Messy Books... Messy Business

Do you cringe when it's time to close the books? Are you frequently frustrated by an accounting problem, or certain tasks your bookkeeper is asking you to do? You've got messy books, and as Mark and Jesse argue, it likely means you've got a messy business as well.

Accounting should be boring and repetitive, Mark says. When onboarding new clients for his bookkeeping business, he spends a lot of time upfront gathering information and creating systems so that, a few months in, the accounting process is fast, accurate, and as painless as possible. There's two lessons in this: 1.) accurate books indicate that the upstream process of the business -- marketing, sales, pricing -- are tight and well defined, and that the business is not taking on too many custom or one-off orders, and 2.) for the service provider, in Mark's case his bookkeeping service, a streamlined system leads to more profit, less frustration, and less burnout. Even service providers are in the business of manufacturing, Jesse says, they are manufacturing a service or experience. Edge cases and messes clog up the manufacturing process and create frustrations.