S02 E04: How this firm owner used workflow checklists to scale her firm

Roman Villard
What’s up everyone? Welcome to the Accounting Flow podcast brought to you by Financial Cents. This podcast is dedicated to taking a deep dive into accounting firm workflow and processes. Each episode we will spend 20 minutes interviewing actual accounting firm owners just like you uncovering specific processes that firm owners and operators encounter on a daily basis and discuss ways to improve them. Let’s go!

Welcome to another episode of Accounting Flow. I’m your host, Roman Villard. And today we’ve got the wonderful, the amazing and wear many hats, Mrs. Kellie Parks, how are you?

Kellie Parks
I’m great. How are you? And I just learned something new about you Roman.

Roman Villard
What’s that?

Kellie Parks
And this is so, so I should know because Canadians understand French it is not ‘Vill-ard’. It’s ‘Villard’.

Roman Villard
C’est Villard en français.

Kellie Parks
Right. And so that’s the French part of it. And I’ve been going ‘Vill-ard’. I’ve been doing the US version of it.

Roman Villard
I get, I get it every which way, every which way. But yes, you’re correct. And I’m so glad to have you on today. And today we’re going to talk about how to utilize workflows and checklists to enable scalability within your firm. To give the audience a bit of an overview of why you have domain authority on this expertise. Can you tell us a bit about who you are and what you’re involved in?

Kellie Parks
Sure. So I am a certified professional bookkeeper. That is a thing in Canada, we have a very strong certifying body in Canada, and we have to hold insurance and we have to take exams and we have to have our CPA ease. And it is not the wild west of bookkeepers. Of course, there’s some that are part of it. But it is not the wild west of bookkeeping up in Canada, we it is a very, very strong organization. And so I’ve been a part of that organization for 2014 is when I joined there, I was on the board of directors there for a while and I am still on their conference committee. It is just a great, great organization. This is not a plug for CPB candidate, but it was turned into one. And so Certified Professional bookkeeper. And but I come from kind of a technology background. So this is where my bookkeeping meets my technology meets my workflow. And that is I came from the marketing and branding industry. And now going on 30 years ago, we experienced a technology upheaval. Right? When in this seems like nothing, probably even you. But Adobe PDF changed our world. Because we went from running proofs around on giant pieces of paper to getting our files approved by sending them by email. And that was a game changer. And but lots of failures, like a tonne of failures in the beginning, right? And then we are me. And some of my clients who were more forward thinking we move to FTP sites to transfer data. Whereas I did insurance and bank work. So it was all in the downtown part of Toronto. Before that, we were using bicycle couriers literally to send everything around. So I know this is gonna sound ancient to you. But it was a very big deal to go to FTP sites, which then would fail at the at the worst moment, which I actually had big technology fails last week while I was away, and I just want to Yeah, so my favourite app Typeform stopped sending responses to me to zaps broke that were part of my new process. Yeah, and there was something else that happened. I can’t remember, it doesn’t matter. But anyways, we had the worst technology failures in the moments that we needed the most. It so But at any rate, that I think the technology piece where you’re getting to is why do I think it can talk about this is because I have been using cloud technology since forever when it was a disruptor in another industry. So when I moved into the bookkeeping industry right away, I started using Fresh Books in 2009, rather than Word documents to invoice my clients because I was I was on Mac. So the compelling reason was I was on Mac. And I just tried to run parallels and it was it was like it’s a space hog. Right. It just killed your system. And so there wasn’t a Canadian programme other than Fresh Books and it was like wow, this is fantastic. So I brought all of those worlds together. And I think I already told you I’ve been working remote since 2009. By adopting all of these technology pieces.

Roman Villard
Yeah, and there is big debate between Apple Mac and PC users amongst us accountants, we won’t get into that right now. But I’m also a Mac user. So I’m with you.

Kellie Parks
As relates, basically, that was one of the compelling reasons I use the word compelling again, to go to an online programme, I QuickBooks Desktop, I was hosting it for a while on Dropbox as really before cubox became a stable product. But when when Xero and QuickBooks came around, into the 1012, I believe it was, right. That was like it was ugly. But you know.

Roman Villard
And so since then, you’ve been you’ve been building various iterations of workflows and checklists to bolt on to these online cloud based tools that has now evolved into a full business for you of selling these templates and workflows and checklists that bolt on to various tools. And that’s a big part of your current business, correct?

Kellie Parks
Yeah. So I create and sell templates. Some of them are just in spirit. And I say, just in spreadsheets, I don’t take that lightly. spreadsheets have a lot of power for building stuff. And they can be important, but I built them proprietary in some of the apps like Financial Cents, for example, I have templates that you just open them up the Financial Cents, and you’re ready to go.

Roman Villard
And, yeah, that’s good. That’s good. And so we’ve got a lot of experience as relates to cloud tools, building checklists, ensuring that they work together amongst the tools you may or may not have integrated. There, I want to lead with, like, why is it important to establish a foundation of process but before I jump into that, I want to understand, like, what’s the difference between a checklist and a workflow? Because I think of those very differently, and I want to hear your take on that.

Kellie Parks
No, I want to hear yours first.

Roman Villard
For me, checklists are kind of stressful. It’s like a to do list, it’s like, just check it off. And then it’s done disappears, it goes away. A workflow is something that is is constant, it is moving, it is interconnected, and it will be updated based on other things that are happening within an organization. So it’s, Hey, it’s part of a checklist, but also it’s always connected to something else that’s happening. Matthew may did a good job of kind of characterising his thoughts on this too, in his episode, but I feel like checklists are stressful. Workflows are exciting.

Kellie Parks
Oh, okay. Well, workflows are exciting. Oh, and of course, Matthew May said something great. Should I listen to that first and then try to do I’m not that competitive, especially with math. Right? I do. I’m not that I competitive, especially with magical kanji.

Roman Villard
I don’t know. I don’t it probably visionaries.

Kellie Parks
Yeah, so I’m interesting, you should say that, because sometimes when I am working with people or doing presentations, I tried to get people to stop thinking of things that they need to get done as workflows, because some people are overwhelmed by the concept of a workflow. So very often, I’ll bring them back and say stop being stressed about it being a workflow. It is a checklist with extra elements. So everybody comes at it from a different place, right?

Roman Villard
Okay, the checklist is alive.

Kellie Parks
Yes. And so a lot of people struggle more with I have to have a workflow because then it has to be perfect. There is a queue, think of it as just starting with a checklist, which is the basis of all workflow, which are.

Roman Villard
Okay, so it’s little bit easier to think about the checklist side of things, because we’re all familiar with that. And as like, Matthew characterized in his episode, he always wants a checklist item to be kicking off something else that’s happening next. Yes, that would be more indicative of what we would probably typify as a workflow.

Kellie Parks
Okay, so I actually stress, a couple of things often stop overthinking them, and you and I agree on them. Crying out loud, just get on with something, right? You’re by my tempo. And getting started is worse than being perfect. Right? Or better than you know what I mean. So now, I can’t remember where we were at Matthew said, Matthew, Matthew, Matthew said…

Roman Villard
…checklist items should always be kicking off something else that is a workflow.

Kellie Parks
So, the one thing that I really like to start people with is think in terms of it as milestones. And then your checklist is really the milestones of things that need to get done, meaning you do this and then the next thing falls in line, just like just like Matthew set, right? So you start with one thing, and then it’s going to kick off another thing. I try to convince people to build their workflows, in checklists that are milestones. And then the other thing that I really try to get them to think about even though I don’t want them to overthink about them, I want them to think about what is the outcome there Looking for what is the reason that they need this checklist? What’s it going to solve? What’s your outcome going to be? And that comes from the marketing background. Because in the marketing background, we didn’t call them workflows, we call the work backs. Because so I use the word turn work back quite a bit, you actually start at the end. So if you’re really stuck on your checklist, so an onboarding outcome would be that I want to bring a client in from prospect to working directly in their file with as few communications and little lift on their part, making the client experience seamless. But the day I start working in their file is the day that I want to keep working in their file, I want to go back for things I don’t want to find out, I’m missing things, I don’t want that not to just get working. So then, so back to the marketing thing, we always started with the end run. And for me, I did corporate work, as I was saying it was banks, insurance companies, and so it was all compliance driven by the Securities Commission, everything relied on the Securities Commission deadline date. And that was in the days where annual reports or IPOs, were literally paper that had to be in the hands of a shareholder by mail, right by a certain date. And so that was the ultimate outcome that the the information contained was compliant. Generally, we wanted them to look nice, we wanted them to be there on the correct date. So what were the hardest bung in candidate would have been Vancouver, I’m, you know, live in the centre of the universe, Toronto, so it would have been Vancouver, and then St. John’s, New Brunswick, or St. John, Newfoundland, whatever, when you want to pick what was going to be the hardest thing to get those out to there. So that was, what’s the Canada Post delivery deadline there? And that we started working backwards and every step and then that work back would then say, okay, when does it have to be at the fulfilment house? When does it have to be at the boundary? When does it have to be at the printer? When does the paper need to be ordered? Then it became not just a checklist of the things that had to be done starting at the bottom. It also became a workflow or a work back now because it would say, Who’s the stakeholder here? Who are we ordering the paper from? who approves the budget on the paper? How far ahead? What is the deadline? Because the paper was probably coming from China, because of the size of the orders we were at. When when it’s like is that on the floor at the paper mill? Because the paper mills even important, right? The other mill reporting. And then when so right up to the top of when do we get approval on the budget and then start the design process. And then we would label who’s in the design process, we’ve got a designer, obviously, we got me in the middle, and we’ve got the client on approvals.

Roman Villard
So taking that that philosophy of work back and saying, Hey, we know that there are multiple checkpoints, multiple milestone milestones that occur in any accounting firms workflow or process or checklist, there are multiple individuals that contribute, there are multiple dependencies that are required to be also checked as you walk through this process. Why is it so important as somebody who’s setting up their initial infrastructure to think about this relative to wanting to scale wanting to grow? Because I think a lot of us look at it and say, Okay, I’m gonna take a new client and I have got recurring accounting work, I need to get done. So I need to reconcile the bank accounts, the credit cards, the balance sheet, and then deliver financials, check, check, check, check, delivered, done. But if you really want to scale, why is it so important to make sure that that is in order at the beginning?

Kellie Parks
Yeah, so And Kellie, Kellie, Kellie, so the day I decided to hire Marissa to do the day to day bookkeeping for my client work was the day that she could basically start working for me. And that is only because I had those checklists. It was only me for a long time. I had those checklists built out, partly because that’s my nature the minute I’m going to do something twice, I’m going to make a how to so you can also think of these checklists as how to because even I would forget even I like I’m the greatest thing ever. I didn’t do it that way. So a milestone for me as ridiculous as it sounds, the end thing is closing the books with a password. So if I didn’t have a checklist that said close the book to the password, because I forgot and that’s a big deal, right? Because clients are in the box. This is a pretty collaborative world, or, or an account. I don’t do taxes, so an accountant could be in there. Now, Marissa get somebody can undo your work and so on. Do your work. It’s, it’s right there on the list that allows you to scale because you’re not pissing off clients. By having stuff on done in the books, you can’t scale. If you’re not by No, some firms can, you can’t scale, if you’re not doing good work, you can’t do good work if you don’t make your way through the process. And you can’t do it efficiently if you’re going to do it out of order. So I’ll give you an example. And in the onboarding process for me, which is the one that fell, it fell apart two weeks ago for me, when I have a new niche, and it’s doing accounting, and tech firms book. And I’ve talked about onboarding, and then honestly, my Typeform fell apart. And then that fell apart that didn’t move something like it was it couldn’t have been more. But that’s life, right? My world. And so anyways, it’s seven, it’s actually seven milestones. And within those milestones are all of the things that need to happen. So the checklist is discovery, we do these things, right, then it is file review. And we do these things. And then it is, quote, and it is information, gather. Engagement, doesn’t come until after I’ve gathered all of the information. Because if a client doesn’t get new stuff at that stage, they’re never going to get it to me when we’re married. I’m going to be fighting with them every single month. So I don’t get engaged with anybody who can’t follow my process from the beginning. I also don’t quote any books, until I’ve seen the books, even for accounting firms. Sure, right. I mean, I’ve looked at at books where there’s all kinds of stuff that just hasn’t been reconciled. That’s a big list for reconcile all of these old accounts. So the dependencies are really important, but the milestones, but then let’s take the discovery phase, the discovery phase has, you know, send type form that’s somewhat automated has a site per second over, but it’s on my website. So you go to my website, and you fill out the discovery form that has all of the dependencies, do you use QuickBooks Online? No, well, then it goes straight to the end, right? And then who is the file review going to go off to so now you’ve got what the tasks are, you’ve got what the technology is, right? So there’s the tasks, there’s the technology piece, there’s what’s automated, and then there’s who’s who’s going to do it. So that makes it from a checklist to a workflow.

Roman Villard
So one thing that you alluded to, in regards to scalability was that you are not capable, you are not able to hire somebody to take over that, that work that monthly bookkeeping work without having the documentation without having the things that you were doing twice, really well instructed in the form of a checklist, and then ultimately, your workflow. And so when you brought on an accountant, how did you? How did you think through, I need to have this before hiring somebody to get me into a position of doing the things that I want to be doing? And then how does that repeat and continue for those firm owners that want to repeat that 1015 2030 times to grow their firm?

Kellie Parks
Right? So a couple of couple of things there. Um, first, I hired a bookkeeper, not an accountant, just for those people that are in the weeds of that. So you, I don’t think you can scale successfully unless you can do good client work. Right? So start with that, even if you are one or two people in your firm right now. And good work means like good policies. So in part of the workflow, it is what rep so you know, we’re clearing the bank feed, how do you clear the bank feed, don’t just say clear, the bank feed, that’s a milestone, but then it would be have all banks open in one, you know, one window, all tabs open with all of the bank feeds to make sure that an accounts payable and accounts receivable and undeposited funds. So you open all of those up, so that you can see everything gets efficient, because you can’t scale if you’re not efficient. And it’s good client work because AR and AP and undeposited funds aren’t an afterthought. Inter Account Transfers are not an afterthought. Are they lining up? Or are they not lining up? You can see right in the moment because you’ve got them all open. That’s how you can do good client work. And that’s how you can scale because it’s super efficient. And then you take it next level and you build a way for your team to do it well, so it will say x In the bank feeds, it will say what bank feeds, you should be opening and open accounts payable, accounts receivable and unposted, then I made it easy to do, because I created bookmarks of all of that. The reports, the bank feeds, put them in a folder, so that you right click it and you open them all at once. You can’t help but open them the same policy with the reconciliations. There’s a dependency that you have to have cleared the bank feeds. But then at the same time, there is now and you can actually do this at a client level where there’s an ID number in the QuickBooks file for reconciliations. You can bookmark each Bank Account Reconciliation screen, with the folder for that client, put in the accounts payable, accounts receivable under the audited funds, right click it and open up all of their reconciliations at once.

Roman Villard
Oh, that’s a that’s a hot tip. I did not know that.

Kellie Parks
It’s amazing. It’s amazing. And you’re and somebody said to me, Well, you can’t scale that you can’t like possibly save all of those bookmarks for each client. As you can, you got to do them once, the very first time you do it, make it the policy that you bookmark them, put them in a folder with the client name on it, right click them and open them and put that policy in your workflow. So also in the workflow, because you want it to be bulletproof. In the workflow, you still name the things you need to open open that checking open the savings, Emergency Loan Account, open the visa, like how many visas are there is there clearing accounts, you still have to list them? Right open accounts payable, accounts receivable, them but then have a way of making it super efficient.

Roman Villard
I think it’s interesting because to your to your point, those types of discoveries can easily be baked into a new process or updated. And so you, you say, hey, this has created a lot of efficiencies in our team. Let’s do this for every new client, we onboard, bang, you put it in your onboarding policy. Now, you made the statement of you want your workflows, you want your policies to be bulletproof. And I like that a lot. But I’m gonna challenge you a little bit because I want ironclad process to the extent that I can still modify and change and ebb and flow them as I scale and grow. Because ultimately, there will be clients that have nuances that fall outside of the scope, there will be team members that come on board that say, Hey, have you thought about doing it this way? And so while I wanted to be iron clad, I want there to be a set of rules that say, here are the the the items that would cause me to change a process should I need to? So like, what is that internal mental checklist that I need to have? Or maybe written checklist to say, if X exists or Y happens, then we need to change this process? That makes sense. Yeah.

Kellie Parks
And so I might not have explained myself clearly enough. I want them to be rock solid. I want them to be iterating. Constantly. Yeah, yep. That you need to iterate those. And that is the beauty of cloud technology. We can iterate so easily and share that across across our team. Right? So anytime I make a change in Financial Cents to like, a checklist or process. It’s live. Marisa can see it. Well, I add in a video probably we put videos in the resources in there. Shoot us my do, right? So what we put in a video as well, yeah. 100%. And I have, you know, the videos are interesting, too. Because if you see the way you work, you will catch things differently than just Yeah. So I caught myself doing something that was like, why am I doing it that way, but it was working well in my checklist. But when I saw the video, and then Marissa caught something that I was doing, because she could tell me whatever she wants, right, this letter letter, let her fly. And she saw something she says it’s a really dumb way of doing it. Like nicely. I mean, we’re nice to each other. But you know, you could see the nuances in the video of the work, right?

Roman Villard
Yeah. So I think that’s a really good practice to bake into a workflow is like taking video snapshots of maybe on a quarterly annualized basis and or, like retraining somebody on how to do X. This came up yesterday with me, I was training somebody on a process that I use for a client. And as I was going through the process training him, I was like, why am I doing it this way? I was challenging myself and trying to explain it to him. And I know that he was like, why is he doing it this way? So like those types of internal feedback mechanisms are so important for continually improving workflows.

Kellie Parks
Yeah. So what we did was when I hired Marissa, I already had the checklists because I am a lunatic for the workflows. I had descriptions for money. And I always plan on somehow since I missed the mark on my life goal of being a trust fund baby. My next in line, I’m not I never tried to think of myself as not working because I’m gonna get hit by a bus. I think of myself as not working because I’m gonna win a lottery so big. Yep. Then I’m going to ghost everybody, but my family and friends so sorry for any of my clients. I love y’all. But I have always so I was a single parent for a long time, not a long time, seven, eight years, literally a single parent, no, no other person. So I have always said to myself, What if something happens to me? Does everybody know this? Is everything in play? That they can just mourn my loss? Right? Of course, then I still did stupid things out at bail. I’m the only parent living rural, right? We lived out the country on a lake. My kids needed to get everywhere. And I would still jump off the lift at the top of you know, you know, we call it Roget’s run but Rogers run, which is an insane bump run, right? And look and just pointing south and head down. Or, or Georgia, the back country at Blackcomb. Right, so there was a compelling need for both my clients and my kids to have somebody be able to take over my stuff. So it’s not just about scaling your work. It’s, it’s the same idea. I always how am I going to get myself out of my client work gracefully. If they I do take on project work as well. I need everything to go back to them. So when I needed to go back to them, I needed to go back I had a contingency partner. So I needed to go back to Mike upside accounting. Lots of Shouts out to Mike so that he could take over in that moment he he has my one password password. And all of my processes were good to go. Right. So if it is scalable enough, that you win the lottery, and you don’t show up tomorrow, it is scalable enough probably for your business, right? Yeah, it’s another way to think of it. But then when Marissa came in, I had the list and I had descriptions, I have sub tasks, I had links to everything, like I always had all of that. But then when Marissa came in the very first time you were working through each client file, I already had the videos of me doing the work, we took a video of her and I together, he handing the work off to her. And that was an interesting tale. So I would say that would be another good thing to do to add into your list. So part of your workflow you and I just said is the videos. It doesn’t just need to be a video of you doing the work on that first training sessions, those videos can go into and maybe replace the old videos. Sure.

Roman Villard
And we use Loom internally for recording those videos. Is that what you use as well?

Kellie Parks
Yeah, and a word on a couple of words on my clients, I do that with my clients as well. And now some of my clients lose me back. I mean, it’s, it’s a game changer, right? You could go back and forth by email 100 times. But at one point, one day, I didn’t have my voice and I looked like hell it was during COVID. So you knew what I had. And I needed to get something out to a client. And I did it without video. And without sound. I just jumped on video so she could see because it was somewhat urgent that she changed up a process she had. So don’t overthink those videos. Right? But password protect them. Yes. So I see lots of people sending the actual video, please don’t do that with client work. And please, you can you can make it so you share it. They have to have the right email, and then you can password protect. Luna makes it really hard to find password. But if you Google it, so I really want this message to go out please password protect those new videos of client stuff.

Roman Villard
Two thoughts on that. One? Yes, absolutely. Password Protect. That wasn’t the first thought that was a sub thought. The first one is, if you are in a position where you are off camera, you don’t have a voice, whatever it may be, you can you can utilize tools like 11 labs to clone your voice. And my ultimate vision is that all these workflows lead to a point where you know we can have aI support some degree of analysis based on how we would prompt a tool to analyse financials and the core things that we would deliver as part of a monthly package. It would then come up with a script that would shoot over to 10 or 11 labs that would clone my voice that would go into a video alongside the financials and then bang the client has now that that eliminates a lot of the personality a lot of the personal relationship that’s required for a lot of this stuff, but you can utilize something like 11 labs to clone your voice in exactly how You would say what you would say over the top of the video?

Kellie Parks
Sure, you could, and you just blew so many people’s minds. But you also just had a whole crowd of listeners that went, I can’t even make a checklist.

Roman Villard
You’re not wrong, you’re not wrong. So the checklist is really what is enabling you to be able to scale into those new areas of automation and AI and things like that. Right? What I will say…

Kellie Parks
Can we dial your video back a little bit even? The training transcripts are easy. I’m like, let’s just even use the transcript because then it’s almost like a description that can go if you ever want it to go right into your workflow, like it can be part of your checklist. Let’s not scare people with cloning voices. And we are Blake and Ryan, do you know that? So I should say who it is right. Ryan Lazanis from Future Firm, I believe is cloning his voice for his podcasts now, isn’t he?

Roman Villard
I think so. Yeah. Yes. And he said that, and he said that. And I believe he’s also using 11 Labs to do that. One of the things that I think we can take this detour of AI that I brought us on to, to a very usable place of most people have heard of chat GPT most people have heard of tools that you can utilize to transcript videos, right? So you can record you know, Google meet or a Zoom call, they’ll they will start to transcribe the meetings use Fathom note taker, or supranormal notes or fireflies for transcripts.

Kellie Parks
I believe my notes come from you to me.

Roman Villard
I believe you have to and I think I’ve turned that off for external parties, hopefully at this point. But what you can do in order to get started at the base level of any checklist or process is hop onto a video, have it be recorded for transcript, and then just talk about your process just verbalize it externally. And then utilize a tool like chat GPT, to summarize and distil the notes in the process form. And you’ll be amazed as what as to what comes out of that. And you can utilize that as a really good base level note or process for a tool like Financial Cents, Asana, Monday, whatever, if you would just want like a really easy way to get started. And you don’t have 50 bucks to buy Kellie’s templates.

Kellie Parks
Right. My Templates are more than 50 bucks, just so you know, your margin by my templates, because every nuance is done. But I’m Financial Cents if if you don’t want to buy the templates, it has AI built in. And I think the best use case scenario is getting unstuck. It’s not going to be super robust workflow. But another one of my favourite things, the hardest part of going for a run is putting on your shoes. And so getting started is really tough. Put in there, QuickBooks, DEXT, Pluto, workflow, monthly workflow, and see what comes out of it. It can’t hurt to try.

Roman Villard
That’s so true, and there are two camps, right? Like, I’m going to be one that wants to, I want to tinker with a lot of things I want to play, I want to mess around with chat GPT. Not that I have the time to do that. But I just find it to be really fun. But that also leads to a lot of inefficiencies personally for me in developing these checklists, workflows and maintaining them. If I was smart, I would probably just spend the 300 bucks on just buying a template, plugging it in, and maybe making small customizations to it, and then be off to the races. There are so many more efficiencies that can be gained by by just taking the dollars to save your time to build something that’s really efficient for you. That is all predicated upon having time and the dollars, but at the same time, it is so much more efficient to do that.

Kellie Parks
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I wondered if AI was going to be a competitor for me. And I think I need to step up my game on my value statement, but my sales are not slowing down. Back to you tinkering. And that is one of the things that you need to I’m going somewhere with this you need to consider if you want to scale is what are the various learning styles that you need to address. If you’re going to use those checklists to delegate so that you are out of the work, but that there is still good work being done because I can’t stress that enough. It has to be good work. And it’s not you’re not going to have happy clients if you’ve got loose checklists and workflows, right? You need to address the various learning styles for your team and for your clients. So get out ahead of that you are I believe a kinder stenick learner? Do you know what a kinesthetic learner I think you probably do. You want to hear you want to play you want to you don’t care too much about making some mistakes along the way, nobody’s going to die. If you ask chat GPT the wrong question, right? There are people that learn visually there are though, those they may need, like a full checklist with sub tasks with lots of description. And then you’re gonna have the ones that want to read and write. And then this is also where the videos come in. So a good checklist includes the videos, that so that people can see and hear, as well. So all those learning styles.

Roman Villard
That is such a great just conclusion to this converzation around process and workflow, because not everybody thinks about it the same way. And the way that I think about it very tactically, very experimentally drives people on my team, absolutely bonkers. But that’s how I get to a conclusion of, you know, process and checklist and figuring out things on my own. But ensuring that you have a variety of means of understanding and learning and transition. And, you know, handing that off to the next person who should be owning that work is instrumental to ensuring that you have scalability in your firm. I think that that was phenomenal point. Kellie, thank you for that.

Kellie Parks
That also comes back to super quickly, when you are deciding on a workflow. What’s the flexibility? Do they have a board view, a list view and calendar view? Because I personally like a list view. Lots of people like to see things in a different way, it’s kind of comes back to that addressing some of those learning styles.

Roman Villard
Boy, and we could do an entire episode on how to evaluate workflow management tools and things like that. Kellie, you are a great resource to approach about things like that. If people do want to find you, a Do you want them to nb? Where would they find you?

Kellie Parks
So yes, I would like them to find the easiest starting point is I have a landing page that basically has big fat buttons that take you to where you want to go. And that website is simple. It is calmwaters.ca (calmwaters.ca) and not to sound fool of myself, but I think if you went Kellie Parks with an IE, and either accounting or into it, or Financial Cents, think I’d pop up. That’s all of myself that I’m searchable.

Roman Villard
You know, I’m not sure we’ll let the audience give you feedback on that. And if your SEO is what you think it is, but I think you’re right, I believe that will take people to the right channels, whether it’s LinkedIn or your website. So either way, people will be able to find you. They can also find me and I can get them to you in one way, shape or form. But I’m so glad that we had a chance to chat today. Thank you for coming on. And more to come. I’m sure more to come.

Kellie Parks
Well, thank you for having me on. And so because I had because I’m a brat. I’m going to end it that we still should have recorded the part about should accounting firms consider cost of services sold in their chart of accounts.

Roman Villard
I believe firms should have a cost of sales Cost of Goods Sold in their accounts. And that is another discussion for another time but that might stir up some some dialogue here on the backside. All right, Kellie, have a good one. Thank you for coming on.

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