The end of the year is a good time to take stock of the year’s accomplishments and returns. It is a busy time for planning for the next year. The beginning of the year is the best time to start your planning for a year of improvement and success. Here are five things every QuickBooks professional should set out to do in preparation for the New Year:
- Evaluate your best (and worst) clients: Using QuickBooks you can easily run reports to highlight your most and least profitable clients. Take into account billed dollars as well as total time spent, billable and unbillable. You will soon discover who your best performing clients are. And this will give you visibility into a seldom-used but highly efficient practice – letting go of the underperforming clients, those that take up more resources and are less profitable in terms of billable time.
- Review / update software certifications: This applies to your QuickBooks software certifications, as well as any other applications that you are involved in supporting or reselling. You would be surprised how easily it can be to let some yearly renewal lapse or fall behind.
- If you have not done so, install and learn the current / latest version of QuickBooks: Every fall, when the new QuickBooks version is released, you may have been too busy in the middle of another task or project, putting installation of the new QuickBooks version in the back-burner for whenever you “get around to it”. Well, the beginning of the year is as good a time as any if you have not installed the latest update, for yourself or even your clients. Even more, by this time, get yourself familiar with all the new features of the latest release. This relates directly to the software certifications section
- Choose 3 to 5 new 3rd-party add-ons to learn and implement: Decide on new set of add-on applications to learn and support. This expands your software knowledge and makes you that much more valuable to your clients.
- Get to know 8 to 10 of your local ProAdvisor colleagues: Much like the learning of new add-ons above, expanding your reach to know your fellow QuickBooks Professional Advisors adds versatility to your practice, as other professionals may have expertise in areas that you would otherwise not be able to offer. Of course, the same works vice-versa, others can tap you for expertise and thus you can grow and expand your practice.
…MARIO
