Heard during the recent Behind The Hustle live stream with Nicole Beitenman.
“Last October I read your guidebook 3 times on a plane ride to a wedding in New York and by November 1st I had launched Twin Ledgers Bookkeeping.”
Wowzer!
I had no idea she was going to say these things about my Bookkeeping Side Hustle Guidebook.
I am not sure she even knew that I updated the guidebook 3 weeks ago so the current version (version 5.0) has my most up-to-date insights, so it just happens to be a prime time for folks to buy it.
But her mentioning it in that interview inspires me to share it more boldly with y’all newsletter readers. We have to promote ourselves, right? Even though I can still feel a little cringy about it. But I know the guidebook is helpful. Nicole’s encouragement is proof of that.
Bookkeeping entrepreneurship changed the entire course of my family’s life. I wrote the guidebook because it might change yours, too.
The book is meant to guide folks to the starting point. It will not be the resource you need to get all the way where you want to go. It helps you see the big picture. Helps you know what to expect. Helps you to understand what is possible.
In the book I also explain to readers that this type of business is NOT for everyone. But wouldn’t you rather know that before you get very far down the path? It will save you months/years of heartache if you really should be pursuing a different career path.
If you are already neck-deep in your bookkeeping business, then this book might not be the resource you need (you might need my Bookkeeping Course Comparison Chart instead if you realize you need to invest in formal training/coaching).
But you might have a smart and hard working friend who is miserable in their current job. You could get them a copy and then offer to take them to lunch after they have read it so you could help them process it and help hold them accountable to do the steps.
Thanks to Hector Garcia for writing the foreword to the book and believing in what I’m trying to do. I am forever grateful for his support and encouragement.
Related to guiding you 😁, some of the saddest cases I deal with are businesses using FreshBooks when they should not be. If you need someone to guide you if you are considering serving clients in FreshBooks, you are also invited to my “Should You Convert Clients To FreshBooks” webinar this Thursday (replay will be available). The webinar registration also includes two additional 1-hour support sessions in 2025 to support folks who are working on their new FreshBooks client accounts.
Last edition was the hot Black Friday sales roundup. So special deals are a little out-of-vogue this week. I’ll share some evergreen discounts I’ve gotten for this group.
💰 Take 10% off your entire order of sarcastic accounting swag from TB4A* with code HUSTLE. Just in time for Christmas!
💰 RightTool* - HUSTLE30 for 30% off for the first year of the Pro version
💰Serena Shoup, The Ambitious Bookkeeper*, gives 10% off her resources with code KATE.
💰 Akadian Accounting Education* offers 15% off with code HUSTLE15.
💰 Josh Stadley’s S-Corp Essentials Bundle and other resources related to S-Corps and Accountable Plans* have built-in discounts at this landing page for our community.
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.
📅 December 11: Velocity Annual Planning Retreat* If you’re a bookkeeper or accountant who needs a strategic plan for 2026, consider this your official invite to Velocity, Justine Lackey’s half-day (FREE!) virtual planning retreat. You will leave feeling grounded and organized and gain real momentum. Register for Velocity today.
📅+ December 11: “Should You Convert Clients To FreshBooks” webinar
📅+ December 18: Behind The Hustle: Travis Thompson. If you are needing some inspiration to get your biz going - the Behind the Hustle series is for you! Travis will share how he got started and what he is doing to keep going. Watch them all HERE.
📅+ December 22: Behind The Hustle: Melissa Harman. Melissa will be the last Behind The Hustle interview of the year. Be sure to subscribe to the YT channel so you don’t miss it.
📅 May 4-6: GrowCon in Utah. THE Conference EXCLUSIVELY for OWNERS of Bookkeeping, Tax & Accounting Companies.
📅 May15: Wave-Seattle. See what happens when Erin Pohan bring together a community of forward-thinking women in accounting and finance who are shaping the future of our industry.
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🌶️ Travis T. was vulnerable about losing a client when the client took on an investor and teh investor forced their own accountant on the business. This was his first ever client to lose.
🌶️ Melissa P asked for advice when it comes to hiring admin help.
🌶️ Cindy H. saw an ad about a company that can do a year’s clean up in 24 hours and she wonders what tools are being used.
💪 The latest Behind The Hustle with Nicole Beitenman has some interesting takeaways. Hers is the smallest (revenue-wise) business I have interviewed, but her business is only one year old and she has 2-year old twins (that means she started when they were 1-years old, people! No excuses!!!).
When you listen to this, you can just tell that she is someone whose main priority is building a life of her dreams. Building a successful bookkeeping business is more of a means to an end for someone like her. It is not something she has always wanted to do.
Her tech-stack is the scrappiest of all the folks we have interviewed so far. Extremely low-key. Basically just Google Workspace for operations, Square for payments, LinkedIn for marketing, and she prefers to work in Xero.
💪 I was a guest on The Millionaire University podcast for the 2nd time. I love sharing my story about how I am building my firm and how bookkeeping changed my family’s life.
💪 We board members of The Accounting Cornerstone Foundation just placed our votes for the 4 accounting conferences we plan to give scholarships for in 2026. We used a Google sheet to vote. We are very fancy over at ACF. 💎
If you want to make sure you find out which conferences we are doing and when the scholarship application deadline is, you need to be subscribed to this newsletter and read it (it only comes out every other Saturday, y’all…I am not a spammer or trying to do email marketing with your email address). We will announce them in early 2026.
Why don’t you comment on this newsletter on Substack (🙏) and list what conferences you hope we pick! Perhaps you could sway me to go back into the Google sheet and change my vote.
💼 3 jobs were added to the BSH Job Guide!
Don’t forget the standing opps on my Find A Freelance Job article. 1099 and W-2 opps.
🎪We have a family fairy that lives with us. She moved in the day our daughter was born.
Her name is Lucinda. 🧚
Sadly, she keeps herself a little scarce these days, but she did come with us to family Thanksgiving, and I was able to regale one of my little 4-year-old cousins with many memories of things Lucinda did when my kids were younger.
Lucinda would fly to the mountains before our ski trips and sprinkle fairy dust so the snow would be extra shiny and sparkly. She always needed fairy hot chocolate (made by melting a Hershey Kiss) to warm up after an adventure like that.
When she met a dog who had its tail docked, she always felt a little sad for them. So she would tell the dog to run as fast as it could and she would grab on to their little nubbin so they could feel what it was like to run with a (fairy) tail.
Sometimes she would stow herself away in my husband’s helmet bag and go flying with him in his jet. Since he is a single-seat pilot, he usually appreciated her company, but he did not appreciate her jokes about pulling the ejection seat handle or how she teased him for not having his own real wings.
She knows the importance of hard work and earning a living, so during the summers, she taught other fairies’ children how to swim. It paid very well. Many fairy families would bring all their children through her swim school, and she was a big fan of calculating the lifetime value of her customers. She used part of her earnings to give my kids two shiny quarters whenever they lost a tooth.
She loved to sit on the basketball rim and keep mommy’s shots from sinking. “Lucinda, quit blocking my shots! That is cheating!”
Her doctor’s office was high up in a branch of a very beautiful Japanese maple tree growing in our neighbor’s front yard. She had to visit the doctor’s office a lot because she was often getting injured and occasionally sick from bad choices.
Speaking of bad choices, one year we found her cradling her belly and moaning inside the bag of the giant haul of Halloween candy. She ate way more candy than anyone should ever eat at one time. “Consequences, Lucinda. Natural consequences.” Good thing her doctor was just down the street in that tree.
There are so many fairies out there who would love to move in with your family.
Though maybe your family already has a dragon. Or a friendly troll. Or a misunderstood mutant spider.
You will know when you have reached peak reality when someone in your house blames [Lucinda] for the spilled milk or the broken Christmas ornament.
But whatever you do, do not ask AI what imaginary character lives with your family or what said creature does for mischief or virtue.
Do not cede your brain or the brains of young people you love to the computer chips!
🎢 Last week I did something HUGE that took a lot of brain power! My friend Mariette Martinez asked if I would do a demo of a full year of bookkeeping in FreshBooks so I built a fake credit card and fake checking account for import and came up with a script to know exactly what order I wanted to go in.
I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a long time.
It was so good! I am so proud myself. Every once in a while it feels good to confirm that my brain can still run at max capacity.
Watch the replay on Mariette’s YouTube channel.
🎢 Y’all, I accepted a job as a softball coach to start up a middle school team at our school! Gah! What am I thinking?!?! I had to work pretty hard on my husband to get him to agree that this was something we could add to our lives. I assured him that our lives would not fall apart. Hopefully I can keep the promise!
I am grateful that my business doesn’t really have a busy season during the spring that might prevent me from carving out the time to do this.
🎢 Looking at my payments dashboard, it appears that I will bill ~$116k revenue for client work in 2025 (no affiliate income, no Bookkeeping Side Hustle income, just payments from clients for real bookkeeping work in FreshBooks).
You decide if that sounds like a lot of money based on all you know about how I run my firm.
Now I have to ask myself, do I want to get more client work in the last 3 weeks of the year to make my firm’s annual revenue higher? I am torn! Which I realize is such an incredibly privileged thing to say. But I am scheduled to substitute teach 2 days in December and am hoping to have my name drawn to chaperone the 5th grade field trip next week. And I don’t have Christmas lights on my house yet. So maybe I am at enough for the year? I am at least going to be picky. I know that.
⚡There are not many significant changes to the 1099 situation between 2024 and 2025 (though it looks like there will be some slated for a year from now, so be on guard for that). So, to save everybody some time you can listen to my interview with the payroll Queen Shannon Ballman Theis from last year to start preparing for January 1099 issuance.
✉️ Didn’t mean to make Elizabeth stress waiting for the last newsletter, but I’m glad she loves to read it. And that other comment made me 😊
I love reading it. Very valuable information IMO. And perfect for reading with my coffee!!! Elizabeth M.
Doing God’s work over here!! Thank youuuu!!! Serena S.
Keep hustling!
Kate
-Chief Hustler-
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