BulletProof Bookkeeping Review-- Interview with course creator Seth David
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On November 18, 2019, I had the pleasure of interviewing Seth David of Nerd Enterprises about his newest course called BulletProof Bookkeeping in QuickBooks Online. I’ve investigated lots of courses and programs for aspiring bookkeeping entrepreneurs, but this course has some very distinguishing features. That means that it will be a perfect for some folks, and not the right fit for other. I’ll try to explain who I think would benefit from this course.
Quick PSA: He has a discount code for this course for 25% off. Use BB25 when you check out. And if you want to support this effort I put in to running the Bookkeeping Side Hustle, I’d appreciate you purchasing via my affiliate link.
First of all, it is clear that Seth is one of the best trainers in QBO. In addition to watching my interview with him, you should definitely watch his YouTube videos to see if he fits your learning style. Shoot, you might be able to get buy just by consuming all of his free resources.
Seth is an “old dog” in terms of how long he has been practicing and teaching accounting, but has a super forward thinking mindset when it comes to using technology to build a business. He works and trains exclusively in QBO now. He told me he won’t take a client if they won’t convert to QBO.
His entire teaching mindset comes at it from the perspective of making your books “bulletproof” which is the word he selected because it is a less intimidating word than “audit-proof”. He teaches the way to use QBO so that everything is done the exact right way instead of a “good enough” way. If you can’t sleep at night if you think something isn’t exactly right, then this guy is up your alley.
Should You Take BulletProof Bookkeeping?
Who is this BulletProof Bookkeeping Course for? Well, you should listen to my interview to decide for yourself, but you know I’ve got an opinion.
1) People who only need help in becoming a total jock at QBO. This course is not going to tell you how to set up your business or build your website or get your QBO ProAdvisor cert. Not going to tell you how to market. Not going to tell you how to get more clients or what wording to use in an engagement letter. It also assumes that you have a base knowledge of accounting.
2) The QuickBooks Desktop lover who is seeing the writing on the wall about how the industry is transitioning to the cloud and wants to make an investment in excellent instruction to make the difficult (I get it, I do) transition as easy as possible.
3) The accountant (with an entrepreneurial spirit) who maybe has not done much bookkeeping and wants to be laser focused on just learning the nuts and bolts of QBO.
4) The accountant who wants to provide training for a bookkeeping staff to get them to be super adept at QBO.
5) The person who is already doing bookkeeping for one company (maybe your spouse’s company or your parent’s company) and knows the accounting behind it and just wants to up their QBO game to the PRO level and then go branch out into serving more clients aside from the support you already provide for the company you serve.
So, is this course for you? If you need help deciding on a course, read my musings on course selection and then go make your choice.
Don’t forget to use the discount code BB25 for 25% off.
As always, come on over to our Bookkeeping Side Hustle FaceBook Group to ask more questions. Or leave a comment below.
Transcript of the Interview
Kate: I’m here with Seth David. He’s a new contact I’ve made. I was introduced to him by Hector Garcia. I’ve started to watch some of his material on YouTube, and he knows his stuff about QuickBooks Online. So he’s exclusively a QuickBooks Online guy now. He’s completely booted all his desktop ways. That’s good to know because some of you don’t want anything to do with QuickBooks Online, but that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
He’s got a new course called Bulletproof Bookkeeping and he is going to tell us about it today. Just in full disclosure, I do have an affiliate link for his course but I have not taken this course yet. I introduce all the interviews this way. If you would like to buy through my affiliate link I appreciate that. But my goal here is not to be the one promoting the course, but to be a conduit of information for Seth to tell us what’s outstanding about his course. I would like to ask Seth now to tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
Seth David: Sure. Thanks for having me Kate. It’s an honor, and I appreciate the opportunity to come and talk with you. My goal more than anything else is to educate and inspire people. That’s what I hope we accomplish at the end of the day. If people want to sign up for my course, then great. But if not, hopefully at the very least we’ll educate and inspire some people during the next hour or so.
A little bit about me, I grew up in New York and I started out as an auditor. I worked for a federal government program doing audits for Medicare and state Medicaid programs and things along those lines. Long story short, I ended up in California where I took a job at a large publically-traded company as a Senior Revenue Accountant. From there I moved on to a CPA firm.
While I was at the CPA firm I started my own business, which is called Nerd Enterprises. You can find it at www.nerdenterprises.com, easy enough.
I started out doing basic bookkeeping consulting with people. In those days it was all desktop. And this is an interesting fact, I started out providing consulting services with companies who needed help designing spreadsheets to accomplish various things. In fact, one of my first projects there was with a guy who was running for city council in Beverly Hills. Basically we were downloading voter data. We couldn’t see who people voted for of course, but we could tell whether or not they had voted. And I wrote an application in Excel that looked at who voted, compared it with his list of known supporters, and we weeded out the ones who already voted. Then his staff would call on the people who hadn’t voted yet to help encourage people to vote. He did win the election. Not saying I can take credit for it, but you know.
So that was my first ever consulting gig outside of working full-time while I was at the CPA firm. Then it just grew from there. Over the years I started developing more training. I was originally putting videos on YouTube to answer questions I was being asked most often. I found myself retyping the same emails over and over again. Then I got a little smarter and started forwarding the last email I sent answering the same question. Then eventually I decided to put videos up on YouTube answering these questions.
Next thing I know, without this being my intention, it took off. It got traction. Not only were a lot of business owners following my YouTube channel to learn how to post transactions, but it turns out a lot of bookkeepers and accountants who may have known their accounting stuff but not QuickBooks were watching also. That’s how I built a following from a wide array of people from business owners to accountants and bookkeepers.
Kate: You started off thinking you were helping business owners, but would you say in your day-to-day now you’re helping accountants more, or is it equal?
Seth David: It’s really both. What I find most interesting about this is I’ve noticed a specific division in terms of which group goes for which of my services. A lot of the business owners come in for my one-on-one where I logistic in with people remotely. They share their screen and say, “Seth, I’m stuck on XYZ,” and while I’m looking at their screen I take them through it. I explain to them how to record it or how to clean things up. Sometimes it’s really untangling things and putting them back together. Then I record those sessions and give them the recordings afterwards. That’s what the business owners mostly go for.
And I find that the accountants and bookkeepers are the ones who, by in large, are observing my online training like the course that we just released, and I’ve got other programs too. And I have a mentoring program for accountants and bookkeepers called 97 and up. That’s where a lot of them come in and have more direct access to me and my guidance and advice on how the build, run, and grow a bookkeeping practice as well as the bookkeeping skills. Sometimes people come in and say, “You know, I’ve never encountered how to do factoring receivables and how to record that.” So they’ll come in and ask me, and I’ll help them with that.
Kate: Awesome. I do want to let people know that if you’re watching this live you should be able to ask questions. So don’t hesitate to type a question. We’re watching them on our screen, so pop in with any questions you have. Otherwise it’s just going to be me asking questions.
I think you answered what motivated you to create your course. You saw a need in that people would see a problem and need an expert. But do you have anything more to say about what motivated you to create the course we’re talking about today, the Bulletproof Bookkeeping course?
Seth David: yeah. Over the years there have been a lot of well-known accounting professionals in the community who have written a lot of books for how to be a QuickBooks consultant or how to use QuickBooks for this or that. Many times over the years I’ve thought about writing a book, but there was always this hesitation and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
Then I realized the reason I don’t love the idea of writing a book is that things change so fast in this world that by the time I get the book published there’s already going to be so much that I need to rewrite or edit. I found it was just so much more versatile to put together an online course. And in fact, the way I’ve been describing it to people now that it’s done is that I tell people it’s really like an online video textbook. Because the lessons have screenshots and detailed write-ups in addition to the videos.
That’s really what motivated me is I really wanted to create the quintessential resource for people to get access for how to do bookkeeping. But not just how to do bookkeeping, how to do it in what I describe as bulletproof.
What I mean by bulletproof really means that in the end you can prove every number. So if somebody is scrutinizing your books for any reason, whether it’s a banker considering if you’re credit worthy for a loan, or an investor considering whether or not to buy your company, or Heaven forbid the IRS auditing you, the bottom line is you have not only the right documentation but the right audit trail also. So if somebody is questioning a number I can quickly and easily drill into the numbers, get them the detail, and get them the backup. And it’s done in such a way that it raises the fewest possible questions about what’s going on when people are looking at detailed information and transaction reports.
Kate: What’s coming to mind now as you’re talking about nitty gritty stuff is this group particularly has a lot of people who are very new. Maybe they took an accounting class 15 years ago, or maybe they’ve never even had one but they’re looking for a career change and they’re willing to work hard. For those people, does your course teach accounting? It sounds like it doesn’t.
Seth David: It does. In fact, the precursor to the whole course, which is a free video on YouTube, is called Bookkeeping Basics with QuickBooks Online. And if you go to school for accounting in your first semester class you’re going to learn debits and credits. So that free 30-minute video teaches you debits and credits. I walk through 10 different transactions. And I use Google Sheets to create T-accounts to demonstrate debits and credits. I go through each of the 10 transactions. First I show it in the T-accounts, and then I go into QuickBooks Online and post the transaction. Then I refresh the balance sheet and the profit and loss to show the impact of those transactions. So you really understand not just the bookkeeping but the actual mechanics of QuickBooks combined so you understand when you hit save and close on a transaction exactly how it’s impacting the books.
To me, if you’re doing bookkeeping, that’s so critically important. The course follows suit with that. It’s not all in debits and credits. But I’ve written the course in such a way that it’s in small bite-sized chunks. And there are some parts that if you’re newer you might skip over at first because it really does dive deep. But the way I like to describe it is the course goes deep but it also goes wide. Meaning it covers a broad range. It really covers everything you need to know from A to Z in bookkeeping.
You can pick and choose what you need, or you can go through the whole thing sequentially depending on where you’re at and what you’re looking for. That’s what I intended when I set out to create the quintessential bookkeeping resource. It’s like having a bookkeeping encyclopedia on your shelf that you can pull out and reference what you need to when you need it.
Kate: Okay. So you do teach accounting concepts. Does your course teach business concepts? So the course that I took to get started building my bookkeeping business definitely had nuts-and-bolts accounting section. Then it had a whole separate section of teaching you how to market, practicing networking, and all that entrepreneurship stuff. Does your course have that or not?
Seth David: No. it’s really just focused on teaching you how to keep books and how to keep them well, how to keep them bulletproof.
Kate: I think that’s cool. I have been learning a lot about different courses, and I want to let people know that I think this is a huge thing that makes your course unique. There are lots of people in the group who will say they need to learn the software. Maybe they’ve built businesses and kept books for their businesses. They don’t need business education, they need bookkeeping education. I would say for those of you who are wanting to be laser focused on that this course would be a great fit for you.
The cool thing about people who are business owners is a lot of them love business concepts. So they might actually be sucked in by, “Here’s how to market your business,” even though they don’t need that. They really need to just shut that off and go with a product like yours that is laser focused on teaching the nitty gritty stuff. Not the soft stuff, the hard skill stuff. And then they can go use their already established networking and marketing skills.
But what would you say makes your course unique Seth?
Seth David: First of all, Phyllis is watching on the feed and she’s asking where to go to get the course.
Kate: Oh, I have a link right here.
Seth David: Perfect. So what makes this course unique? Going back to the previous question about whether I included aspects of building and growing the business in the course, as I said the answer is no. but I also want to qualify why that is.
I can certainly speak in depth to how to market an accounting or bookkeeping practice because I’ve been pretty successful with my own. But I also felt it was important to stay very singularly focused on teaching bookkeeping with QuickBooks Online. I felt that, if anything, a marketing-related course would be a separate course.
The other thing is, there was a time when I was going out there and trying to be that for other accountants and bookkeepers and teach them how to grow, build, and market their business. Earlier this year I made a decision that if I was really going to take my own business where I wanted to I needed to get singularly focused.
I asked myself an important question, what is it that I really want to do? What is the one thing that I do better than anything else? The answer that I came up with ultimately was education and training in bookkeeping and accounting and productivity. So that’s one of the reasons why I haven’t touched the marketing part of it.
I’m often asked to speak on people’s webinars and talk about how I built and grew my own practice. We’ve already covered it; it was largely just from putting videos on YouTube. So if I have any marketing advice for anybody that’s the advice for today, content, content, content. It shows people that you know what you’re doing so that you don’t have to convince them. That’s how people have found me over the years.
As far as what makes the course itself unique, I think it’s the robustness of the resource. I’ve done a lot of research and looked at what other people were doing by way of bookkeeping courses. I really feel that this is more robust than most anything you’ll find out there. But it’s also divided up into small, digestible chunks. This way, what it does is it provides you the option of going through it sequentially because new at this and you want to start from the beginning. If you’re in QuickBooks Online, or online period, it really does have to start with bank feeds. And then it goes all the way through to the ultimate output of anybody’s bookkeeping work, which is reports. And it includes everything in between as well, especially how to record the transactions. But the course wraps up with a section on management reports where I have a whole bunch of lessons. Then I go into analytics, how to analyze those reports. So we’re almost starting to touch on beyond bookkeeping and into almost CFO-level analytics.
I keep it pretty simple. I don’t get too deep into that. But I do give you some examples of how to run through and analyze a balance sheet, a profit and loss. And there’s an hour-long video in the course on the statement of cash flows because I feel that’s so important and so many people miss that.
Kate: I think that’s really great. You say it’s just touching on CFO stuff. In actuality that’s probably true. But what most bookkeepers are able to bring to small business owners, even just that surface-level management report, that’s just so valuable that you almost don’t even need more. If you can just give them that, that’s going to be more than they’ve ever seen or dreamed of. So yeah, that would be a great arsenal that you’ve built. It sounds like those last few reporting sections would make your clients just want to kiss you. Your clients are going to be like, “I’ve never known any of this.”
Seth David: Yeah. You’re right. Most of them have probably not had the experience of having a bookkeeper who proactively, without the client asking, went out and said, “By the way, here are some important reports.” And QuickBooks Online, for those of you who don’t know, lets you automate them. So I can set up a group of reports and put them on a schedule to be sent every Friday.
This is how I do it in my firm when we’re doing the books for clients. I have a schedule where each client’s books are getting done on a very specific day and time. I know I can arrange the schedule to go out usually two days after that day. That way if there’s something we realize we needed to catch and want to make sure it gets into the reports for that week it gives us time to get in there and make whatever updates we need. So, again, it’s very systematic. But the point being you can really wow the clients because of the ability to do that. I don’t know of another cloud accounting app that allows you to automate the sending of reports like that. I don’t think Xero has it, unless they’ve added it since I last checked. That’s one of the huge things about it.
And back to the question of what makes my course unique, the other thing I did is I’ve included a community. It’s kind of like a Facebook group, but it’s actually built into the website. I’ve sectioned it based on each section of the course so that you can go in there and ask questions. Obviously the course can’t speak to your or your client’s situation specifically because I don’t have that information when I’m recording it, but now you can get that context when you go into the community and ask a lot of questions. You can also comment on the lessons, but the community is really designed for the Q&A. I’ve had people go in there and say, “Hey, I have a client with XYZ,” they’ve given me detailed scenarios and I don’t mind. I go in there generally within 24 hours, usually a lot faster. I’m in there answering questions. I can post screenshots and even append with videos just to give clarity and context to my answers. So it’s direct access to me for answers. I don’t know of many courses, and certainly books where you can get direct access to the author and get follow-up questions answered.
Kate: Well that’s super fascinating because the course that I’m in has a Facebook group that I would say possibly that alone was worth the price of admission. For me, I needed that comradery. And I needed other people saying, “I’m nervous,” or, “I wasn’t sure about this either.” There’s a cheerleading aspect, and then there’s definitely an answer-your-questions aspect as well. But it can be so hard to sift through Facebook.
So you’re saying if I had a question about recording a loan or managing a loan, I’m assuming you have a video about a loan and how to depreciate or whatever, I ask my question in that module and I’m seeing everyone else’s questions that are just about recording a loan? Am I making sense?
Seth David: Yes, I understand the question perfectly. You can actually comment right there on the module on that lesson. But also, separate from that, there’s a Bulletproof Bookkeeping community. So when you sign up on my site there’s a section called My Courses. When you sign up for the course you’ll see the course, and then you’ll see the Bulletproof Bookkeeping community. That’s where most people are going. But in either place you can see other people’s comments or questions and answers. Then the community is where I’m encouraging most of that activity. But you can ask the questions either place. There have been a few cases where the questions that were asked have given rise to me adding another lesson or two to the course. I’ve now got four or five planned lessons that weren’t in the original outline, but I’m going to add them because it makes sense.
Kate: Okay. Just to be clear, when you get into the community is it going to feel more like what a Facebook community is? So you don’t get a whole section of questions about loans, or a whole section of questions about opening balance equity or whatever? It’s still all jumbled, is that right?
Seth David: No. it’s broken down into sections. What I did was I modeled the community after the way the course was broken down. So there’s a section on loans specifically.
Kate: Okay, I got it. That’s awesome. I feel like lots of times I might not even need to ask my question if I can just see everybody else’s question about that topic. That’s really good organization. Even with my own Facebook group here I struggle with it. That’s why I built a website.
Seth David: Yeah, you can try the search. Sometimes the search works well on Facebook groups and sometimes there’s just so much stuff in there that things get lost even if you had a good search term in there. That’s why I decided not to do a Facebook group because this allowed me the ability to organize it so it’s easy to find content.
Kate: Okay. I wrote another question I wanted to ask. I think it might go with how you’re describing the course. Talking about that gem you just told us about, you have a schedule you use to send automated reports, to me that sounds great but I definitely am not that formulaic about my work schedule. Are you teaching workflow or anything like that where you show how you manage 15 or 20 clients? Which app you would use to maintain your workflow schedule?
Seth David: There’s a bit of that. It’s not heavy with it, I’ll be honest. But there is a bit of that. I believe I do have a lesson that walks through exactly what I just talked about on how to automate your reports. I’m actually looking at the outline right now just trying to confirm that real quick.
Kate: You have to trust the process. That’s what’s scary for me. I would want someone to say, “Here’s how I’ve done it and why it works,” otherwise I’d want to be manual. The whole point of workflow is to get us to not be manual.
Seth David: Yeah. My biggest concern from the beginning, and it definitely is more valid now than before, is assuming your goal is to grow and build a big, substantial business you’re going to get to a point to where you cannot really on what’s in here to make sure you don’t drop any balls. You need processes that assume you have zero independent recollection of anything. If you start from that point and build the processes around that then you have processes that are iron-clad or bulletproof that make it so that you never drop any balls. I wouldn’t want to really on myself to have to manually go in and send the reports to clients every week, even though I’m in there every week. I may not remember because I may run late that day working on their stuff and now I’m behind on something else so I’m in a rush. It’s very easy to forget something like that. The moral of the story is any repetitive process that can be automated should be.
And I do have a lesson. It’s called, Scheduling Reports. Every lesson has a video. This one is 1242.
Kate: Do you talk about apps at all outside of the stuff QuickBooks Online can do for you?
Seth David: Because it’s Bulletproof Bookkeeping, which does concern itself very much with having very good documentation, there’s an app and a lesson called Billbeez.
There’s lots of apps out there that you can use to capture copies of receipts and bills, but Billbeez is my favorite. The biggest reason it’s my favorite of them all is its interface and the ease with which you can retrieve bills. It has a really powerful search capability. It’s also connected to QuickBooks Online. There are other apps that do this that will fetch your documents and whatnot. In my opinion, they’re not that reliable. A lot of things break. I get messages that I have to go feed the authentication code, which defeats the purpose of having an pap that’s supposed to take care of this stuff for me if I have to stop every day and feed codes to it.
Kate: It’s the worst. It’s terrible.
Seth David: Right. These guys set up a very simple system. Some people will say it’s not very sophisticated. Maybe it’s not, but maybe it’s more sophisticated in that it just works. It’s very simple. You have an email address that you can forward any bill and receipt to, or I can take a photo for a receipt with my mobile and just email it to that email address. Which of course I’ve included it as a contact so I can type three letters of the email, it autofill’s, and I hit send and I’m done. I know it’s going to show up and Billbeez is actually going to read that bill with very sophisticated technology. Then it’s going to make a decision.
That decision is, is there language on that bill that suggests it’s going to be paid? Let’s say there’s language that says your auto payment will come out next week. If it sees that it won’t push it to QuickBooks because the theory is it’s going to download in the bank feeds anyway and we don’t want to duplicate.
Kate: But you still want the receipt. Although we don’t need to get into dissecting Billbeez.
Seth David: Yeah, but you have the copy of the receipt in Billbeez, which is well archived. And they’re working on developing it to the point where it will push that receipt through as an attachment to the transaction if it’s already in there. But if it sees that the bill or receipt is devoid of anything indicating it’s going to be paid, it will push it through QuickBooks Online as an unpaid bill. But it’s there waiting to be paid. And then Billbeez also has a bill pay app that you can actually connect your bank account and make all your payments out of it.
I like it because we’re talking about bulletproof, we’re talking about having a clean audit trail and Billbeez makes it real easy to go find the copy of whatever you need in two seconds. It even has a cool feature where once you’ve chiseled the list down you can export it to Google Sheets. And that Google Sheets export has a column which includes the link that you can click on to view a copy of the bill. It’s just really smart.
Kate: Well that’s cool. I’m guessing over time you’ll have other things that you’ll introduce to make your books bulletproof. I assume there’s lifetime access so once you buy it if you add another thing you’ll get it.
Seth David: Yes.
Kate: All right. That’s cool. I’m just trying to dissect what you said, this course is really, really, really QuickBooks Online-only focused. But there are some things outside of the scope that are not just nuts and bolts, where to click, but more of a workflow consultation, and now you’ve talked about an app too. There is a little bit of that that grows out if it’s related to making your books bulletproof it’s going to be in this course.
Seth David: Yes.
Kate: Okay. I want to say if anyone has a question, please chime in. my next question is, what sort of student is most successful in your course? And then conversely, are there any potential purchasers of this course that might not be successful?
Seth David: It’s a good question actually. I haven’t thought much about it to be very honest. But the first thought that comes to mind is it’s not so much about where you are in life. It’s a robust resource. But, as the old expression goes, I can lead the horse to the water, but I can’t make it drink. I think that definitely applies here. I can give you the resource.
There’s a few people who have signed up who, before signing up, they reached out to me with similar questions and wanting to know if there was lifetime access. Yes, absolutely. I don’t want people to feel like they’re having to write a blank check and paying for it even if they’re not using it. I really wanted it to be that reference material that they can pull off the digital shelf. But I think what it comes down to is, you have to use it.
When you asked me that question, who’s going to do well with this course, my answer is the person who sets aside the time. By that I mean, you actually go into your calendar and say on Mondays from 4 to 5, let’s just say, you’re going to work on the Bulletproof Bookkeeping course. Just do one lesson. If you’re really new and starting out and plan on going through it from A to Z, then I suggest you do one lesson a day. Some of the lessons might be a little shorter. On those days you can maybe do two or even three lessons. On the days where it’s a little long, just do the one.
But if you go through doing one lesson a day, and pausing the video and taking notes so that you’re really learning, and having a sample QuickBooks file open. There’s a QuickBooks Online test drive company you can go in there and play with if you google QuickBooks Online test drive you’ll find it in your search results. So you can go in there and practice what you’re learning. Watch a little bit of the video, pause it, go practice.
If you’re an accountant or bookkeeper you should have a QBO Accountant, which is where you can have QuickBooks Online for yourself and all of your clients, and with that you get a discount on QuickBooks Online. So just use one of those. Pay for the company, it’s worth it so you can play around with your own company and import data or what have you. The first few lessons walk you through how to do that.
So that’s really where you’re going to get the most out of the course by going through it one lesson at a time, taking notes, and practicing. Have a QuickBooks Online company open that you can practice with. That’s who’s going to do real well.
Kate: Okay. I guess you could say someone who’s not going to do that when do well. But any other profile of someone who this course might not be a good fit for?
Seth David: If you’re not inclined to want to use QuickBooks Online it’s not going to be for you. Often times I think really where that question leads is, is this for somebody who’s beginner level or somebody who’s more advanced? In truth, when I was designing the course I was really aiming it at somebody who is less experienced. Maybe even the business owner who didn’t want to hire their own bookkeeper yet. But as it started rolling out I had CPAs and enrolled agents who told me even though they knew this stuff pretty well already they found they still learned some stuff.
One of my colleagues refers to my ‘golden nuggets,’ which are just little pieces of information that often times I’ll just mention in passing while I’m talking about the actual subject matter. She’ll say she’ll pause the video and catch that and think, “Wow, I didn’t know you could do that.” I was going through the community comments a week or so ago and I noticed a comment from somebody that underscores this. She’s a bookkeeper who I’ve known for a number of years. In one of my videos talking about vendors, expenses and how to manage that part of things there’s a little tip I show where there’s this little window in between that pops in once you go into a vendor. You can use the search box there to find other vendors. A lot of people don’t notice it because it’s subtle. She said for the last two years she had been clicking back out to the main vendors area to go find another vendor. A little thing like that just saved her a ton of time that I didn’t think to highlight because I assumed people knew it. But because I showed it in the video and made reference to it she was blown away. She loved that little tip. So it’s things like that you’ll see throughout the whole course that a lot of people say they get out of it even if they already know accounting really well.
Kate: Awesome. Again, if anyone has a question chime in now. We’re coming to the end of my list. How much does your course cost Seth?
Seth David: At the time it is $997. I think I gave you the coupon code that people can use to get 25% off. If not we can certainly post it here. Or I can give it. It’s BB25.
Kate: That takes it down to $750. So if you save yourself a few hours of work guys this will pay for itself. That’s what I keep thinking about, is this course for someone like me? I have a small client base. I’m building my business as my kids grow. So for me I think being able to be more efficient, that would be the appeal for this with me. Just like the lady you said who didn’t know she had to back out to find her vendor. Over time, even with the small amount of clients that I work on, that would allow me to bring on another monthly client potentially. And your concept of potentially working through it a little bit at a time, especially when I started two years ago, I don’t have long stretches of time. So the bite-sized approach to going through the course, that’s what I need. If I’m not working on this before my kids get up it might not happen that day. I don’t have a lot of time to just really sit and learn.
And I’ve learned that with bookkeeping, and with the software in particular, I think it’s foolish to plow through your course in a week. Say I had completely free time you’re not going to learn it. There’s something about the slow marinade. I’ve just seen myself get to know material better. Anyone who thinks, “Oh, I’m just going to go learn QuickBooks fast in two days. Weekend boot camp.” There’s just something about being in it for a long time.
Seth David: I posted a video recently where I spoke to this concept. I remembered that a number of years ago a good friend of mine who’s a professional writer for a living, things were slow and she was trying to think of ways to pick up some extra money. And in passing she mentioned maybe she should pick up some bookkeeping clients as a side hustle, right? Recently when I referenced back to that conversation I said that works well on the surface. You might be thinking if you know how to write a check you know how to do bookkeeping, you just have to code it somewhere and figure that out. That all works great until you get to the end of the first year that you’ve completed with a client and the client comes back to you and they’re looking at their P&L and they say, “Hey, my profit and loss says I made $150,000 but I only have $10,000. Where is all the money?”
If your idea of bookkeeping is knowing how to write a check, and therefore knowing how to code expenses, and maybe posting and receiving payments on invoices, you’re not going to be able to answer that question and then your client is going to lose confidence in you. It’s not what bookkeeping is meant to be all about.
I don’t like to say I’m reading a book I like to say I’m studying a book, which goes to what you said. This is not a course to be read or watched. First of all, it’s over 13 hours of video as of now and counting. If you rip through that in two weeks you’re going to barely scratch the surface of what there is to learn and gain out of it.
Kate: Well that’s not practicing, like you said, with the sample company open. I’m slow and I study and I’m like, “Oh gosh, what did he say? Back. What did he say? Back.”
Seth David: yeah. If it’s 13 hours of video, in my opinion, it should take you a good 30 hours to get through the course collectively. It’s about a factor of three, so a little more than 30 hours. If you’re watching it and pausing it and going through it slowly and taking notes and practicing it should take you at least double the time to go through it once. And then you should be reviewing and going back through it.
Let’s say you get your first QuickBooks Online client and you say, “Woohoo, I’m glad I took Seth’s course.” You get to that classic case that I’ve been describing with the bank feeds where for some reason you can’t download the bank feeds from your client’s bank account. So you or your client call the bank and the bank says, “Not our problem, it’s QuickBooks’.” And then you call QuickBooks support and they say, “No, it’s not us. It’s the bank.” Well, I give you lessons that show you how to get around all that and walk you through in detail how to grab a CSV file from the bank account, code it, and usurp the bank feeds and import it directly. If you do that then when the bank feeds do start working you’ll have everything in the register. It will all just match up.
Point is, you can learn how to do that, but when you stuck on your actual client and you’re like, “I remember Seth showed me how to do that in that course,” but you’re not going to remember all the steps until you have a real live use case like that to go through it on.
Kate: Not at all, yeah. I’ve got to open my videos three times on the same case because I’m not doing it every day. I think there’s a lot of people in my group that are like that. I am not onboarding a client even once a month. Onboarding videos, sometimes I have to just go through them. And that’s the choice I’ve made. Obviously I could become the world’s best at a few things, but I’m going to have to be practicing them a lot. My husband is a pilot; he calls them the monkey skills. He says he’s the worst pilot when he hasn’t flown in a while. I’m the worst bookkeeper when I haven’t bookkept in a while, if I haven’t done something in a particular situation. And I think there’s a lot of people in the group that are like that. Or they’re an accountant full-time for staff who uses their own accounting software, not QuickBooks Online. They can pass an accounting test, but just like, how does QuickBooks do that again? You’ll have to do it lots of times. And you’ll need the video to watch again and again. I’m pretty smart and I have to watch my videos several times.
Seth David: And that’s why I didn’t want to make it a monthly subscription because I knew this was going to be the case. People were going to want to be able to reference this material over and over again. I don’t want people to have to worry that they’re just going to be paying for indefinitely. This way you’ve paid one price. You’ve paid for it once. It’s yours to keep.
Kate: All right, I have one last question for Seth so if you have any questions chime in now. He’s been very generous with his time. I think this would be a good fit for folks. He is in the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Facebook group now, so I don’t know how active he’ll be in there. Try to tag him if you want, or where can people find out more about you or if they have questions how can they find you Seth?
Seth David: Sure. If you tag me in the group I will catch and I will get back to you. Like I always say, usually within 24 hours. I try to do it a lot faster than that. If you go to nerdenterprises.com that’s the easiest thing to remember. When you go there you’ll find a big banner on the homepage that lets you know we’ve moved. When you click on it, it takes you over to the new website, which is new.nerdenterprises.com. And that’s where you’ll see. It’s all in the top navigation. You’ll see a link to access all of my courses, including this one. This is kind of the big one that we’ve released this year. But I’ve released others. You mentioned onboarding. I’ve got a course that teaches you how to automate your whole onboarding process. I’ve got a good amount of stuff there and a lot more coming. So that’s the best place to go.
And of course if you have questions feel free to PM me. Just remember, if we’re not actually friends on Facebook I might not see the pm right away. I’m not always good about catching those. I do try to look because I know it happens. But certainly comment on this very thread and tag me, ask me anything you want. I’m very available, very accessible. I like to think of myself as an open book. Like I said earlier, my hope today more than anything else is that we’ve educated and inspired some people. Even with a tip like automating your reports in QuickBooks Online. If you going to into a QuickBooks Online company and go to their reports area it won’t be hard to figure out how to do that. Search for it on YouTube. Plenty of videos that show you how to do it. You don’t need me or my course for that. My course is for the whole big picture, everything in one, reference resource that you can use. And as we’ve highlighted today, it will grow. We will keep adding to it. There’s going to be questions, and there’s going to be lessons that need to be added to the course because they fit right in.
Kate: I thought of another question. Talk to the person in my group who is a QuickBooks Desktop person and good at that and hates QuickBooks Online. What do you have to say to that person? Because there’s a lot of people who have recently retired and if they could get three clients and have a little bit of extra cash flow a month while they’re traveling around in their REVIEW and they’re like, “I hate QuickBooks Online.” Talk to that person about, maybe not even selling your course, but what encouragement do you have to people like that? I only know QuickBooks Online so I don’t have a dog in the fight. But there seems like a big accounting fight that I’m not a part of, but I just witness.
Seth David: Yeah, I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it firsthand. Let me actually start answering the question by not answering the question. But I have a point to why I want to start there in answering the question.
I have my own Facebook group, it’s called Between Wall and Main. You’re welcome to join it. The idea is to bridge the gap between Wall Street and Main Street. It’s mostly accountants and bookkeepers how to understand how to run a business the way Wall Street companies do, obviously scaled and tailored to what a small business is like. And there’s lots of people asking bookkeeping and accounting questions. Anyway, anybody is welcome to join there.
But I’ve certainly seen it in my own Facebook group. And I belong to many others and I see the constant debate, “QuickBooks Online isn’t there yet. It doesn’t have the features. Desktop does so much more. It’s so much more robust.” There’s some truth to that. It’s not wrong. But I’m going to be very honest, and please don’t take this the wrong way, I don’t mean to sound snarky, but I just think it’s shortsighted. And I’ll give you a very specific example of why and where it might be shortsighted.
Yes, it’s true that QuickBooks Online, especially if you have QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions with advanced inventory, you pay a lot of money for that product but it’s robust, it does a lot. You can do detailed inventory tracking with lot and serial numbers and all kinds of stuff. I know. I still have people who hire me to train them in these products. I just don’t let my clients use them. If you get QuickBooks Online with an add-on product called Dear Inventory you have all the same power, the exact same features, at a fraction of the cost. Not to mention all the advantages of the anytime anywhere access and the dramatically increased efficiency that comes with having a cloud product that’s connected to other cloud products.
The reason I said at the beginning that I wanted to start out by not answering it is because on some level, very honestly, I’ve given up on trying to convince people. I used to go into the Facebook groups and comment on the threads and try and convince them. It’s just not a good use of my time. I know that it works for me. And I can run circles around people using QuickBooks Desktop in terms of the volume of data that I can process, the efficiency from the automation. I can practically automate the whole bookkeeping process. In fact, a lot of people got mad this year when Intuit released QuickBooks Live which is their own bookkeeping service. I didn’t get mad at all. I said bring it on. I’ll tell you why. Because for what they’re charging, I think $400 or $500 a month now I can charge $250 to $350 a month, give them more personalized service, and automate it all day long. Because the bank feed rules in QuickBooks Online are so much more powerful than the ones you have in Desktop that I can practically automate the whole process. I can do detailed If-Then logic in my QuickBooks Online bank feed rules.
I have a video out there where I explain I can create a bank feed rule in QuickBooks Online that I could never do in Desktop that says, “If the bank text contains the word Best Buy and the amount is over $500 book it to a fixed asset.” And then another rule that says, “If the bank text contains the word Best Buy and the amount is less than $500, book it to computer equipment.” So that knocks it down right there. I don’t have to think. It’s automated. When I apply those rules I can even check off a checkbox, which I personally don’t do yet. I’m not comfortable doing this yet, but I know a lot of people who are. The checkbox that says, “Automatically code it.” I still like to review it just to be sure because it might not be computer equipment in either a fixed asset or expense category. I might have gone to Best Buy and bought a TV. So I still want the opportunity to review it just to be 1,000% sure, to be bulletproof whether or not it’s going to be coded in the right place. 99.9% of the time it is and I can just see in the feed that there’s been a rule applied. And I know that when it shows that little green rule icon I know it’s very reliable. I know I don’t have to spend too much time scrutinizing or looking too closely. It just saves time.
So that’s one of my big arguments for why I think people are ill-advised not to start getting into and learning QuickBooks Online. . Forget about my opinions, the bottom line is in 5 to 10 years from now there’s not going to be a QuickBooks Desktop product anymore. Mark my words, I will bet you money that at the latest 10 years from now if all you know is QuickBooks Desktop you won’t have a bookkeeping practice anymore.
Kate: Haven’t they already gotten rid of some of their Pro Advisor certifications on some of those products?
Seth David: I don’t know that they’ve gotten rid of them. But I know that, for example, the requirement to be in the Intuit Trainer Writer network is only that you be certified in QuickBooks Online. You don’t need to be certified in QuickBooks Desktop to be a member of that group, and it’s kind of an elite group. Not everybody gets invited. It’s gotten bigger over the years. I think that’s very telling, the fact that they require a certification but it’s only a QuickBooks Online certification I think says a lot about where they’re headed as a company with their product.
Kate: Awesome. Hey, I want to be respectful of your time. I am just so glad you talked to us. I have visions of specific people in the group who I think this is the course for them. I’m not going to tell them. My job is not to be a salesman. I think this is going to be a good fit for some people. It’s definitely different than anyone I’ve talked to who are trying to help people move the needle towards building the business and life they want. That’s my goal to provide resources to be able to do that. I can see how this course would fit into that plan for some folks.
Well, we’ll let you go make some new videos for your course or whatever you do next. Thanks again for jumping on with us and I’m glad you’re in our group now.
Seth David: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Kate: All right. Thanks. Talk to you later. Bye.
Seth David: Bye.
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UPDATE: New monthly pricing option for BulletProof Bookkeeping Course. You can get the course for $197 per month for 6 months.
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