Collaborate on Landscaping Invoice for Operations with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Landscaping invoice for Operations

awesome okay great so i'll get this started um thank you everybody for joining the landscape operational and accounting systems webinar that we have going on today uh scott and katie mulchan are joining me from the million dollar academy uh they are well versed in the operational side of landscape businesses and help out landscapers with that side of their business every day and do a great job at it and you know me carliniguez um ceo of cycle cpa we do anything from bookkeeping to cfo level services and we are specializing in the landscape industry awesome so we have some great things in this webinar today so let's get started here and um just a quick note if you want to ask any questions please use the chat option we will be answering questions at the end of this okay if this is everybody's first time uh seeing scott and i we are scott and katie mulchan with million dollar landscaper like carla said we have our million dollar academy that's um yeah where we have courses and a networking system for landscaping business owners and then we have our million dollar landscaper podcast as well so a lot of people maybe have heard us from there and we just want to say a quick thanks to carla real quick for having us on here tonight because i mean who doesn't want to talk about you know landscape and operational systems i mean this is a hot topic yes we're happy that you guys all took the time out of your evening to join us for this tonight all right so we'll get started here so hard work doesn't equal success sorry let's change the slide here all right so hard work doesn't equal success you know we're all taught that we just work hard sell more jobs keep hustling keep working we'll be successful and we're here today to break it to you that this isn't necessarily true and we're not trying to rain on your parade or just we just want to save you from a lot of heartache a lot of a lot of stress you know we were taught this our entire lives this literally was our business model for years this is what we did we worked hard sold more jobs worked six sometimes seven days a week our customers loved our work we're great landscapers and we didn't really have much in the bank to show for those that was a little embarrassing yeah does this sound like any of you or how many people do you know that are awesome landscapers um and are busting butt every day and working hard all the time but they're just not making the money that they should be that's it's all too common in the landscaping industry and we really hate it because i always say that landscapers work way too hard uh to be broke so uh and for us it wasn't and really it wasn't until we hired a business consultant that we realized that our problems were were not because we weren't working hard enough um and our problems weren't because we weren't selling enough work we were completely and totally winning at the landscaping game but what we were failing at was the running a business part it was the business end of things that really we were kind of stinking at um because we were suffering from a whole bunch of what i like to call abt it's just a bunch of eight been taught we just didn't know how to run a business we just we didn't know how um and this really kind of came to a head one afternoon i was pregnant with our second son and i left work early and i don't even remember why i took scott's plow truck but i did i left and i was in scott's plow truck so uh and i decided to go to the grocery store before i went home and i pulled into the parking lot and i just started sobbing because it hit me like a ton of bricks that i was sitting there in the truck that we used to literally make money and i wasn't sure that i was gonna have enough money to go get the groceries i wanted i was like having that pre-anxiety that my debit card wasn't gonna go through as anybody familiar with that where you're like you just like you swipe it and you hope it doesn't come back declined and so it was just really a pitiful moment i'm like i cannot sit here in this truck that we used to make money all big and pregnant bringing our second child into the world um and being afraid that i don't have enough money to feed my kids it didn't feel good at all so that was really what spurred us to take the steps that we needed needed to take to just kind of get our crap together you know get our business organized get our employees better trained start really digging into our numbers into our business and start getting our estimating on point we really had to kind of overhaul all of that so um because if you think that we're crazy and that working hard will just automatically give you success then if you'll take a look up at the slide that we have up here you'll see in the middle um this is what this is what can happen if you ignore your problems and you just keep working harder and selling more work and hoping that everything's going to fix itself um this is um this is an actual like assessment from the consultant we were working with and what it says there in the middle is in one year we wasted 159 528 in payroll on unproductive time that means we were paying people we spent out that much money in payroll in one season this is one season uh for work that we were not getting any income back for like and we weren't even paying ourselves 159 000 mind you so we um our productivity was so bad it was down at like 65 percent um because we did 1.3 million in sales that year that is a good chunk of change that is a lot of sales we didn't need to sell more um but that 1.3 million in sales doesn't mean much it doesn't mean anything when you look at how much money that we were wasting just because we did not have our craft together um because those numbers are from a year when we were still just focused on doing the work we were just selling more because we're like we don't have any money we must just need to work harder so we just kept selling more work and yeah we were paying little to no attention um to how we like ran our business we we just knew what we had knew how to do and we knew how to sell work and we knew how to do work and so we that's we just kept working i don't know how many times i can say work we just kept working um so we're just really here to tell you that um that that that that struggle that working harder that putting in more hours all of those things that just lead to burnout and stress it is a broken strategy it doesn't work you can do it for a little while but it's eventually going to bite you in the butt exactly how it did to us so um but we we were able to turn it around and we were able to fix it we didn't just like yell at our employees we weren't just like why are you guys all so lazy and why is this all terrible i mean we we were mad for a little bit but we were we acted like grown-ups we took the responsibility for our part in it we're like you know what this is our business this is on us if we own this place and it's running at this low productivity then this is our fault and we're going to have to take steps to fix it so we just really had to kind of let go of that narrative that working hard is going to fix things and that working hard is going to guarantee success um because you can't turn things around until you can kind of just let go of that a little bit so sorry one sec so your slide's not changing oh i don't know scott's having technical difficulties there we go oh is that then so anyway the moral of the story is you have more control over your days and your business than you think um you just kind of have to let go of that old it seems easy to just let go of an old thought pattern but it's not it's ingrained in us it's hard it's it's still scott still kind of struggles with how he's just thinking he just has to work all the time and so it's really something that's a little it's a little hard to let go of but you're going to have to let go of that if you ever want to turn your business around and you want to grow so one of the key things that we did do to get our business turned around is start implementing systems and procedures those operational systems and procedures sorry my mouse keeps disappearing oh there it is you have too many screens do you have too many screens that always has too many screens if you're seeing like looks let's look all over the places because he has multiple screens all the time all right there we go all right so we're here to talk about system procedures obviously so let us know are you using system procedures in your business uh let us know in the chat i'd love to see it for those or not what's your reasoning is why we love to see why you're not using it is it yeah do they just seem too hard do you not really know what they are you don't know how to implement them you don't know how to even get started or you don't even know which ones you need yeah so put in the chat i'd love to see what you guys are doing or if you're using them or or you start using them and decided it didn't work for you let us know as you see we see systems every single day and everything we do and sometimes we didn't think about or see it really so let's take a look at a simple system such as like a truck for example inside the truck you have you know a steering system you have a braking system you have a heating and cooling system you have a drive tearing system and you can see there's multiple different systems that make up this one truck and these all these systems have to work together to make this truck drive and move forward or do go reverse whatever it needs to do but all these systems come together to make this thing work and um sorry people are popping in yeah i'm not sure what systems are okay good i'm trying but i don't know where just how to implement them the resistance from field workers yes there there's definitely some resistance at first and we'll kind of get into that later on some questions yeah if you have any questions we can definitely address that sure i don't know what we need okay okay we'll we'll address those here in a bit so like i said the the these systems all kind of come together for this truck to make it move forward and these systems are like the big major items in this truck now you can break these systems down to even further smaller items and these will be kind of like your procedure so let's take example of the steering system you have your steering wheel so you can turn that left or right and that leads down into a steering box inside the steering box there's gears that make it easier for us to turn which you know drive the steering arms and turns the wheels left or right and all this has to be done to make sure that make again make sure this procedure works and this is this can be done for every single system in your car everything kind of get broke down and the same thing applies to your landscape business um your business is made up of major systems and none of those would be like repeatable procedures so for example you can have the accounting system which we carl is awesome at um you have your hr systems your sales systems you know you can have a landscaping system a long maintenance system and just like the truck everything has to work together to kind of make it work you know your whole business move forward and keep you know making profits and you can break these individual systems down into smaller procedures so i like to keep things simple so we have major systems and then we break down in smaller finer things underneath so let's take example of the landscaping system you could have a procedure just on how to plant a plant how to plant a tree um how to mulch how to do a brick patio now some of you might be thinking oh that's just silly you know guys should know how to or girls or whatever should be able to plant a tree or shrub how many of you had somebody go out there and didn't know how to plant a plant we've had guys go literally grab a flat point flat shovel and try to dig you know a hard clay here it doesn't work yeah even if they came from another landscaping business sometimes they do weird things because you might think oh i hired this person they worked for someone so they probably know a thing or two but they that doesn't mean that they do and even what they do know might not be what you want them to be doing like scott said they'll go grab a flat shovel to dig in clay and that that doesn't work now for these examples you're not going to use these procedures out every single time for your team you're going to use these procedures to help train your team so when you have a new person come on you're going to use these procedures out in the field you know for a few first few times until they kind of get the grasp of things and then from there you're going to have checklists that go underneath that that they can kind of just skim through to make sure they've completed everything the check let's kind of just reinforce the procedure because you might take like a saturday to run everybody through your procedures or maybe you're going to train on the first couple jobs it kind of depends on your employees how many people you have who's new who's not but um like scott said you'll you'll do that over arching uh system at first and then you just kind of reinforce it with daily checklists that's to kind of keep everybody honest and just to make sure everything gets done because everybody gets tired at the end of the day and forgets things and or like they think somebody else you know blew off the sidewalk and they think he did it and you know everybody's pointing fingers at everybody so it it um adds in some accountability and just ensures everything gets done well just to kind of give you a quick story here um i went to help out another landscape company a while back and we got to the point of the job we're putting down mulch so you know i'm grabbing a rake and i'm breaking out the mulch level and the owner came up to me he's like oh you're doing it wrong i'm like what what do you mean i'm doing wrong i've been doing this for like 20 years yeah i put down thousands of thousands of yards of mulch what do you mean he's like no i want you on you're literally on your hands and knees and and shuffling the mulch around to get it to a consistent level okay that's fine but the point was it's not that i didn't know how to do mulch it's just it wasn't doing his way so doing these procedures you're teaching these people whoever it is your way of doing things you know you started your business doing things a certain way you want to continue that that all throughout every single thing you do in your business and that's where the procedures will create that consistency and accountability so remember that sheet sorry change slides so remember that sheet from the consultant we talked about with low productivity now he mentioned that our crews took a long time in the morning to get out of the shop because all the jobs at the time had to go through my dad he was he used to be the one that would do go out through the estimates and he would have to tell us every single morning you know who's going where what we needed what materials we needed what equipment who was going where everything had to go through him so we had to go through him every single morning asking what was going on that is a prime example of a very terrible system that doesn't work like who like i don't even know how we got to that being our system but we did i think we just grew and didn't think about it but if you think about it that is a horrible system having one person to be the information bottleneck in the morning is terrible because we had a landscaping crew a hardscape crew a pond crew two mowing crews and so we had 20 some people at the time right so when you've got like five six four men trying to talk to the owner in the morning to find out what we need to do for the day that is a clustery mess of garbage but that that was our system so we had a very broken system um so then we fixed it we we came up with a much better morning routine um we had to develop something that worked better for us and for the business because like we said that was just it was literally a chaotic mess his dad was then getting mad that everyone was like bugging him in the morning when he's trying to return phone calls but nobody could do anything until they talk to him like i said broken system don't do it it's not a good idea so what we did we took what the consultant stated as being part of our problem and really just broke things down you know how could we get our people out of the shop faster without forgetting things and without you know everything going through my dad it really started at the top you know first off we had to change how our crew leaders started their morning in order to make this happen us the business owners had to really change on the information that we gave to our team we had to basically we started having weekly meetings where we planned out our jobs for the next week and we started putting all that on a job a scheduling job board on the job board we had you know the crews that were going out who's going with whatever crew leader what large piece of equipment what trucks are taking then we also started creating job folders inside these job folders we had a detailed list of materials that had to be go out you know a list of the whole production hours for the job so the whole plan a drawing uh driving instructions everything was inside this folder so basically now the crew leader can come in in the morning quickly look at the board who knew was going with him grab that file is in the cabinet right below the scheduling board and walk out and get his team going right away and this just sped up the process because we went from basically having when the consultant was there it was taking us like 45 minutes to get out of the shop the morning we're able to cut that down to like 20 minutes sometimes less than that because we just had things set up way better nobody's was standing around waiting for information because even if the foreman or crew leader whatever you want to call them did have a question they needed to go to your dad for they already had enough information to get everybody started the truck could get loaded the plants could get on the truck all of that could be getting done nobody's just standing around you know sipping coffee waiting for the information to get to him so yeah i mean i mean 20 you know cutting 25 minutes off your morning time doesn't seem like a lot but when you have 20 plus employees over an entire season that adds up very very quickly yeah so i see some people here have some questions so um this is something you can see chris said is this something that you have on a per day basis where employees check off on it that way they're responsible for the work so the the checklists are just kind of given out every single day they know they have to go through a checklist um to make sure everything is completed so like we have an end of the day procedure or a checklist they know that they go through like making sure all the tools just picked up um you know all the driveways are blown off all the sidewalks blowing off all these types of things you know key points and it's basically on just one sheet of paper but they have to go through this every now and then you can keep them in phone or yeah so like if you use jabber for example jobber has the capability of putting checklists on there the the crew leader whoever has access to it can go through so there's other things you can do but having these things in place is key because it's also going to help hold them accountable like we said because if they you know forgot you know whatever a compact or a blower on the job site okay well who's responsible for this you know who checked this off okay i like the built-in accountability i'm always big on accountability because everybody likes to point the finger at somebody else and so the checklist can kind of help that and not you know i don't like accountability so you can necessarily just be hard and yell on people but eventually they're going to step it up and realize oh okay hey they're gonna know if i don't do this and so i'm going to have to do it and it eventually becomes habit these can be a little bit um crews can have resistance at first but eventually it will just become habit yeah um so yes it it's something that they need to be doing every single day like i said the procedure is not going to they're not using those out that's mainly just to train people or using during your training time to make just sure people are doing things or if you update a procedure but the checklist or what's getting done every single day out in the field um sorry i'm just going through the list here uh yet somebody said 20 minutes 20 20 guys at 20 minutes 400 minutes a day oh yeah that adds up imagine if it was 45 minutes how much time we had that was terrible so it's it is crazy so all right i don't know what's going on here all right so let's talk about colby here for a second colby's a guy that we um have been helping out here for uh he's been a member of our academy for quite a while he's doing a real good job yeah yeah he's your typical kind of work in the field kind of guy however he knew that if he wanted to grow his business and really provide for his family and be able to offer on or offer employment opportunities to people in this area he needed to figure out how to work on his business he didn't really have any kind of process in place for working on his business he was just really just flying by the seat of his pants we have a lot of people come to us because their business and their business model is currently flying by the seat of their pants and so well you just do i mean i poke fun but we i mean we did it too we completely did it i you know i don't judge we've been there and done it so uh it was just funny that he literally said that he's like i'm really just flying by the seat of my pants so yeah so uh you can see here one of the things called he said about it is you know the results have been endless so far i've never felt my confidence grow and business knowledge is growing each and every single day it's because now he's able to take some of these systems that we have that we had that in our our business and we're now giving it to them in our academy but basically he's able to take these things and i know he's made some of these up themselves because he does like concrete curbing too we didn't have anything so he's able to take like some templates and use that and now train his people the same way every single time on the job so now he's he's getting consistent results all every single time for every single customer and that's the key point with having these system procedures now he's also able to hand off his jobs to his people rather than having to be out there all the time or at least be able to step away part of the time because his team knows exactly what has to be done next and it's all because of these systems and procedures and like kobe mentions in this quote there the confidence is a key part of that because nobody likes feeling insecure and like that just like hurried like oh my gosh i don't know what i'm doing just kind of flying around like with chicken with your head cut off having that confidence is really key and that's um made him able to do a lot more in his business as well then he started working on numbers and all kinds of other things but just getting that initial confidence was a real boost so arlington asks are these standard operating procedures yeah whatever you like to call them yeah sops some people call them sogs there's a little fine line on those but procedures is what i call them just in general so you have your systems you have your procedures and checklists keep it simple because you start making these things too complicated nobody's going to be nobody's going to do it then you're going to like panic and make yourself crazy be like that's too hard no thank you so now keep them simple um so basically just start adding these types of things just don't over complicate these things uh start getting something you know writing down a simple procedures like for doing plants you can even videotape it now you don't necessarily have to write it down if you can videotape a person doing this that's going to go a long way just start doing yeah you could use that for your training procedure yeah have some if you have say you've got somebody who's been with you for a while and knows how to do it yeah have somebody recording the other person implementing it and then yeah then just have the new people watch the video on how to do it i like that you say video tape you're happy nobody's using it like a vhs tape here grab your phone and use this these things take awesome video that's all we ever use so yeah we don't really use any other cameras there's no need to go like get crazy productive on this type of thing keep it simple record it you know put it on a google drive or something like that and you can start training your people this way every single time when they come on yep send them a link or put it on youtube even you can do that too so um does anybody have any question anything um just for everybody being here today we're gonna share a tool checklist that we have well and it sounds pretty simple like oh just a checklist of tools but this was really one of the things that we used to kind of start turning our crap around in the mornings because at the time we didn't have enclosed uh trailers we were still loading and unloading our trucks and our trailers every day and so a simple checklist that you can just take off the tools that everybody needs to gather in the morning does wonders because like we said the former can just come in give the crew the checklist so while he's you know getting plant material or looking over the job whatever he's doing then you can have other people gathering up the tools for the day so that's kind of how you would use a checklist like this well that's one way you could use it i'm sure you could use it a million other ways but um that's just one way that we used it to get um just the mornings running smoother this is obviously one of the first things that we did in our business to really start getting my dad out of there uh before a while we're trying to do all these other writing up these procedures just having this checklist was like case that was it was a huge thing it was basically a snowball effect once i started seeing the results of just doing this simple checklist like we have here with you it's it was a life-changing thing because honestly it started seeing all that it's that confidence once again you're like oh if this little checklist did that then what if i did this yeah what if i did this yeah because like i give you a boost uh on this checklist there's a section for like your address for the the customer phone number um the man hours that you have estimated for this job because you have to you should be estimating man hours um you know and just basic basic information for that the uh crew leader to know and then just simply check it off you guys can take this edit it make it your own but yeah like this is one that you as the owner would fill out like you'll check off the tools that they need to get for the day um and then they can mark yeah whether they've got them or not all right so see steven said are your system procedures all manual paper checklist review landscaping software um so everything we have is is i mean you can download and do whatever you want so we have some people that are taking these and putting these on um in jabber like i said um some people are using um i forgot there's a apple checklist and i'd have to get back to you i'm sorry i forgot it was one one of our members is using that whereas cruz just uses online app um but we've you can use paper or whatever you want yeah we're old so we were doing them on paper back in the day um but yeah you can put them wherever yeah you like to keep them um chris said do you have a business planner help you with these systems i'm on a boat where you're talking about by not having a good grip on systems oh we well we had the business consultant that kind of helped get us started but then from there once you know how to do them you can pretty much just do them yourself um because everyone's business is different so we provide a lot of systems and procedures to members our academy and they're really it's the ones that we used and they're good like bones they're a good structure it's a good place to start but everybody's business is going to be different no two businesses are exactly the same so but once you get the knack for them and get like like the bone i don't know what else to say like the bare bones like how to do it then you can always just adjust everything and do it however you want for your business or like scott said just record yourself and there you go yeah so i challenge everyone just go out start making a checklist get that going and start implementing your business and i guarantee you'll start seeing results on it so yeah it doesn't have to be hard you can start with start small and work from there so just everybody knows we do have our millionaire academy we are offering a 20 off discount to anybody that's here tonight um so if you're interested we'll send you a link i forgot to put the slide up for this so i do apologize but it's millionaire landscaper dot com forward slash academy uh and if you enter in the coupon code cycle cpa uh you'll get the 20 off any of our memberships yeah we'd be happy to yeah work with you more get you going uh we've got tons of courses in there on it and um there's you know facebook group available for questions and all that kind of stuff so you can be in contact with us um you're never alone in all this i guess basically that's why we have this in academy form um so you actually do take action and do it because you can buy a course then like forget about it but you know with this you've got that additional support that um for anything you need so and if there's any information or anybody has any questions about that let us know we'll we'll uh talk about it after the thing absolutely uh brian has to do a spanish version of the program no not yet we we've got on our goal that is on our list yes there will be at some point yes i mean we do have some documents in there that are translated in spanish the data uh like our job locations are both spanish and english uh but the courses are not yeah we're we'll be working on those all right carla thank you for uh letting us be part of this we appreciate it yeah we'll hang out unless there's questions at the end and everything too yeah no problem um well thank you guys for that i think you know operations and the systems and procedures you have in place in in your landscape business is just so important it helps you scale your business and grow to that you know number where you're comfortable with your revenue size and you're comfortable taking a salary right but that all starts with your system so i think that was great thank you for that presentation and now i'm going to talk about other systems well they probably have enough money so they can afford to have you helping you know with your accounting system if you're going to have accounting you've got to have some money in there so yeah so that takes me onto your accounting systems right and whether you're just starting your business or you've been in business for a few uh years you know you'll need um your accounting system in place to track your numbers and be able to see you know um how your company is doing um and there's different ways to go about that so i'm gonna give a bird's eye view of what your accounting system um should look like and then steps that you can take to get it um to where you need it to be right so let's talk about our friends over at the irs they want um you to track your receipts right in case um you have an audit not for like bookkeeping or accounting or cpa purposes really it's really in case you get into an audit and you'll save those receipts for seven years now you can keep paper version of these receipts or the irs accepts now digitized so you can use receipt bank your phone or any um you if you use quickbooks online you could take a snapshot of your receipt and upload it to quickbooks online that way you have a digitized form of your receipt as well so each each piece of the accounting system should tie in together and we'll really get um more into that as we progress here different tools and apps may fit your process so depending on how your yeah we all you know you guys all have landscaping businesses but it's all of your businesses are unique so maybe different apps um and tools fit your business right and then you want something that supports um if you're planning to grow you want something that supports that so if you're gonna have um an accounting system like quickbooks online it's great because you may start off with the self-employed version of it um and you may want to go into the essentials and then the plus and advanced version of that so it's something to think about when choosing your accounting system whether it's quickbooks xero and so on so to get um your accounting all started it is important to open a business bank account right and you should consider opening different business bank accounts for uh different expenses that you're going to incur throughout your business just to get yourself organized so a payroll account is always nice savings account for year in taxes operating expenses and then a savings account for your sales tax if you are subject to that in your state so always always always separate your business from your personal expenses it just gets messy when you co-mingle it'll take more time and effort to um decipher what is business from personal if you have that all mixed in there and you know in case of an audit again um it'll just be more work on your or your accountant's um table there um you need to decide what your legal structure will be how will you be taxed as will you be taxed as a sole prop partnership or corporation or s corp and i go more into the advantages and disadvantages of these um tax entities in a youtube video that i have over there under cycle cpa on youtube so if you guys want to go and watch that but you'll have to um make that conclusion for your business because depending on your um entity structure your bookkeeping will be a little bit different on that end as well and you know obviously the way you get taxed right so which accounting software um should you choose right so i recommend going cloud-based because that's really where society is moving to we're moving to cloud-based and more of the crms that landscapers are using like lmn um jabber and stuff like that they're upgrading their systems to really um sync better with the online version of quickbooks you know so some benefits of quickbooks online is that you don't need to back up your data quickbooks uses the same servers that back up the us government and so you're pretty covered on that and there you can link your business bank accounts to quickbooks online to eliminate a lot of data entry so you'll when you sign up for quickbooks you'll link your bank accounts and what that does is when you link your bank accounts to quickbooks quickbooks will automatically pull your transactions from your bank account so if yesterday you went to home depot um lows or site one landscape it'll pull local transactions for you onto your accounting system um and so that eliminates data entry on your end right and it's great for landscapers because quickbooks online works on your computer tablet or smartphone since you're on the go you're in the field you need something that moves with you right so uh quickbooks continues to dominate the green industry market with 74 of respondents indicating that it's their accounting software platform so a lot of uh landscapers using that as their accounting software and again like i said there's a lot of crms in the market such as lmn and jabber that do sync with quickbooks online so that's great so you have your accounting software you chose your accounting software you opened your business bank account you have your um business incorporated and all of that good stuff so now you're going to set up your chart up accounts inside of your accounting software whatever that was right a chart of accounts is a list of accounts that you have set up in your bookkeeping system to keep track of all of your financial activities um so this chart is really the skeletal structure that holds your entire bookkeeping system together each account should have a type so asset liability expense and so on a description and a number i'll show you an example here so you see some here on turn this on on the left hand side so we have your assets here your mowers bobcats trailers your vehicles and then the numbering here and then your liabilities sales tax liabilities you have your equity accounts you have your income accounts based on the services that you're providing so maybe you're providing maintenance arbor snow and ice and then your cost of sales that are that is your direct cost so payroll field labor um taxes workers comp fuel job site materials and then over here you have your just overhead expenses which entail your advertising marketing bank charges all of the other items that is not included in your direct class which are here so you set that up in your accounting system and this really paid the way to how you're going to categorize your expenses in your landscape business that way you can form the end goal which is financial statements right so you can take a look at how your companies is performing great so now you're ready to do your bookkeeping um so you're going to record your transactions like i said you're going to say your accounting software to your business bank accounts the transactions will be automatically pulled in and a great tip here is that in quickbooks online you can set rules so for example you say okay every time that i go to home depot um please put it in the job site materials category and so on so it'll eliminate even that part the categorizing part so it's very easy um you're going to post all of your assets like we said your mowers trucks or trailers your loans for those assets you're gonna post it on there it's so important to post your loans i see a lot of clients come in and they don't have their loans and therefore what's going on is that they don't have their interest expense on their profit and loss statement and they're losing out on that tax deduction right so we definitely want our loans on there and then your depreciation whether that's book or tax depreciation on there at the end of the year so you have done your bookkeeping now um it's time to reconcile your books and it's it's great having um your accounting software automatically import your transactions and you're categorizing that that's great and um you know technology is great until it just doesn't work that's why reconciling your books is so important whether um you i know i see some companies do it once a week or once every other week at a minimal you should be doing it once a month so you'll have your month end statement and there's a function that you can do on your accounting system you'll hit reconcile and what that does is um you're looking at your transactions on your accounting system and you're making sure that that mirrors what actually happened in your bank account like i said um we can't rely too much on technology that way we know that we're not missing transactions we're not duplicating transactions because i've seen that um because that can lead to overstatement of revenue and you don't want that you don't want to pay taxes on income that you really never received or um understating expenses or overstating expenses that's going to skew your book so it's very important to reconcile your books every single month so um payroll it's important to distinguish between w-2 employees versus subcontractors and this may vary from state to state to state but rarely what what um is going on is that your subcontractors are contractors that for example um you don't have to have a lot of control over them they schedule their day they use their own equipment and machinery and they get full reign over how that job gets done that's a really broad you know definition but a w-2 employee is someone that reports to you you set up their schedule they use your machinery and equipment and so on um you will distinguish between whether you have a w-2 employee on your hands or subcontractor and then you'll set up um you'll get in touch with a payroll provider such as adp or gusto to set that up right with that comes having to pay payroll tax that's why opening that extra bank account really comes into play to get yourself organized and know that you have to have a certain amount of money every single week for those payroll expenses um so you're going to set up your workers compensation insurance a lot of um a lot of the business owners that i work with they use pay as you go workers comp so with pay as you go it's really nice because um for example if this month you have ten thousand dollars worth of payroll then with um workers comp is going to increase along with that but then next month if you only have five thousand dollars worth of payroll then your workers comp is going to decrease um the expense is going to decrease along with that if you just have regular workers compensation insurance you're going to pay a fixed dollar amount every single month but with the seasonal business um that could be in this industry it's really nice to have pay as you go for cash flow purposes as well and then we partner with gusto where a lot of our clients they run payroll use them as a payroll provider they'll pay your payroll taxes and issue the w2s and 1099s for your subcontractors and what happens is with uh most payroll providers that you have whether it's adp or customer or any other payroll provider you can um link your payroll account to um your payroll transactions to your accounting style for two quickbooks online so that way you know that you have your payroll expenses payroll taxes and all of that posted on your books correctly so that's nice okay so accounts receivable so these um accounts receivable is the balance of money due from to your company from your clients right um some of the best practices to do when managing accounts receivable is um to pull an ar aging summary report at the end of every week because then you'll become familiar with the balances of each client that owes you um money and um what happens is if you don't you know have this procedure in place of pulling the ar aging report every week then what happens is um things can flip through the cracks your um balances with your clients could be off that way if you see something oh like actually bob actually did pay me doesn't owe me this 2000 you'll be able to catch it on the spot before you know things get out of hand you can also send invoice reminders and um when invoicing your clients please establish your payment terms whether that's net 30 or 15 um and you know now you have sent out your invoice right but then you have to receive your payment to from that invoice and clear your invoices as you receive your check so you receive the check in the mail for that invoice um hit receive payment on quickbooks and then this last step a lot of people missed this last step so pay close attention match your payments that you've received to the deposits that are coming through into the bank so as the deposits clear your account that must be matched to the payments that you said you received from the invoice right what happens when you don't follow this whole procedure you can have under or overstated income and this happened with one of our clients he had overstated income of a hundred thousand dollars last year um so he was going to pay taxes on that he was under the impression that he made a certain amount of money but he didn't and you know he was he was going to pay taxes on it but we got his books cleaned up and now we're at the right revenue amount and it's because this procedure wasn't followed and things weren't cleaned up like they needed to be so that's very important to follow if you're using quickbooks online and just a quick tip for the invoicing if people are filing um behind on their invoices and not paying you you can um make a rule on quickbooks um to charge them a late uh late fee and that can be based upon like a flat flappy or percentage of the remaining balance here um you can see that on the right hand corner it's an example accounts payable so this is money that you owe to your vendors or creditors you can utilize your accounting software to track your bills track your bill payments and credits to those vendors again pull in ap and accounts payable agent report every week to ensure those balances are correct so nothing slips through the crack and reconcile your bill payments as they are drafted from your bank account so same kind of methodology here as accounts receivable and then if you don't do that again you can have over understated expenses on that end great so you have you know you're doing your bookkeeping but you also want to keep track of your expenses on a per job basis right that's um maybe something that you want to look into so tracking what do we need to track we need to track um per job we need to track the materials labor and overhead so your materials you can track the old school way you can hand out a piece of paper to your crew have them write down okay this is the materials i have spent for these clients every week or you can track them on a crm like job or lmn have your have your team take pictures of their receipts um clock in and out of jobs again crm or piece of paper that's how you can track that your overhead will be tracked and tracked uh by your accounting system gonna collect that data from your employees which could be the hardest part there it's keeping them accountable to relay that data back to you and then you can create your job cost report so down here um this is an example of those transactions that i was uh mentioning before that get pulled into quickbooks online right so here's an example of a transaction you're going to categorize it for um on may 13th we went to harbor freight tools and we spent 393 dollars and 16 cents right what is the vendor's name harbor freight tools what category do i want to put it under supplies and materials and then this is an important part you can allocate it to a certain customer or project in quickbooks so then you would click this drop down and you would select your customer or the project that you wanted this expense to be allocated to so you can then create your job cost report now let's say you say oh carla but i only spent um you know a hundred dollars for uh mrs smith and the 293 and 16 cents for mr jones that's fine um in my in my uh screenshot right here i can't show it but there's a split option it's called split and you can split the amount and you can track it um you can split it so that you can track it for both of those clients right so it's nice so instead of just you know when you're when you're doing your bookkeeping instead of just putting it to a vendor and then the category and then that's it right you can take the extra step to do this that way you can create your job cost report obviously this would only take care of materials right but then you would want to allocate your labor and your overhead percentage based upon how you what methodology you want to track that with right awesome so financial reports this is the major reason why you want to create your accounting system because you want to create your financial reports you want to create your profit and loss your balance sheet and your cash flow statement at least once a month after you do your bookkeeping and your reconciliation you'll have these financial reports that you know you can rely on they're accurate because you did your reconciliation and if you allocate it to a customer or a project you have your job cost report which is amazing again junk in junk out here if you're putting junk into your accounting system that's what you're going to get coming out um of that you're not going to get your accurate numbers you're not going to be able to use it you're not going to have a real picture of what's going on your business are you profitable or you're not profitable on this job or just in your business as a whole right um and doing this it's going to be a seamless transition into tax season which is dreaded um but if you have your accounting and bookkeeping um system in place it'll make it so easy for you to file your year-end taxes and your sales taxes and all of that good stuff right and something that i do want to mention is uh another report or another item that we do for our clients is we create a casual forecast for them um which is in addition to their financial reports and what that does is we forecast their revenues for the next 6 to 12 months we forecast their direct costs which is your payroll your job site materials all of that good stuff and your overhead costs for the next six to 12 months and what we do with them is we go over and see oh okay um it looks like in november we're um you know we're not generating as much revenue as we would like we it looks like we're not going to have um enough money in the bank to cover our payroll costs what can we do now okay let's ramp up the advertising for fall cleanup so that way we have that peace of mind that we're able to cover those costs in november or you can create we create scenarios for a client so for example if someone tells me okay i'm looking to purchase a truck in august i'm gonna put ten thousand down how does that look like in august and i'll i will say something like okay yeah that's the right move or no let's actually do this in july it's a better month or let's wait till september um and it's great for someone who is trying to like grow someone who is trying to really get an in-depth look at what their um revenues and expenses will look like in the future right because we want to plan now for what that's going to look like so um and you can create a cash flow forecast using the float app as well it's a third-party app that you can use for that and that syncs with your quickbooks online account too also with quickbooks online you're able to export any report on there to excel and you know plug in any formulas that you need for any metrics that you're looking to track so you have done your bookkeeping you have your financial reports you're all ready to go for your year-end tax applications so you have your initial tax filing for some of the states your year-end tax filing and your sales tax filing awesome so that's all i had for the slides but um just wanted to mention that uh we have a spring rush offer and if you sign up um before may 31st you'll get the first two months of bookkeeping free that's our offer that's going on now so uh take advantage of that if needed um but yeah i want to thank everybody for joining us tonight and thank you scott and katie for joining me on this webinar and i guess we can answer some questions thanks again carla we greatly appreciate it um just want to make a quick note i did mess up i did give the wrong uh url to our thing it's actually millionaire landscaper.com for cycle cpa and then cycle cpa is also the coupon code to get the 20 off so i i corrected in the link below but i didn't didn't mistake that yeah no and people are silly if they don't take advantage of your offer we lived the life of having a bad accountant and it was horrible and it was awful and i'm like you're listing off all the stuff that you do and even just that like cash flow forecasting is amazing because our accountant didn't do that for us and it was garbage and so the fact that you do that is amazing because that can help your decision making so much so anyway just from people who have lived through bad accountants get a good one awesome thank you no i i i appreciate that um let's see if i have some questions here okay it says someone says i'm not sure if he's still taking questions but is it a good idea to have an accounting software and a software like yard book or jabber uh i i really like that question chris so what happens is that yes you can have a crm like job or yard book where you're going to mainly use that for creating estimates sending invoices maybe your clients pay you through there maybe you're scheduling out your jobs right um but that does not replace the need for your accounting software because your accounting is keeping track of your expenses your assets your liabilities and so on so what i recommend is having a crm like jabber or lmn or any of those um other softwares that actually sync with quickbooks online but sync um well because there's some that's hey these things but it's not it's not that it's not that good but i mean do you definitely do your research on that and um i definitely do recommend either element or job or they in my experience sync very well with quickbooks online um so you know one doesn't replace the other it's important to have both um chris asked a while back is says probably a long question but what's the best software you think i'm not sure what you're referring to yeah well yeah accounting software or crm she's covered that a little bit yeah the quickbooks online um awesome so let's see here uh yep and then a lot of people are asking will this be available so yeah we're going to send out a replay of this webinar after um it is over for everybody who signed up today uh brian asked carla do you also train us on quickbooks with your services oh great question so not um i'm i don't currently train like on quickbooks like as a training course no but um we do train like for example in a sense where maybe um maybe you're having a hard time using like the invoicing function on quickbooks and you're doing it as a business owner or your receptionist or you're having trouble with that we do you know that's part of our service our bookkeeping service like um but not like a formal training no not yet um awesome so all right i think we got i think we answered everything here unless you scott or katie have anything else on here no i don't see anything um i i just kind of go back i know somebody said something before when we were talking about uh having a hard time getting your team on board with the using systems and procedures uh it's not gonna be something that's gonna happen overnight trust us but you do need to tell your team you need to find a win in it what's going to make it better for them how is it going to be easier for them you know you always need to find whatever the win is for them you know it's going to be easier for them on the jobs they know what's gonna be happening it's gonna be a lot less stressful you know if the companies make more money then we can pass the money you know give you more bonuses or more raises or whatever it is you always need to find a win into that for them um and that's gonna help get your team on board i also recommend you know for like a simple procedure like uh planning a plant have somebody that's out there on the crew record it while the other person is doing it let them do that kind of work for you there's no need for you to go out and teach you know unless you're the only two-man team or something but if you have a team out there let them record the video on how to do it let them teach it it gets them on board gets them excited about it um and then it makes it easier to to get everybody on the same page so that's just one thing i would say yeah i think that's that's such a great idea like having a video um of every little thing you you do within your business and then having that stored somewhere and then when somebody you know new comes on board and then they just watch all of those videos and they're able to um take in all that information without wasting somebody else's time or anything like that i think that's such a great point scott and this this can actually go to for like even the invoicing part of it so if you've been doing the invoicing and you're getting the point you need to hire a bookkeeper or a secretary whatever you want right you can have them watch these videos on how to invoice so if they never used it you can teach them that way too so it works very well yeah with everything exactly awesome well great great stuff here um thank you again um if anybody wants to reach out to me here you can join our facebook group landscaping accountant or email me at carla p at cycle cpa.com it was so nice um to be here with all of you and thank you for joining tonight all right thank you guys we appreciate it have a great night bye