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Stay vigilant, my friends.

I was recently targeted by a scammer that I thought was a legitimate prospective client.

I made a short 4-minute video about my experience, so that you don’t become a victim of this. And I explain a tiny trick you can use to always avoid this sort of thing (btw, this trick also helps you check and see if anyone shares a link that is a referral link for them but they didn’t disclose it and you have to wonder “hmmm…I wonder how much commissions are playing into their recommendation…gross”).

Ultimately this criminal’s trick was to try to get me to click on a bogus Microsoft Teams meeting link.

Bookkeepers are such a good target for scammers because we deal with money stuff. Here is a list of some other scams we should all be aware of. Please chime in with others that you know about.

Never get excited about the “payroll inquiry” from a “movie studio” for you to manage their payroll of “all the people on the set”.
Never help someone pay their bills outside of a real bill pay system in which they are the ones putting in their own bank account info.
Wire transfers should never ever be urgent.
Never ever update an employee’s direct deposit bank account information in the payroll software.
Zero, I mean ZERO, legitimate clients are going to email you and “attach all their documents in their own secure platform so you can do their tax return and they’ll pay you later.”
QuickBooks/Intuit is not going to send you alarming emails saying “You (or your client) needs to update your bank info to keep receiving payments.”
No rich dad is helping his children start a business and wants to pay you an exorbitant amount of money for you to train them about accounting.
- Thanks to Justin W for reminding me about this one, which I have received. And got a little excited and hopeful about, because I’m a great technical trainer, after all. I actually responded to that scammer person to set up a meeting. The shame! 🫣

But let’s take this conversation even further…

Megan Tarnow, a good friend and mentor of mine in our industry, gently commented on my video to point out that there were other red flags in my story even before this skeezball sent me the harmful link.

How did I let myself get so far into my communication with the guy (see the video for how many emails we exchanged)?

Well, perhaps it is because I’m not having the best time in my firm right now. If y’all have been following the Kate Builds In Public section of these newsletters the last couple of months, y’all will know that I’ve lost some clients and my pipeline is much drier than I’d like it to be.

And that reminded me that most humans are going be more susceptible to being taken advantage of when they are in their most desperate times.

Megan said it best…

Kate, when we’re hungry, we’re a lot more vulnerable. To scammers, and to just settling for clients who aren’t a good fit.

To be clear, these are 100% not desperate times for my family’s personal finances. We’ve not even ever experienced anything like that.

And things are not even that desperate in my firm. Things are fine. I’m just not where I hoped I’d be at the end of Q2.

But if I was truly experiencing financial hardship how much farther would I have gone with this guy, hoping he would become a paying client? He probably saw me as a pretty delicious piece of prey, based on how I was engaging back and forth over email.

Thankfully, I’m just experiencing the hardship of wounded pride. The hardship of wanting my firm to be more successful than it is. The hardship of privately thinking “what if my business is just, well, sorta “meh””.

So, stay vigilant with me, friends!

Don’t let any hardships or disappointments you are facing cloud your judgement. Hopefully my personal scammer story will refresh your resolve to be wise to these common scams out there.

And for sure embrace that right click on your mouse, as I explain in the video. Right click is your friend.

And I would love it if every one of you embraced the LEFT mouse click and clicked on this ad about the Accounting Cornerstone Foundation. It is 100% not a scam. It is a non-profit that I co-founded a few years ago that exists to provide scholarships to accounting professionals to attend their very first accounting conference.

It is legit. And it is changing lives. Because attending in-person conferences with your peers is truly life changing for a business owner. The more money we raise, the more scholarships we can give.

Clickety-click! Thank you!

Deals Deals Deals

💰 The QuickBooks Online Hands On Training by Alicia Katz Pollock (QuickBooks ProAdvisor 2026 Educator of the Year) is on sale. Price reduction baked into this link*.

💰 There are 6 different one-day accounting conferences called Advisory Amplified. See if they are coming to a city near you. And if you buy 2 tickets, you get 25% off. It is supposed to be for you to bring your team members, but if you teamed up with someone else, one of y’all could buy 2 and then split that savings between y’all both.

Please always send me any news of deals that you hear of that others might benefit from.

Be There or Be Square

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 4 - Oct 22: Updated dates for the QuickBooks Online Hands On Training*: This course is put on by the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Educator of the Year, y’all. She had too many people tell her they were on vacation in July, or that they couldn’t swing the cost. So they fixed both of those problems. Click here to see slightly later dates and noticeably reduced pricing*.

📅 +July 29: Alternative Compensation Models for Bookkeeping: Round 2. Stephanie Manley will be sharing the unusual way she compensates her staff bookkeepers.

📅 +July 30: Behind The Hustle: Catherine Bonds Pabon. Watch live on YouTube.

Subscribe to the YouTube Channel

Featured Posts

🌶️ To delete or not delete Bank Rules when you break up with a client. That is the question.

🌶️I’m grateful to this post where Cindy Schroeder mentioned to the Facebook group that I had a birthday and that it would tickle me pink if y’all made a donation to The Accounting Cornerstone Foundation (the non-profit I co-founded that exists to give scholarships to send accounting pros to their very first accounting conference).

Help You Hustle

💪 Embrace the mouse. Embrace the right click. Take 4 minutes to learn about how you can easily take a peek behind a clickable link to learn what is the TRUE internet address of any link that someone has sent you.

💪 Latest Behind The Hustle Episode: Bookkeeping Mistakes That Keep You Working at 2 A.M. (And How to Avoid Them) with Hope Brown

Listen on YouTube
Listen on Spotify

💪 Replay of the Rescue My Bookkeeping Business Haltime Reset*. Watch the 90-minute live working session where Stephanie Manley helps you audit your year, find your non-negotiable WHY, & build a real plan for the second half of 2026. She invites you to come ready to think and leave with clarity. Is Stephanie Manley of Rescue My Bookkeeping Business the coach you need in your life?

💪 Akadian Accounting Education is launching a non-profit bookkeeping course. Check it out if you want to learn non-profit bookkeeping*.

Thanks for reading The Bookkeeping Side Hustle Pub! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Jobs

💼 A few jobs were added to the Job Guide - Anyone in the DFW or Nashua, NH area? Jobs in both areas were added.

If you are hiring, please feel free to post your job description so we can share it here in this list.

My Family Circus (44F, 40M, 14M, 13F, 12M)

🎪 Level up your “take-them-a-meal” signups

Our neighbors received some devastating health news recently and someone created a meal sign up for them.

I selected an available date. I did a loaded baked potato bar with a big helping of pulled pork that would have provided additional leftovers for several more meals. But I also used some of the bacon I cooked for the baked potato fixings to throw into a quiche for breakfast.

I am not bragging about my cooking or my hospitality. I am not gifted at either of those skills.

But I have adopted “take them breakfast, too” as a part of my meal delivery strategy (not 100% of the time, but pretty close).

The quiche was just a frozen pie crust, 7 eggs, splash of milk, handful of whatever shredded cheese I had in the fridge, crushed up cooked bacon, green onions because I had some in the crisper, salt, and pepper. Covered in foil and baked low and slow.

And this particular act of hospitality was something I just copied from one of the most memorable kindnesses that is seared in my memory.

A nice woman named Marty Finch brought me a meal after I had my first baby and was neck deep in “new mom overwhelm” mode. And she included saran wrapped frozen squares of a breakfast casserole.

I received a few dinners from other members of our church in Virginia Beach, but these bonus breakfast items are the only food I specifically remember.

Because anyone going through a difficult life event requiring a meal train doesn’t just need dinner. They need breakfast, too.

Anyone have any great, re-heatable breakfast ideas besides quiche?

Kate Builds In Public

🎢 After a big lull in my business for most of June this past week I was back to having what consider a “full” training schedule for the 1-on-1 training that I do for FreshBooks users. Felt good. “Ya know, Kate, by golly, when you are at your desk to work and have an open calendar, it makes logical sense that you would have more opportunities to make money. Most people need to go to work to make a living”. Shocker! I am “most people”.

🎢 I need to tell you something that happened in June. I lost 2 of my monthly recurring bookkeeping clients. And if you follow my tea-spilling about building my business that I do here in the Kate Builds In Public section of this newsletter, you probably know that I don’t even have a lot of monthly recurring clients. That is partly because I don’t want a lot. But boy, when you lose 2 in a month, all of a sudden I’m super thirsty to onboard some new ones.

🎢 Thankfully one recurring client did come to me asking for an increase in scope, so I’m able to increase his price. But not anything close to the monthly revenue that I lost.

From The Vault

⚡Does in-person networking intimidate you? Not sure how to get yourself out there and meet people? Erin Pohan shared how she grew her business with in person networking. Watch it HERE.

Letters To The Editor

✉️ A LinkedIn comment from our most recent guest on the Behind The Hustle series, Hope Brown:

I’m still a little amazed that I went from listening to your podcast as a brand-new bookkeeper to having this conversation with you. Thank you for always being so generous with your time and for continuing to lift others up in this profession.

✉️ La Trice shared her thoughts on the last Bookkeeping Side Hustle pub.

Awesome read and lots of gems!!! Thanks!

Classifieds (Clickable)

Keep hustling!

Kate

-Chief Hustler-

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