, the scholarship is for the conference registration only (normally our scholarships include transportation and lodging, so I want to be clear that this one doesn’t include that).
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🌶️Facebook finally built a feature where I can prohibit “nicknames” on comments or posts. You can bet your boots I turned on that feature and I explained my reasons why. If you have a valid reason for asking a question in the group while remaining anonymous, you can DM me, and I’ll consider posting it for you.
The only legitimate cause for concern that I believe people should have for posting with a nickname is that they don’t want an employer to see their activity. Otherwise, the group is just made up of other accounting pros, and kick any jerks out of the group immediately. If you really want a bit more privacy though, you have to pay to join smaller paid cohorts. My group is free y’all. But here is a list where you can compare the different coaching programs out there.
🌶️Amber B asked about getting work done on an ipad. Hard no from me. I personally think the only way bookkeepers can make a lucrative living doing technical bookkeeping work is to value price your client and then get very speedy. But you see some folks in this thread talking aout how they use one! And those people don’t sound like crazy people. Sooo…maybe I’m wrong about the tablet.
💪 If you haven’t peeked at Claude Ai yet, you can watch my interview with mega tech nerd expert and wonderful explainer Isaac Perdomo called Your First 60 Minutes with ClaudeAI. He was very gentle with me. Because it was MY first 60 minutes with Claude, too. That’s right. I opened a Claude account about 15 minutes before I went live with him. And a few days later I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription. I know myself, my tendencies, and my emotions about Ai. I am only paying for one of these things. And I’m pretty sure that I’m still going to be just fine, y’all.
💪 Be sure to catch the latest Behind The Hustle podcast: The $14K/Month Solo Accounting Firm: Contractors, AI & Freedom with Andrew Parks. As a young college student he majored in Anthropology and thought he would do overseas mission work. Turns out that didn’t happen, but he got some jobs in the accounting industry instead. Andrew really dove deep into the “Talk about your tech stack question”. He mentioned some tools that I had never heard of! But the most interesting one of all is that he also serves clients who use a software called YNAB (You Need A Budget). Be different, y’all. Be different.
💼Six jobs were added to the Job Guide. If you are an expert with Abacus or Vantaca, you need to check it out!
Don’t forget the standing opps on my Find A Freelance Job article. 1099 and W-2 opps.
Thanks for reading The Bookkeeping Side Hustle Pub! This post is public so feel free to share it.
🎪I’ll tell you why I make a new note in my notes app on my phone at the beginning of every school year.
We just began a new school year. And I’ve got all my normal back-to-school vibes going strong because I loooovveee All Things School. I’m like “Buckle up, kiddos! I’m ready to be super mom! Team Johnson is going to crush this school year. Let’s goooo!”
And since I am so very enthusiastic and involved in my kids’ education (one might say “too involved”), I’ve got no shortage of ideas. You know the kind. “Helpful Ideas”. “Constructive criticism”. “What if the school tried doing that my surely better way”? Those kind of ideas.
So to tame myself and not be that parent that constantly peppers the inboxes of the administrators and teachers, every August when a new school year starts, I start a new section of notes in my notes app on my phone. This is the place where I will capture all my “good ideas” for our school administration. Of course, plenty of those “good ideas” are just minor complaints in disguise. I need to get them off my chest. I know I’ll feel better if I can just write them down somewhere.
So I capture my idea/complaint via talk-to-text in that year’s note, and then submit them all at once at the end of the year when they send out the survey to parents, which always has an open-ended question asking for feedback. By the time that survey comes around though, many of my ideas don’t sound so good anymore or have already been fixed anyway.
I believe that our school administrators and teachers are all doing the best they can at what is quite literally one of the hardest jobs imaginable. Low pay. Limited budgets. Caring for children from hard circumstances. Being in classrooms with middle schoolers who just came from P.E. 👃🤢
They do not need an email from me every time my brain gets going while I am sitting in my nice, air conditioned car while they are out there sweating their butts off directing the car line. Or every time my children might come home with a frown saying something negative about school.
This notes system of mine helps me remember that I’ve made a choice to trust this particular school and that I need to relax and do my best to be as supportive as possible.
Here’s to a great school year for everyone involved!
🎢 So that interview I did with Isaac Perdomo pushed me over the edge to start to dip my toes in to Claude. The professional plan comes with 2 seats automatically, so I told my Digital Operations Assistant that I wanted us to learn this together. I don’t like doing things alone anyway. We plan to work through the built-in training that comes inside the platform. I’m prepared to pay her to learn this with me and am excited at the thought of collaborating on tasks inside an Ai platform with someone.
🎢 Y’all, I scripted, recorded, design thumbnails for, THREE FreshBooks YouTube videos all within one week. I only published one of them. The other two I scheduled to be published over the following two weeks. It felt heroic. These three videos are all moderately related. They all have a slight angle towards getting referral commissions by getting new FreshBooks users to use my accountant referral link to start their FreshBooks account. FreshBooks just recently increased the payout terms of this link to be quite steep. So I felt myself getting a little more motivated than I normally am to make more straightforward affiliate-slinging videos. Overall, I feel good about the words I spoke in these videos, but I am going to constantly remind myself to not be tempted by unethical online sales tactics. It is not worth it.
🎢 The week before school started, a friend reached out and asked if his 16 year old daughter could shadow me. Talk about wind in my sails. People don’t ask their children to shadow professionals that they don’t respect. I was able to host her up at my co-working space for about 5 hours. I treated her to a coffee. She was able to listen as a fly on the wall to 2 client calls. Overall, I just felt so honored thinking “what is happening!?!?! who am I to have high schoolers shadow me?!?!”. Her parents told me later said she had an amazing time and is very interested in the accounting industry now. Or at least doesn’t have a bad impression of it, which apparently she did before her parents made her shadow me.
⚡If you are a parent with school-aged children who finds him/her self with more time on their hands when school starts, maybe you can find out if you are one of those bookkeepers who also loves taxes?!? Two resources to point you to if you want to consider whether you should learn tax.
🎥 Learn about the IRS Volunteer Tax Preparer Program (they start their free trainings in the fall. Don’t wait!)
✉️I hope more you liked the detailed Behind The Hustle titles in the last BSH Pub. And Pauline nails it on the head. Always make sure you are listening to the stories of people actually doing the work you think you want to do.
Kate, THANK YOU for the detailed interview titles. I already see a few I want to go back and listen to. I love the stories of career-changers. What I appreciate the most about theses interviews is that they are showcasing real people, real stories, and not just “fancy influencers.” Pauline Le
Keep hustling!
Kate
-Chief Hustler-
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I am down right rabid about transparency and full disclosure. If a link, including Amazon Links, has a * beside it, it means it is either an affiliate link where I might receive compensation if you make a purchase, at no additional charge to you. Or it could be a tracking link that another business provided me to see how many readers click on that link.
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