Onboarding: The First 90 Days
A FOUNDATION FOR SUCCESS
Usually, when you have a new accountant, they employ the SALY (Same As Last Year) method. Meaning, they look at what was done in the past and try to replicate that as closely as possible without asking "why?"
At Kaizen CPAs + Advisors, we do things a little differently. We want to understand you and your business and apply our knowledge and expertise to come up with the best solutions going forward.
Our 90 day onboarding process is designed to help us get to know each other in the most efficient way. To provide the best service, with proactive advice, it's important that we understand you and your business. It's equally as important that you are comfortable with your accounting team and that you feel confident that we are here to help you make informed decisions and develop strategies for long-term growth.
We want to hear your story – what’s happened in the past, where you are today, and what your goals are for the future so we can effectively design a plan that will help you reach your goals.
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The kickoff call begins the process of building the foundation for moving forward.
The business solutions director you would 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.
The portal will allow you to do things like securely upload, view, and download documents. The portal connects you to our entire team so communication is efficient and seamless.
Enhancing communication is critical to providing you the partnership you hired us for. We want you to feel empowered by the team that’s behind you.
- 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 and assess 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 & 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?
DEXT is a third party software that works alongside QuickBooks to integrate receipts, invoices and even bank statements with your QuickBooks data. If you’ve never used it before, we’ll schedule a training for you to understand and get the most from it.
Executing the plan — Our work behind the scenes
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:
- Understand the up-to-date financials
- Ensure we’re in alignment with you on your financial goals
Next, we will talk about how the rest of the year will go.