Messy finances and how to avoid them, with Jennifer Yousem

When your financial records are not accurate or organized,  it can lead to poor decisions, financial problems, and stunted growth.

So how do you keep your books clean? What should you look for in a bookkeeper and accountant? And how do you make sure that your financial records are accurate and up to date?  

In this episode, Jennifer Yousem and I talk all about the challenges of messy accounting for small businesses. We break down why this is so common, even in this day and age of accounting software and tools, and its true impact on the health of your business. She also shares tips for maintaining clean books to support your company’s growth.

Jennifer Yousem is a Fractional CFO who started her career in equity research. She pivoted into corporate finance for enterprise media and advertising companies and led teams in strategic and operational finance at Sony, Paramount, Clear Channel & Daily Mail. She was part of the team tasked with launching Verizon Hearst Media Partners and as their CFO, helped lead the merger with Complex to form Complex Networks, a multi-platform digital lifestyle brand owned by Verizon and Hearst. 

We discuss: (timestamps) 

03:06  Discovering messy books

04:50 Common issues with messy books

11:09  Differences between revenue, profit, and cash

16:10 Hiring a qualified bookkeeper

19:49 Tips on weeding out the wrong people in your team

28:05 Optimal month-end closing process

35:17  Actionable steps to take to keep your books organized and accurate

Resources:

Jennifer Yousem, Fractional CFO, I Love EBITDA
https://iheartebitda.com/

LinkedIn:
 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferyousem

Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/yousem/?hl=en

Kathy Svetina, Fractional CFO:
https://www.newcastlefinance.us/

Blog post | Messy Finances and How to Avoid Them
https://www.newcastlefinance.us/listen/messy-finances-and-how-to-avoid-them/

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Chapters

• 3:06 Discovering messy books
• 4:50 Common issues with messy books
• 12:22 Differences between revenue, profit, and cash
• 17:23 Hiring a qualified bookkeeper
• 21:02 Tips on weeding out the wrong people in your team
• 29:18 Optimal month-end closing process
• 36:30 Actionable steps to take to keep your books organized and accurate

Transcript

Kathy (host):
Well, hello there, and welcome back to another episode of "Help! My Business Is Growing," a podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that is healthy and sustainable. I'm your host, Kathy Svetina, a fractional CFO and a founder of a company called NewCastle Finance, a company where we believe that everything that you do in your business is eventually going to end up in your finances. And to get to healthy finances is to have a healthy business. Well, the question is, how in the world do you get there? Well, this is where this podcast comes in to help because we give you tips and tools to create that healthy and sustainable business. And today, we are actually going to be talking about finances, clean finances, to be precise, because if you don't have clean bookkeeping and clean accounting, it's going to be extremely, extremely hard to get good insights about the business. And when you don't have those insights about the business, it's going to be harder to make any decisions about the future of your business. So when I talk about a healthy financial house, this is a framework that I've developed. The foundation for that is good accounting and good bookkeeping. That is really where everything starts, because if you don't have good accounting and good bookkeeping, then you cannot do financial analysis, you cannot do any planning, and it's going to be significantly harder to make any heads or tails of the numbers that you have. You know, there's a thing out there that says numbers don't lie. Well, if the numbers are not recorded correctly, they are definitely going to lie. It's going to be garbage in, garbage out. So this episode is going to be all about, how do you actually do this good accounting and good bookkeeping? How do you stay organized? What should you be looking for when you're hiring a bookkeeper, an accountant? What are some of the questions that you should be asking, and how do you make sure that they're keeping everything up to date and accurate? Before we jump into this episode, I want to give you a quick reminder that all of the episodes on this podcast come with a blog post, and each one has its own timestamps as well, so that you can actually go and read and look at the topics that we discuss in detail. If you want to look at that, you can look at the episode show notes. The link is going to be in there. So I invite you to use this as a resource. My guest today is Jennifer Yousem. She started her career in equity research, but pivoted into corporate finance for enterprise, media, and advertising companies, and led teams in strategic and operational finance at Sony, Paramount and Daily Mail. After 20 years in the corporate world, she now helps small businesses with her accounting and bookkeeping via her company called iHeart EBITDA. Join us. 

Kathy (host):
Jennifer, welcome to "Help! My Business Is Growing" podcast. 

Jennifer (guest):
Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here. 

Kathy (host):
Thanks so much for being here. And you know, as I was looking, we're almost at 100 episodes of the podcast, and we have barely even scratched the surface when it comes to finance topics. So I am so excited every time I have someone from the finance industry on this podcast, because we're going to be diving deep into some of the very, very important topics. And let's start here with messy books, because I think it's such an important thing to start this conversation. Because obviously, you know, for someone who comes from a finance background like we do, it's very easy for us to understand what is a messy book and what it isn't and how it actually impacts the business. But for people who don't know that, like who are not coming from a finance background like we are, let's first talk about why are messy books a problem? And then, how do we identify them? Like, how would someone who has no idea what a messy book is? How would they see that? Can we start that, please? 

Jennifer (guest):
Well, interesting. If you don't know much about finance, you probably don't know that your books are messy, and the first time that you're going to hear about it is likely going to be somebody outside your organization. You're either going to apply for a loan or a line of credit, or you're going to your CPA to file taxes. They are going to tell you your books are a mess. So I think it's one of those you don't know what you don't know. Yep. But unfortunately, you tend to find out your books are a mess at a crucial, critical time, and that's what makes it so dangerous. 

Kathy (host):
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I've seen this with business owners, that they do have some indication that something might not be right. Is, for example, the bookkeeper hasn't maybe updated their books in a long time, or maybe the cash doesn't reconcile to what's actually in the statement. Or just simply, they have no idea what's really going on. Like, I don't know how to read this. It just doesn't make sense to me. 

Jennifer (guest):
You know, what's interesting is, and I say this all the time, like, profits high, bad process. So for businesses that have been successful or even moderately successful, money in the bank equals, my books are fine. People are getting paid. I'm getting paid. Things seem okay, then the business takes a downturn. Or, on another note, the business is doing well, but the cash isn't going up. That's when people start to kind of question and say, I don't understand what's happening. I have two times more clients than I did six months ago, and my bank balance is the same. So those are the questions. They may not really understand messy books, but they do understand that something's amiss, and when something's amiss. 

Kathy (host):
That means you are not having the money that you really need it to be in your pocket for whatever reason. Might be because maybe you're completely bleeding and you have a lot of expenses, or maybe because you are not actually collecting the payments that are due to you from your clients. That could be too like looking at your accounts receivable. I mean, there's so many things that can go wrong, but you know, you've been working with people who have messy books, and you have been fixing it. What are one of the main things that you see that people books struggle with, like, what is that? 

Jennifer (guest):
That red line that you constantly keep seeing, the thing that we spend most of our time working with clients on and explaining to them, is really the difference between what their operating expenses are. And you know what those fixed costs are and what their variable costs are, getting them to understand that. Because for most people, it's I made this. It cost me this, and I have this left over, so when they start to scale, they don't really understand only some of those expenses scale with revenue growth. And I think it's really important for people to understand what their net is that they need to cover every month, regardless of sales. And that's one version of messy books. You touched on another one, which is for many business owners, once the sale is done, you know, they're woohoo, you and I know a sale really isn't done until we've invoiced, done the work, collected, collected, collected. So, right? Invoicing isn't enough, right? We need that. We need to get that money. And especially these days, I don't see a lot of people paying early or super eager to pay their bills. Sometimes it takes a little nudge. 

Kathy (host):
Yeah, and this is especially important if you are working with businesses that are larger, like corporations, enterprise businesses, because they can have their own payment terms. So you might have, you know, net 10 in your business, or net 30, or whatever. You might have something that's hopefully within a month, maybe earlier. But some of the corporations might actually be paying on a net 60, net 90. I have also seen net 180 if you believe it, it's just been awful. 

Jennifer (guest):
Net. What's interesting is I used to see all right, if it was net 60, okay, they pay at 90, fine. But you're right. I am now seeing actual terms with very large corporations at net 120 and net 180 and we spend a lot of time talking to our clients about the cost of doing business with those types of corporations, because the reality is, you are a small, small fish. So you have to decide if the terms are worth it, if you can cash flow that, you know, if you can't, you know, have a lot of clients, that'll say, "Well, I have to do business with x." Like they're a huge, huge, I don't mean x literally. I mean X, a company I really want to do business with them, and I'm like, "Okay, can you afford to be out of pocket for six months?" 

Kathy (host):
Yeah. I mean, it might be exciting to land a client that is really, really big, and once you start talking to their accounts payable departments, because that's what they have in those businesses, we might even have to go through their vendor process. I mean, there's so many things that need to happen for a big business to actually get you paid that it might just not be worth it. And it is that decision that you have to make on your own. And if you do decide to go with those type of companies, you have to be able to support that in your business, maybe you'll have to rely more on your line of credit. I mean, it could be or you have the savings that back you up. So there's all these decisions that need to be made before you actually start working with these big businesses. 

Jennifer (guest):
And particularly in agency models, where you have sequential liability, that's an additional layer of, you know, they're like, "Well, I have, you know, I have net 30 with the agency." I'm like, "Okay, but the agency has net 90 with the client, so they're not paying you until they get paid," and that's always a big eye opener for them. So you really need to understand that before you know and having a relationship, as you're well aware, with whoever you're dealing with. From a sales perspective, it oftentimes has very little to do with the accounting department. 

Kathy (host):
Yeah, exactly. And what we have alluded to this in this conversation is really the difference between revenue, profit and cash, because these are three very different things. And I see a lot of people, especially in the small business world, they think that just because they have profit, that they're gonna have cash, and because they have revenue, that they're gonna have cash. So very three different things, and let's talk about this, because this is such an important concept, the difference between revenue, profit and cash. 

Jennifer (guest):
Yes, so we spend a lot of time, again on from an educational perspective, really helping people understand because many small businesses see, even medium sized businesses, they think, once the sale is done, it's, right, they made the sale. Great. That's there's a cost to the sale, right? We have to deliver the product, whatever that is. If it's a physical item, we have to buy it, produce it. There's a cost associated with it. So whatever's left over is, you know, our profit. But getting back to our original conversation, which is where the cash issue comes in, particularly in professional services organizations, you may have net 60 terms, but you're paying your contractors, or you're paying your employees every two weeks. That's, you know, net 14 on the work that needs to get done, so the cash isn't necessarily going to follow the revenue. And it's a very difficult concept for business owners to understand. They're like, "Oh, I made $100." I'm like, "Not exactly, you sold something for $100 it cost you 25 so you made 75. Oh, and by the way, that 75 is not showing up into your bank account until August," so getting them to understand, really the kind of the order to cash, process, the inflows and outflows and the levers that they can pull to make things more favorable for themselves, I think that's where the real work is. But tying it all back to messy books, that's where we see it just a complete disconnect between what's happening in the business and what's showing up in the books. 

Kathy (host):
Yeah. And also, it could be that there are certain expenses, or maybe, like, even certain influx of money that you received, but they're not in your books for whatever reason someone forgot to put it in. Or maybe the bill is coming in for a much longer, and then you're like, "Oh, that should have happened in January, but now it's May, and we never recorded it." I mean, these are all the things that are going to really impact the books, and because they impact the book, they impact the decision that you making down the line for the business. 

Jennifer (guest):
I mean, we took over the books for a client who had not gotten a rent invoice from their landlord for six months, nobody had raised a flag, so they spent money that was actually should have gone towards rent, because they thought they had it. They got a huge six month bill, and it was like everybody looked at each other. I'm like, "You guys knew you had rent, right?" And, you know, to the business owner's credit, he was like, "I'm busy running a business. I just assumed it was getting done." 

Kathy (host):
Yep. And this is why it's so and this is a perfect example why it's so important to have budgets and forecasts in place, because it's not just, you know, it's not just the intellectual exercise of, I don't know, we might be spending this much, and let's it's about recognizing when the expenses that you expected are not coming through, and then raising that question of, "Hey, rent was supposed to come in. Maybe they decided to send us a bill later. Maybe we should go and talk to the landlord. What's going on?" It's those it's easier to catch those red flags before they become a problem, versus, you know, six months down the line and you assume something and it just completely didn't happen, right? 

Jennifer (guest):
Or, I'm sure you see the same thing. We see this a lot with, "Oh, I have to pay taxes!" Like you do. Did you just think, like a magical tax fairy was gonna come and cover those for you? So, you know, that's another one that seems to sneak up on people, particularly if they've never had to pay estimated taxes before. It's something that they are often just completely taken by surprise. 

Kathy (host):
Yep. So making sure that the books are done well, it's such a priority in the financial world, because we need to make sure that these numbers are accurate, that they're recorded well, and also that, you know, the people that they're doing them are well educated. And this is where I want to take us next, because I see a lot of bookkeepers that, and I've actually, I mean, I've gone into clients where the bookkeepers have essentially just taken a… how do I say this nicest way possible? Having an educated bookkeeper who has an accounting background and accounting degree is very different from someone who has taken an advanced course in QuickBooks or Xero or whatever it is, because the accounting tool is just the tool. It's just the software tool for someone to be able to do the accounting and do the accounting well, they have to know the language of accounting. It's just like another language that you need to learn to be able to communicate well in that language. But what I've seen is that the bookkeepers say that they're really good bookkeepers, and they have experience, but what they have done is they have taken those courses, but when it actually translates that into keeping tracks of the books, well, especially for particular industries, it really falls apart. So let's talk about this. How do you make sure that your bookkeeper is actually educated in accounting, and that they're actually a good bookkeeper? 

Jennifer (guest):
You know, that is a great question. And you know, as someone who employs bookkeepers, it's still tough. We ask a lot of questions, because there's no… not to say that if anybody has a license that makes them great at their job either, right? There's bad CPAs, bad lawyers, but there's no… just because you have a QuickBooks license doesn't make you a bookkeeper. So when you're interviewing to find out kind of, you know, getting credentials and things like that, some of the things you should be asking are, what industries have you worked in? Do you do cash or accrual? Perhaps, you know having your CPA, if you have a trusted relationship, having them interview the bookkeeper to get a real understanding, talk to them about what their processes are. How often are they going to be in your books? Do they have a good understanding of your business? You know, if you're a business that takes deposits, deposits aren't recorded as revenue. Deposits sit on the balance sheet, and it is really, really difficult. I think if you are not a finance person, you don't speak the language. I mean, we take over the books from many companies who thought they had good bookkeepers in place. And so I think asking for references, and if you have somebody who is knowledgeable, having them, you know, sit in on those discussions to ask some of the right questions, I will say one of the biggest issues that we see is we have a lot of e-com, I cannot tell you the number of books that we take over, where the net that is coming in from any of these platforms, Square Amazon, you know, Shopify, that's being recorded directly as income, as opposed to… right. The right way to do it is gross it up and reduce fees, and that can result in audits, tax implications, things like that. But as a business owner, if you're, again, not facile in the finance jargon or understanding of books, you really wouldn't know. 

Kathy (host):
Yeah, Is there any specific questions that you would say is a really good one to weed out bad bookkeeper and accountant? From a good one. And I know I'm kind of putting you on the spot here. Is there anything that you have found when you are hiring for people that work in your company that works particularly well to weed out the people out? 

Jennifer (guest):
You know, we tend to go through some actual examples with them instead of asking, you know, listen, I have a love-hate relationship with references. Because I think nobody puts down a reference that's going to be… mad a bad person. So I think, like I said, some of the questions are like, how long have you been doing this? What types of companies? I mean, that's a big one for us. If you've been doing the books. You know, a lot of people like, "Oh, I've been doing the books for my household for years," but no, not the same. Quicken and QuickBooks are not also not the same. So making sure that, you know, like I said, "Can you explain to me the difference between accrual and cash bookkeeping." Now, again, if you are a business owner that actually doesn't understand that concept yourself, it may be difficult to ask that question, but you'd be surprised by the number of bookkeepers that will have said to me, "I've only, I've only ever kept cash books" like that's not a good fit for us. We keep only accrual based books, because I don't think you can run your business appropriately. That has nothing to do with tax. Other questions that we like to ask are experience with things like inventory, lease accounting. What's the standard capitalization policy? You know, if you get a doe in the headlights kind of look from someone, it's a pretty dead giveaway if they don't understand how to do a Depreciation or Amortization Schedule, like those are some basics for us. 

Kathy (host):
Yep, and I will say this too, and as I shared that with Jennifer before, when we were prepping for this podcast, is that if you have books where your depreciation on your balance sheet is more than your asset, that means you need to get yourself a better bookkeeper or a better accountant, because that is an absolute no-no, and that happened to one of my clients, and as soon as I saw that accountant to send us those adjustment entries, we started looking for a new accountant. 

Jennifer (guest):
Yes, I also find, I mean, listen, everybody runs their bookkeeping firms differently. We're high touch, I think for most businesses, unless, you know, obviously there's exceptions to every rule, but most businesses, there's activity every week. One, it's easier to spot fraud if you're not going in once a month. But two, think it's really important to understand the business, the flows of money coming in and out, and it makes you more attuned to things like, "Huh? Rent usually hits on the fourth. I didn't see it come in." If you're only looking once a month, you just know rent came in. You're probably not attuned to the fact that rent's going to hit on the fourth. That's an important thing to note if, especially if you're dealing with a company that maybe is in a cash crunch, that is a… you do not want to bounce payroll, rent, insurance, you know, those are the things that you want to make sure you're covered for. And you want to make sure that you're aware of those things. 

Kathy (host):
Yep, and you've alluded to this very important topic too, is, are you able to identify fraud as well? So I have seen some of the businesses that they have unfortunately had a bad bookkeeper, or someone who was an actual office manager that was doing their books, and it turned out that the rest was stealing from them. So I think this is a topic that we really need to go a little bit deeper in. How do you make sure to protect yourself from it? Just what type of access should you be giving them, or should you not be giving them? Like, how do you fight those types of unauthorized problems? 

Jennifer (guest):
It's a big one for us. So we do a lot of training, we do a lot of phishing training our staff, but we also have a policy in our office, which is, if a request is made, you know, it's always over email. If a request is made over email, you need to send a separate email, not a response. You need to send a separate thread email to the client directly, asking if the request was made by them, or pick up the phone and call them and get a response from them. And we tell our clients during our onboarding, even at the risk of something not getting paid on time, we won't do that because it is so easy. Yep, too. And if they get a call from a bank, they are not to answer it. They are to pick up the phone and call the bank directly, because we've had that happen quite a few times where the bank has called and said, "I'm seeing a wire. I just want to confirm" it's a fake call, or "I need to change the routing on my paycheck this month," right? Reach out directly to that individual and find out. So we're seeing more and more of that. It's very scary how accurate and unbelievable the requests have become in looking like real requests. 

Kathy (host):
Yeah, and I think with the AI these days, and what I've seen some of the instances too, that they take someone's voice and replicate it and actually it sounds like that person. So it's absolutely terrifying, the technology that's available these days, and that's where calling the person back and truly verifying it, it was that use. I know it's an extra step, it might be annoying, but it might save you a lot of grief down the line. 

Jennifer (guest):
And I would also say, if you're interviewing a new bookkeeper, you know it's okay to put controls in place until you've gotten to a comfort level. And we have many of our clients, where we have controls in place where we can enter the bills, the bills have to be approved for payment by someone else, and then we can issue the payment once they've been approved, but we don't have those controls in place where we can enter the payment and also make the payment in most situations, we have something in place. 

Kathy (host):
Yep, and that is a great internal… that is called the internal controls. And the more the company grows, and the more you need to put those in place because there needs to be a separation of duties that someone who is entering the bill, paying it or reconciling it, should be… there should be at least two people in between to make sure that that is an actual bill, obviously, and that the vendor is correct, and also that, you know, someone is not fictitiously doing the vendor approving them, paying them, and it goes into their bank account. I mean, I have seen that happen too. It's just, it's just terrible. 

Jennifer (guest):
Yeah, I mean, in the other, you know, kind of our office policy is we won't pay anyone without having a W-9 or a W-8, you know, on record. And that's been an interesting kind of gating factor, actually, for fraud as well, because we've had vendors that have been able to duplicate what other, you know, look and feel of an existing vendor, and we've said, "Oh, you know, we need this information," and all of a sudden, the line goes kind of quiet. Nobody's responding since another good… well, it's a good practice, but it's another gating factor as well. 

Kathy (host):
Yep, I agree. So let's go back to the having the books clean and organized. So one of the main things to do that is to have an actual month-end close, and that is a whole process the bookkeepers and accountants go through. So let's talk about how does a good month-end close process look like, and what should a bookkeeper be doing? 

Jennifer (guest):
So for us, the month-end close process is reconciling all accounts, income statement, balance sheet, making sure everything ties out. And what does that mean? Going back to you know, our e-com example, if Shopify is showing that you sold $100,000 worth of things, and what's showing in your books is 90,000 that's checks and balances we want to reconcile to make sure that our books are representative of what we actually sold. So we're going in, we are looking at, what are fees, what are returns, things like that. So we're reconciling all the accounts. And then we were talking earlier about the concept of accrual versus cash. We're looking to make sure. Is this in line? Okay? Rent has been $5,000 every month. I don't see a rent charge this month. Was it missed? Did the owner forget to tell us that they moved out and they're not paying rent anymore? So part of our process is validating, not just that the transactions are in there, but really taking a step back and saying, Does this make sense? Does it make sense that we didn't see an insurance payment come through? Or why was this so much higher this month? So and then one of the things. That we have. And again, I know that there's a lot of solopreneur bookkeepers out there, but for us, we take a team approach. So we always have a second set of eyes reviewing our associates work. So our managers are going in, they're double checking that everything ties out in this business. More sets of eyes, better, and then we're talking to the client. We're having conversations with them. Saw this. This doesn't look right. We were expecting X. We saw Y. I noticed that. You know, you haven't been paid on this client for two months. Like what's going on. So that's all part of our close process. And we produce a set of, you know, basically accrual based kind of audit ready financials that we give every month. And the biggest thing that we tell owners are, please don't ignore that email. I mean, I can't tell you the number of people that have reached out to us and said, "Hey, I'm talking to someone, and they're asking me for a financial statement. Can you send me one?" I'm like, we did on the 15th and on the 15th of every month prior to this. And I'm like, "Oh, that's what that was." So our month-end process is very buttoned up and creating support schedules for everything depreciation. To your point, we're not going to depreciate past the value of the asset amortization schedules. The new lease accounting standards awful, but they need support schedules. And again, getting back to like, what's a good bookkeeper is having all those things at the ready, whether it's in a you're using, like a SharePoint or a Dropbox, something that ties to, like a monthly folder. But even better, in your actual financial system of record, when you see the depreciation entry with the schedule attached at the bottom, they should all tie out the number in the schedule should be what you're seeing in your system. 

Kathy (host):
Yep. And I would also say that I have also seen where either the accountant or bookkeeper was doing journal entries, like adjusting journal entries in the books without any support. And this is where I am very nit picky about this, because coming from a corporate background where every single thing needs to be recorded and it needs to be you have to have support for everything, because if you don't, you're gonna have an audit issue. And if you have an audit issue, that's a big problem. So you need to have those support schedules. So anytime someone does any sort of entries, especially for accountants who do like adjusting entries at the end of the year, there needs to be a reason why they're doing it and how they're doing it and why they're adjusting it, versus just, hey, this is a $90,000 entry, because my balance sheet doesn't balance. 

Jennifer (guest):
I am so grateful that you brought that up. I cannot tell you the number of times somebody has come to us in June and said, "I just had a board meeting, and they're wondering why the board meeting that we did at the end of the year, the numbers for the year look different." And I'm like, there were adjusting journal entries, and we go in and the CPA has made those adjustments, and there is no schedule to tie out of why those things happened. And it's always like, you know, they look at us and they're like, "What happened?" I'm like, I don't know. There's no tying schedule to why these things occur. And I'm sure you know this as well. I don't want to just have a schedule. I want to have a reason. I want to know why those entries were made. The why matters as much as the what in those situations. 

Kathy (host):
Yep, there are certain times when we have had to make the adjustment entries, because for whatever reason you know, we were cleaning it up, or whatever it might be. And my thing is, always, I will not even remember that three months from now, why I made that entry. Like, I don't know. So having that support and having either that spreadsheet or a PDF that gets attached to it, you immediately know why was the reason? How do we come to that conclusion, and what is this amount that it needs to be? So if you have a board meeting, if you have an investor, and they start asking these questions, it's so easy to pull that up because it's there, it's right there in front of you. 

Jennifer (guest):
Yes, yes, because I act as CFO for a handful of our clients. It's kind of an inside joke in our office, they'll say, "Oh, you have one of Jennifer's clients," because I'm in. Are, you know, their books have already been reviewed by their manager, but then I'm coming over the top. I'm like, "What's this? I didn't see anything in there. Why doesn't this number tie out?" And so I think the joke is, act like Jennifer is on every account. 

Kathy (host):
I love that. I love that. So Jennifer, we have talked a lot about, you know, the difference between revenue profit and cash and accrual versus cash accounting and, you know, all these different schedules. But if someone is in there and they're saying, "Well, I think my books are done. Okay, I don't know. There's a couple questions that I have, but I have no idea whether they're done well or not. Just seems a little bit weird, but I'm not an expert in this." What would you tell them that they can do to make sure that their numbers are correct, well organized, and that they don't fall into the messy book situation? What can they do? 

Jennifer (guest):
You know, I think one of the biggest mistakes that business owners make, is people are afraid of finance, right? Kathy, you and I, we love it. 

Kathy (host):
This is our, you know, happy place. 

Jennifer (guest):
Yes, it's in our it's in our blood. We love it. But I understand that we're in the minority, and I think that what happens is people put their head in the sand and they're like, "I don't know." You really need to take the time ask the questions and ask them more than once. We have a lot of clients where we review the same thing every single month. And you know, my team is like, "They're asking the same questions." I'm like, "Guys, it's not second nature to them," so I enjoy answering those questions for them. And so I think it's really important to have a strong relationship with your bookkeeper and asking the questions that you don't understand, make them explain it to you. I mean, I do the same thing with my lawyers. I look at a contract and my eyes go blurry, and I'm like, "I can't tell if this sentence is pro or con. I don't know what's happening here," and my lawyers will get on the phone and explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old, and it's great you should have that relationship with your bookkeeper as well. They not only should be able to explain things to you, but should be happy and willing to, and that's a big red flag if they can't, and if you and your gut, if something doesn't feel right, it's probably not. 

Kathy (host):
Yeah, you got to trust yourself with that too. 

Jennifer (guest):
Yes, yes. And it doesn't hurt to be honest with you, we've had people come to us and say, "I'm not sure. I may be looking for a new bookkeeper. Would you be?" And I've looked at their books and they said, "You've got a good bookkeeper. There's a couple little things, but like, I wouldn't move if I was you. You're in a good place." I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The same way, you should look at your insurance coverage periodically and re-evaluate any vendors that you're working with, I think it's healthy to go out there and have somebody just do a review. 

Kathy (host):
I love that, and I, I'm also a proponent of every few years, I would say every two, three years, it's good to have someone else look at the books. It's, it's just like a, like a big corporation, would go through an audit. You have someone else look, have the eyes on these numbers, and say, "Does this look okay? Does this not look okay?" Or maybe they give you a different perspective of how you should be recording things. I mean, there's, there's all sorts of there out there. So I definitely appreciate that advice. Jennifer, it's been lovely to have you on the show. Please let us know. Where can people find you? 

Jennifer (guest):
You can find us at iheartEBITDA.com 

Kathy (host):
Awesome, and we're gonna have that in the show notes as well. And as I told Jennifer, I absolutely love the name of the company. It always tickles me when I see that. So we will have that in the show notes. Thanks so much, Jennifer, amazing. 

Jennifer (guest):
Thank you for having me.