AI and automation are getting all the glory right now. They are amazing for productivity; there’s no doubt about that.

But our apps' batch (bulk), filter, and sort features rarely get their moment in the sun. Individually or a combination of them is one of the things I look for when choosing new technology.

A cool reverse advertising campaign run by The Cossette Group for The Canadian Dairy Farmers more than 17 years ago, has stuck with me. The tagline was “Stop Cooking With Cheese”, and I use the saying often.

It was based on the premise that parents wanted to get their twenty-something-year-olds out of the house, but they were taking too good of care of them - they were not motivating them to leave. Cooking with cheese is obviously amazing (if you don’t like cheese, you are probably an alien…), so why would anyone leave a house that cooks with it?

We have all been there with clients pushing us against the wall on deadlines.

• Last-minute government filings

• “Emergency” calls on financials for loan documents

• Banks freezing accounts

• Payroll not hitting employee bank accounts

You can all name numerous instances where clients have waited until the 11th hour to supply documents, approve reports or let you know trouble & required information deadlines are brewing.

Gifts aren't meant to be kept by us, but to be shared with everyone.

I am working with an app partner on some resource content for their SMB audience. I have been giving them a few ideas, and one topic that I thought was important to communicate to SMBs did not resonate with them. I had crafted the outline, and now it’s burning a hole in a Google Doc. I don’t blog or email on SMB topics, but I want this content to go out, not go to waste.

In the end, payroll is not just about numbers and calculations. It's about people, their livelihoods, and their families.

As an accountant, you have the power to positively impact your clients' businesses and the lives of their employees.

So keep learning, growing, and striving to be your best payroll professional.

QBO Tech Tip

Review company settings before doing any client work or when setting up a QBO file from scratch.

I made a playlist for hiking; it has music from Peanuts, The Cranberries, and Eminem.

I call it my Trail Mix.

My husband, Jeff Parks, crafts the most awesome playlists. We have a fun little cabin filled with family, friends, and music. Lots of music. Our 1,200 sqft home has 17 connected Sonos devices, and almost always, one of Jeff’s playlists is running. People love his playlists and are constantly asking him to share them, which is easy to do from one Spotify account to another.

Unless you don’t have a consistent naming pattern - naming convention - for your lists.

Numbering in the QBO Chart Of Accounts is turned off by default.

You need to go into the company settings and turn it on.

Which I highly recommend you do!

According to the fortune-cookie logic most people live by, the best things in life are free. That's crap. I have a gold-plated robot that scratches the exact part of my back where my hands can't reach, and it certainly wasn't free.

- Josh Lieb

Silicone Valley Bank took us on a bender!

By this time last week, a chat group I am in was ablaze with the SVB implosion.

The SVB Advils were barely kicking in when GPT threw a party.

It went from 3 percent alcohol to 4. Seemingly overnight.

I was invited to be on The Appy Hour earlier this week.

It was so fun to be hanging out with two of my dear APIAs*, Heather Satterly and Liz Scott. They are super bright, forward thinking, collaborating women. I love being in their presence!

The topic was discussing my app stack: how I choose it and what it does for me.

I had an Doc outline of what we were going to discuss, and I copied my thoughts into the chat as we were going through the webbie. Then this morning I realized it would be of value to share that outline here on my blog.

It’s point form, it’s somewhat messy, it’s incomplete in the scope of choosing your tech stack - but “done is better than perfect”!

It is all relevant to the stage your business is in - it’s all about you!

I often talk about the need to guard your scheduler ferociously.

But I think it’s important to define how you guard it - who you let book, why you let them book and how you let them book.

QBO Tags have so many cool uses, yet I don’t many people who have embraced them.

Actually tags are underrated in many of cloud applications.

don’t know about you, but I find adding a link to text in docs, sheets, emails, slide decks… tedious.

Soooo tedious…

And I do it often. So I looked up the keyboard shortcut - who doesn’t love shortcuts? Now I’m sharing it with you

I still need to do a RightTool deep dive, but I already love the few features I use.

And I want to share with all of you, in two parts, my RightTool journey.

I have barely scratched what this magical Chrome browser extension can do.

I have not taken the time to do a deep dive review on RightTool yet, as I’ve had a lot going on since it came out. I had to move playing with it quite far down on my to-do list.

My accounting friends and colleagues were raving about it, though, and I heard it solved a few QBO issues. I decided I could install the RightTool extension and implement only the issue solvers from which I knew I could benefit. I could put off the heavy lift to explore all the features.

The what if-s, the I’m not sure-s, the we’ve always done it this way and it’s worked out fine-s - they are the attitudes that make it hard to implement change.

Change though - if just taking a different look at the benefits in the near future not the comfort of the time honoured past - would improve the client outcomes immensely.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Hector Garcia about RightTool, a QBO navigation tool he developed with Mark Corum and Patrick Cummings.

Eeeek!

Tomorrow some of us are heading to #QBConnect and I am so looking forward to seeing old friends there, and meeting some of you IRL for the first time.

I will be overwhelmed, though - in a great way - as will many of you.

I recently had a quicky Zoom with a lovely woman from my FaceBook Group, The Workflow Wateringhole. She wanted to know the best steps to take to become a professional cloud based bookkeeper. We chatted, I gave her some advice which she said was great and she was going to follow up on it.

I decided to take that conversation from 1:1 and make it 1:many through this post.

It’s how far you go, not how fast.

― T. Rafael Cimino (ish… same concept, slightly different words)

I am a short, flat-footed klutz - I liken myself to a penguin - but that’s okay by me. I’m out there consistently - day by day, year by year. The rhythm of my feet, the time out from the world, the changing face of the seasons - it’s all so soothing.