Onboarding with Kaizen: A Look at Your First 90 Days

The Kickoff Call begins the process of building the foundation for moving forward. 

The Business Solutions Director—whom you will already have met—will introduce you to your Onboarding Team. This team will be with you to guide and train you throughout the onboarding process.

Next, we’ll get you set up in our client communication portal that will allow you to securely upload, view, and download documents. This portal connects you to our entire team to ensure communication is streamlined and efficient.

We review The Kaizen Difference, set up follow up meetings, identify existing accounts, and answer any questions you have about anything we have talked about to date.

Enhancing communication is critical to providing the partnership we have entered into together. We want you to feel empowered by the Kaizen team that's behind you.

Onboarding Deliverables following the Kickoff Call:

• Third party bank/credit card account access
• Point of Sale and merchant account(s) access, if applicable
• Department of Revenue access, if applicable
• Existing payroll reports
• Fixed Asset documentation
• Originating loan documents to verify the accounts are properly setup in your books
• Customized Chart of Accounts
• Ensure your QBO subscription fits your business needs (we don’t want you to be overpaying!)
• Set up of a comprehensive management reporting package with business insights 

During the Initial Strategy Session, you’ll begin to meet your accounting team. The primary person in this relationship is your Client Manager. Your Client Manager, responsible for your relationship with Kaizen, will be reviewing your financials, designing future changes, providing business and tax advice and ultimately preparing your tax returns.

Your Onboarding Manager from the kickoff call is responsible for shepherding you through the process. They will gain a detailed understanding of your QuickBooks and begin to make recommendations. Your Business Solutions Director will also be on the call to ensure a smooth transition from the sales stage to being a client.  

It’s kind of like a first date. Lots of questions and answers, back and forth. However, this is business. There can’t be any holding back. We want (in fact, need) to know the good, the bad, and the ugly so we’re in a better position to help. 

Remember, this is the first meeting where we really start to get to know each other. While we have a specific structure for the conversation, it should be a back and forth of questions and answers.

The first thing we want to know is the story of your business —

• When and why did you start it? What keeps you up at night? Where do you want to be in five years? 
• Do you have partners? Who are the key decision makers? How is the business structured? 
• How many employees you have? How long have they been with you? 

Next, we'll take a good look under the hood.

As accountants, it’s no surprise that we really like financial information to understand, assess, and guide a business. So we will use your existing financial statements (balance sheet and profit & loss) to begin that process. 

With insight into your goals and real data, we'll work with you to create an accounting roadmap. The roadmap gets us all on the same page in regard to financial reporting for your business.

While we want to ensure all transactions are coded correctly, it’s also important we know how you want to look at your business. Are all products and services being properly identified so you can make business decisions? Are expenses being captured effectively so you understand profit margins? Is your equity in the business being properly captured? 

QuickBooks is an essential tool that every business owner should be familiar with. Whether you are already using QuickBooks Desktop or Online, or we are going to start fresh, we both need to be on the same page with how it will be used.

We’ll teach you some important basics to help you get the most accurate and simple reporting methods with QuickBooks. That can include using online bill payment, recording invoices and bill payments, check writing practices, capturing bank deposits, and automation.

That last one is a biggie. Automations save time and help you keep accurate records. Without it, your books can look like a mess. With it? Well, you’ll be able to have faster and more accurate reporting which is going to help us AND you. 

Dext is a third party software that allows you to upload receipts, invoices and bank statements — capture and store the data you need in the cloud for easy search and retrieval. No more shoe boxes of receipts!

If you’ve never used Dext before, we’ll schedule a training for you to understand and get the most from it. 

What is backwork? Doug Schaen, Business Solutions Director, explains backwork and why it's so critical to your success.

Backwork — Our Work Behind the Scenes

During these first 90 days, we’ll also be doing some intensive work on our end to make sure that your financials are in order. It is very rare that a client comes to us and their books are what we would call “squeaky clean”. It’s probably one of the main reasons you’ve engaged us in the first place.

This is a sprint behind the scenes and usually requires significant assistance from you. We cannot do our job without all the necessary financial information. And we need your help to get it. The #1 reason clients may not get through to the final step in 90 days is missing information. Things like: deposit/expense inconsistencies, loan documents, bank and credit card statements and even prior tax returns are critical to creating that solid foundation.  

Next, we’ll have the final meeting of the 90-day integration: the financial statement review. 

This is a big day! We’ll go through your “new” financial statement line by line. We have two types of clients, some that are quite familiar with financial statements and others who may be seeing one for the first time. Either way is OK!  There are two goals: 

1. Understand the up-to-date financials  
2. Ensure we’re in alignment with you on your financial goals 

Next, we will talk about how the rest of the year will go. 

Most of our clients formally meet with us about 3 times a year. Sometimes, especially in the beginning, more frequent conversations are necessary. And that is just fine with us! We do find that 3 times a year is a good frequency that will allow us to properly provide advice and keep communication open, without monopolizing too much of your time.  

That’s the beauty of this 90-day sprint—once we reach that finish line, we’ll have everything we need to create a clear and cohesive picture of your business. This in turn allows us to provide sound business and tax advice. AND, timely filing of those tax returns!