This post is part 4 of the series on how I built my cloud accounting firm. If you missed the previous installments you can find part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.
I have always been an entrepreneur and a tinkerer at heart. Throughout my childhood I developed a love for technology and over the past decade a deep interest in process and automation. December 2019 I left my stable big firm job to launch AccountFWD, a modern cloud accounting firm. Notes about my back office choices for the new firm and ideas to help you with similar adventures! continued…
When do you have some time available?
If you have been in a client facing role you know the drill. The way we all used to do this is take a look at our calendar, send a few dates and times to the other party. We would wait a few minutes, hours, or days for a response and when they got back sometimes that slot was available and if it wasn’t and we would start the process again. Of course this became many times more difficult when coordinating multiple people and their schedules.
Over the past few years I have experimented with different tools for this problem like Microsoft’s FindTime. FindTime is a lightweight free app for Microsoft users to solve the problem I outlined above. I liked using FindTime in my prior role but occasionally ran into technical issues which rendered the solution unreliable (this might have been due to the organization’s IT policies). It also required the invitor to initiate the scheduling task and pick times to offer which does not solve for my primary goal today which is to automate meeting scheduling. I plan to give FindTime a try again for multiparty meeting scheduling eventually but that is not my focus today. If you are in the Microsoft environment its worth a look.
For our new firm we wanted a solution from a leader in the scheduling space that offered integrations to other services we have in our tech stack — remember the end goal is to automate much of the administrative work so that we can spend time delivering value to clients. Enter Calendly.
Calendly is a purpose built one-to-one scheduling solution that allows the invitee to schedule their own meeting on our calendars. It’s easy to use, looks good, and integrates into Office 365 to surface availability information. Many other features like Zoom integration, reminders, availability buffers before or after events, and daily limits make it work well for our purposes. Check out a full list of features here.
There are a few subscription levels. The free plan is great but we moved up to the paid version at $10 per month to try out the Zoom integration with the hope that more of our interactions occur via video calls. Time will tell if adding Zoom as an option at the time of booking with have an impact on invitee connection preferences. Check out our landing page to book a meeting. If you are interested go ahead and book a time to experience the booking process and then cancel if you don’t really want to connect. You have our permission.
Business cards are still a thing
I might have been too radical at the start of the firm and originally did not plan on printing business cards. The entire business is online right? Well it turns out I still meet people in person and they were asking for business cards so I got to designing them.
There are so many vendor choices to print cards. I ended up picking Vistaprint and designed 500 rounded corner – premium plus matte business cards for about $60 shipped. Feedback so far has been pretty good. Image of the front and back below. What do you think?
Local business tax receipt registration
Where we are located a local business tax receipt (BTR) is required for every business choosing to engage in or manage any business, profession or occupation, unless specifically exempted. After reading the requirements it was clear that AccountFWD was required to file so we got to it.
We started at the city of Weston website and reviewed the requirements — How to Obtain a Business Tax Receipt . Step 1, we needed a Certificate of Use from the city. This required some paperwork, notarized signatures, a fee and submission to city hall.
Fun fact, notarization has moved into the 21st century and we were able to get all of our documents notarized via video conference with notarize.com. A little bit expensive for what it was but it was fast and solved our need easily at $25 per signature.
After all the documents were in order we submitted the package to the city only. Within a day or two our Certificate of Use was approved and the next step was the BTR application.
FYI BTR or Occupational Licenses are common in many jurisdictions, check with your city hall to learn about local requirements where you are.
Step 2, complete the Business Tax Receipt (BTR) Application Form for Weston and submit it online along with a fee. Weston has a new web based system for submissions and our BTR application was one of the first to be processed through it. On a related note, Weston was awarded 1st place in the Digital Cities Survey 2019 for pop. up to 75k. More good things to come from our virtual city government.
Step 3, apply for another Business Tax Receipt (BTR) but this time at the Broward county level. FAQ from the county website clearly explains, a license is needed at both the county and city level. The good news this application is all online and the fee for a CPA firm with 5 or fewer professionals is low at $30.
And that’s it. We are now in compliance. You might be asking what would have happened if we did not get the BTR? Non-compliance is outlined in Florida Statutes 205.053 (2) and it describes a failure to comply penalty of 25% of the tax due plus any other penalty provided by law or ordinance.
Next time
For now I think this is it for the blog series on how I built my cloud accounting firm. If you enjoyed this blog series or if there is something else you would like us to cover please send a note, or comment or share this post on social media.
