Chaos.
No one likes that in their bookkeeping business.
But, when you don't have a trusted process or system in place for staff to follow which details how your operation works, a tornado of destruction will likely ensue.
This could happen because clear instructions are not given on how things get done, so others will come up with their own solutions which can lead to disaster including some angry clients.
Today, our guest David Cristello, who is the founder of Jetpack Workflow, will offer some suggestions to get you started on systemizing your bookkeeping business.
During this interview, you'll learn...
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Why it's important to download your brain into a Google Doc
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Why the quality of your product is dependent on the quality of your process
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Why you should include your staff in the creation of your systems
To find out more about David, visit here.
To learn about Jetpack Workflow, explore the website.
To start a Jetpack Workflow free trial, click here.
To access the Pure Bookkeeping Session Checklist, check out our free resources.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION
Michael Palmer: 01:11 Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's guest is the founder of a company that is helping many bookkeepers across North America. His creation, Jetpack workflow reduces costly admin time and manages your client work in one place. If that's not enough. Our guests also happen to be the host of a great podcast called Growing Your Firm. Definitely something you're gonna want to check out. Welcome to the podcast, David Cristello.
David Cristello: 01:36 Thank you so much, Michael for having me. Really excited to be on.
MP: 01:39 Hey, it's great to have you and I'm really looking forward to the conversation today because I know a lot of our clients are using your program and they're speaking very highly of it, which is exciting because I know it's solving their problems and anybody that solves my friend's problems is a friend of mine.
DC: 02:01 I love it. I mean that's, you know, that's the true currency. We, we tried to hold ourselves by here at Jetpack, which is just the overall satisfaction and happiness. It sounds a little lofty, but you know, we're a company that based on our business model, based on our longterm objectives, we want to serve the customers and the users and the firm owners the best way possible. So that's music to my ears. I'm literally going to share that with the team later today.
MP: 02:26 Beautiful. Please do. So to get us kicked off here, tell us a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey and what you were up to before founding Jetpack workflow.
DC: 02:39 Yeah, absolutely. So I've had a bit of an atypical journey, meaning that I come from outside the industry. Uh, prior to Jetpack I was actually building out sales and marketing funnels for small and medium-sized organizations. I was also running different entrepreneurial events like startup weekends and things like that and came into this specific pain point after, well it started talking with a handful of bookkeeping and accounting firm owners and I kept hearing this phrase over and over and over again. This phrase was, we were having issues with quote-unquote checklist management. And honestly, the first 10 or 12 times I heard that there were problems with checklist management. I kind of just brushed over it. I thought, well, it's been solved in some way, shape or form. You know, let's continue on the journey of what else I could potentially help with a war, learn about what's going on in your firm.
DC: 03:33 And I heard it five and 10 and 15 and 20 times all across North America and got to the point where an owner who was based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where we're located, he called me up and he said, look, we've been looking for a checklist management solution. It is the bane of our existence. If we can't find one, we can't grow, we can't hire. I don't feel comfortable bringing on more clients. I was going to acquire practice in the new year and I just don't feel like I can without solving this checklist management issue and so I told him, look, I'll come out to your office end of the week and I'm going to show you the Trello's. Podio is a Saunas, base camps, all these wonderful tasks, and project management tools. Let's get you set up with one of those and I'm going to document how you get set up.
DC: 04:16 I'm going to share it with everyone that has told me about this pain point and then we're going to go on the hunt for something more problematic, more painful that I feel like we can solve. And when I showed up to his office, as the name's will, and I said, well, well, what are you currently using to manage your, your checklists? And like many owners listening, if you don't have a solution in place, you know, we'll open the second monitor. And he showed me his spreadsheet of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of clients and with all types of different recurring dates that were set up in different columns in each column. Cat had this, you know, one through five tasks or checklists that he managed. And when we tried to take that spreadsheet, which seems to be a very, very common setup when we tried to put it into a generic task and project management tool, which we're big fans of, but they're not really built for having a large set of clients with a lot of recurring client work.
DC: 05:06 And then we'll turn to be, you know after we were trying to hack together this whole solution. He goes, well, honestly I want to be able to run reports and answer questions about the status of my work. And he goes, for example, I want to see, you know, show me all my bookkeeping clients with something due this Friday. It hasn't been started organized by my team and that was kind of a mini Aha moment, which is it's just impossible to actually get clarity on your client. We're inside of these tasks and project management tools because they're built for service or product sprints, not for recurring client work. And then when we went into the land of CRM and we looked at salesforce and highrise and bays and pipe drive, we realized that they're built for salespeople, for prospect management, for pipeline management, not for ongoing recurring.
DC: 05:50 They were even one-off client work in some regards. So out of that journey, I ended up emailing a couple of thousand owners, talking with hundreds and hundreds of owners about what the week looks like, what their days look like. Really just became unusually obsessed with this problem and then launched jetpack workflow initially to solve that one specific pain point, which is you have a lot of client work, a lot of it's recurring. How can you quickly track all this information in a way that's very transparent and you can filter, search and sort by your next thing. So that's kind of the short and the long end of it of how we got into jetpack workflow.
MP: 06:24 I love it. I love the fact that you discovered this through solving a problem and now are helping thousands of clients solve that same problem that that one person had. Very entrepreneurial. Very cool and I'm sure very intriguing for our listeners because I'm sure they're suffering from some of the frustrations that your first client really was.
DC: 06:50 Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, as firms continue to grow, there seems to be this, this pivotal ceiling. There's a couple of different ceilings that seem to happen, but certainly, the first one is around three team members, two to three team members. Because sometimes what happens is, you know, you're, you're the sole practitioner, you start your firm because you're, you're great at bookkeeping, you're great at your craft, you get a couple of clients. Then over time, you do great work for them, they recommend other clients and, and you know, suddenly you have a very foundational business and it feels very, very good. Yeah. You ended up replacing maybe your previous salary with your new venture, but then you go and you hire somebody and maybe it's a part-time assistant and then usually if you hire that next person or you get that two to three full-time people, all of a sudden the need for transparency over the process becomes very, very real.
DC: 07:37 And then, you know, the question becomes how do you properly scale the product that you're offering? And so that's, that's the way we kind of think about the product, which is we help accounting firms, bookkeeping firms better productize their service so they can have a high quality quote-unquote product and wanting to get, when I say product, it's the service you're delivering and the quality of your product is dependent on the quality of your process. And so that starts to break down around three, four people. Certainly, you know, when you get into 10 20 and we've worked with firms, you know, 50, 80, a hundred people, each one of the process becomes critically important to making sure that your existing client base, which is your bread and butter, doesn't start looking elsewhere for other providers. But then as you're onboarding new clients, they still have the same quality of service because we know that drives referrals that tries word of mouth, that that opens up opportunities to provide more services. So ultimately we are, we are a tool and so you have to apply an appropriate method. And Michael I know talked a lot about this, um, but, but productizing that quality is, is so critically important. Certainly at that stage where you're starting to hire your first few people and then making sure you have the transparency to, to see what they're up to and make sure that they are adhering to the standards that you set up for the practice.
MP: 09:02 Yeah, so multilayered, right? You've got in your hands the livelihood of another person. And and in some cases, in many cases, multiple people. So if you mess up something when you're doing, they're books. When you're doing their accounting, if you mess up mess a date, there's consequences. And there are financial consequences with consequences, which people don't, you know, that's sensitive, right? You can end up costing people money or having, you know, some failures that could be to the level of catastrophic for business. So you don't want to mess it up. And that's the power of having a tight process, a systematized business where things don't fall through the clock. They're always gonna fall through the crack. But where you minimize to the best of your possible ability, minimize the likelihood that that will happen. And that's, you know, as a, as your duty, as a PR, as a provider, that's what you have to do.
MP: 09:54 But then when you talk about now the next layer layers like customer service, like people, if you want, if you want to retain the people you're working with and have them want to pay more for it and love you and refer you, it's like you got to have a great product and a great service and make sure that people go, wow, they think of this stuff before I even do right? And that's what people go, ah, you got to work with my person. So there are so many layers to this that I think it's a, such a powerful conversation. And I think right now you listed all of these different solutions, a Santa and you listed base camp and Trello and slack and this and that and everything else that for, for our listener right now it's confusing. Where do I go to? What do I do? Right? So many tools, so many tools and that were where you're first, you know, your client number one really was was how do I make sense of all of this and get what I need to do done, which is making sure that all of the boxes get checked on every single client.
DC: 10:53 Yeah. And it's a really fine balance between, you know, of course, you want to, you want to research a tool that could be the best fit for your firm, but it is a tool and you still need to apply content on top of it. And we've done certain things, we've put some lightweight templates, certainly not as robust as what you provide over there, but we some, we've done some lightweight templates to kind of nudge people in the right direction. But I think, well, whatever tool you're using or if you're relying on a spreadsheet or you're relying on calendars or, we had a, a client that came on fairly recently that which she did was she had a whiteboard system. And then as she got more clients, she proportionately bought more whiteboards and toys it became a whiteboard wall. And then we have this, you know, celebrate every moment on the, on the phone when I asked her, have you gotten rid of the whiteboards?
DC: 11:38 And she goes, you know what, I got rid of all my whiteboards, but that's not to, you know, kind of shun a whiteboard system. I think it was important that she at least started putting together some sort of system. And I think the important aspect of it is it's iterative. You like just get started with having anything and then, of course, it will get better, right? But if you're, if you become overwhelmed with the amount of choices, which we know there's the paradox of choice and the more choices end up paralyzing the decision, I would say just pick one. Certainly, if you're, if you're, you know, just kind of getting started with the firm, pick one, start putting content in there, the process of taking that first step forward is going to help you directionally find the right path for your firm. Um, so, you know, we're obviously very biased here at jetpack when it comes to tools, but regardless of what you're using, just start using something.
DC: 12:30 And I think by doing that, you're, you're leaps and bounds ahead of where you were prior to that. And once you get the ball rolling, um, you know, it picks up speed as it goes downhill and that, and that's a great first step. The one thing I'll say pulling back the curtains on jetpack workflow, because, you know, we, we provide software product, but we essentially run a mini service department in here as well because now at this point with customer support and we have customer success, which assists with onboarding new accounts. We have inbound product specialists that give demos. I mean we have a mini service department and, but, but early on it was just me and then it was me plus a contractor. And one of the best things in hindsight that for the business was, you know, the, the first full-time nontechnical hire I made happened about three weeks before my honeymoon.
DC: 13:20 And then about two weeks before the honeymoon, I had this kind of Oh crap moment in that this individual was going to be responsible for all the support tickets for all of the demos and for all of the set. And obviously, at that time, one person could handle all of those things cause the scale was a lot smaller. But it forced me to go through this exercise in a very real way of, you know, I don't feel like I'll have a lot of time, you know, especially with going overseas and internet connection and things like that to answer support tickets and the future livelihood of my marriage might've rested on that as well. And so I had to literally download my brain and what I did is I put it into a Google doc and for me, it was the scripting. It was the tools you need and it was just, you know, for me the perfect place to start.
DC: 14:07 And it was a perfect exercise to pull all this out of me. Cause this is definitely one thing. As you're, as you're starting out, it's really hard to carve, carve out time. But, but you know, if you're an owner or listening right now and you and you have a part-time or full time or maybe a handful of full-time team members, you know, I would go ahead and say whether you do this hypothetically or giving yourself a 10 day, two week vacation, whatever it may be, it will force you to update your process in a very real way because leading up to that vacation, you're just like, oh my gosh, does everybody have the tools and procedures and visibility to accomplish their job? And so it's a great forcing function. So, so jetpack went through that and then we ended up going through that just about every, every 12 months as we continued to grow, updating the process, thinking about how we can improve transparency. But yeah, the best way is to just start in, the best way to start is to leave the country for 10 days and handed off to somebody else.
MP: 15:06 I love the analogy and I think it's an awesome way to have some fun with it too. Write a book on a holiday and get ready for the holiday cause you, you know, you don't have to do that work but then you get a nice big reward cause you're going to be on holiday. I mean essentially to remove yourself from the business. That's what an entrepreneur is trying to do, right? So bookkeepers starts a business and wants to maybe get away from just doing the books or doing the all the work themselves and get up to maybe more consulting level of where they're helping their clients or you know, having a business that actually, if they're very entrepreneurial, having a business that actually produces income without them. That's the idea is to remove yourself from the entity and the entity. Still, be able to produce the promise for the customer and produce a profit.
MP: 15:53 That's ideally what we're trying to do. And so what a great analogy. If you want to remove yourself from the business, you got to remove yourself from the business and then actually all with the consequences, right? Because it's not going to go well essentially. And we, I mean that's what we've built, right? Pure Bookkeeping was built by a woman, Debbie Roberts, who essentially did that for her business on every single level of the business. There were explicit documentation and instruction on how to do the very best job in her firm, and now we've just taken that and you know, have hundreds and hundreds of bookkeepers that follow that same system and use it and implemented in their business. But really that's the process that we tell of you. We want to do it yourself. It's a lot of time. It's a lot of work, but it's, it's possible because Debbie did it and a lot of your clients are doing it is it just starts with one checklist.
MP: 16:44 It's one checklist. I can't remember if you and I talked about checklist manifesto, that book, I don't know if it was you and I, but it's essentially the, the premise, right is how do you ensure things get done while you need a checklist and then the system simply becomes, it's what you did. You've got to go away on vacation. Oh my goodness, I need a checklist for, for my person here. And then they're going to need, oh well they're gonna need more information about each step of that process. So you can start to fill that out and give more context around what that means and if that goes wrong, but you can't build it unless you start. And it just starts with simply five things on a list and then that turns into 10,000 like you, there would be the Pure Bookkeeping system. But what I love about Jetpack is that you now have brought technology that is not for every day, you know, like does generic like a San others' Trello.
MP: 17:33 Those are like generic platforms that help generically everybody, right? Any business can pick it up and start to use it and manipulate it to work for them. Yours is different. It is an overlay on a very specific narrow industry that's helping them solve their problems with technology. And that's why I love it. Uh, and while I think our clients are loving it, is that it's a great overlay. It's bringing technology that's, that's useful, that helps them, that they can then bring to life and implement or ensure that what the, the system that we've created in pure bookkeeping actually gets done. And there's a great technology to help you do that. I worked in technology for a while myself before doing what I'm doing today. And one of the biggest failure points for technology was implementation, right? If you don't use it, it's useless. And so you've got a success team that helps people get using it.
MP: 18:27 Any technology, an excel spreadsheet is a piece of technology that will help you manage a checklist. However, is it the best technology? Maybe, maybe not likely not, but it's better than nothing. And if you use it and you know how to use it and it works for you, then it's a, and it's a good piece of technology. So, so what I love about what you guys are doing is that it's saying, okay, well how can we really help people use the technology, produce a better technology that helps them do it and help them be more successful with it through, through coaching and mentoring and, and helping them get to where it actually used being used inside their business.
DC: 19:04 Yeah. Well, this is us taking our own medicine. So you know, if, if for the folks that, you know, have listened to our podcast or kind of absorbed some of our content, the big thing we interview around and recommend around is, is, you know, solving and helping your clients get to their end desired. How come, you know, w you know, it's a profit margin, take home cash more time off or whatever it may be. And so because of that, you know, I check pack, we, we adhere to the same approach. And so we know that you know, an owner is not laying in bed at midnight, completely stressed out sinking. If only I had one more software app in my life, then everything would be perfect. No, they're thinking, oh my gosh, should I remember to follow up with that client that I missed that due date?
DC: 19:51 Um, did I, did I check in with that team member? I worried about that new hire. Are they onboarding quickly enough? They have all these types of questions. And so as a company we say, well how do we get the owner to that end desired outcome where they can answer those things very, very quickly. And part of that is setting up the tool. And so because we're so obsessed with this kind of outcome approach, then that means that we invest, I think, you know, proportionately more than other companies do into helping firms get set up. And we do a lot of this is as a complimentary service because we want to get to that outcome. We want to have the client information in there. We want you to have standardized templates that are set up in there. So we do everything we can to help, you know, firms get on board and then, you know, kind of the on the same side of the coin, you know, if you're listening right now, your, your small business clients are thinking the same, same.
DC: 20:38 It's not about taking look at specific lines of certain, you know, financial documents. They're, they're thinking about, you know, how long can I sustain a business? Maybe they're afraid about running out of cash. Maybe they're having issues with, with profits or they're working harder, but they're making less, um, where they want the flip of that and they want to make more and maybe even take more time off. And so we think that the same way we think, how do we get these owners to their and desired outcome. And then, you know, once they're set up in the application, then it's a matter of, you know, trying to understand where do they want to go as a business. Do they want to be the high-level consultant and they want to have some helpers or do they want to be kind of more of a CEO and run different departments and be very, very large firms? Um, some of that we can help with and some of it we certainly do not, and that's where pure bookkeeping steps in. But yeah, that we are absolutely passionate about trying to understand where you want to get to as a firm owner and then trying to use our tool as an accelerator to get there. But that's where we also invest in services. So we, you absolutely get set up.
MP: 21:44 I love it. Think with the end in mind, it's one of the seven habits of highly effective people. The book that was written, a famous book that was written and that's essential, I love it. It's on in multiple layers. You've got your customer, what's their end, but as well their customer, what's their end, if you can help your customer, help their customer hit their end. I mean we're, we're talking tic TAC toe here, which is, which is pretty cool.
DC: 22:07 Yeah. And just to make that very, very tactical. So we went through this, we went through this training a couple of months ago, um, for US firms where they were, the tax due date deadline was coming up. So we went through this training of, you know, how to make sure your, your practice is set up to, to manage the upcoming deadlines and due dates. But then, you know, kind of after that, you know, for firms that do offer a tax, and now obviously it varies for bookkeeping and CFO services. But you know, one thing that some of our tax firms want is they say, well, we want to do more advisory work. We want to, we don't want to just talk with owners every January, February. And so we say, okay, well you know what you want to do, you know, you know, you're gonna talk with them about different strategies to save on taxes for the upcoming year.
DC: 22:54 Well then book and recurring mid-year check-in inside of jetpack. Here's your checklist, you know, step one, schedule the call step to go through the free consultation checklist. Step three, you know, Clint, the tasks in there, set them up to reoccur on the first of every June or whatever it may be as a mid-year check-in and roll it out. And so I think like owners, you know, I'm sure listening, you have a lot of ideas of things that you want to do for clients. Probably a lot of its around check-ins or becoming more of an advisor and I'm sure you have all the knowledge you need to execute on having those check-ins and walking owners through inventory management or just the profit, you know, benchmarking profitability against the firm, but then set that up as a recurring thing that you're going to roll out to clients and in check in with them every six months. Don't leave it up to willpower or whatever you do because your willpower is a pleading and like in a given day, that's why typically food decisions are worst late at night, not in the morning. So just, you know, try to set these things up so they're, they're really recurring. Both services. You don't have a big service in your trap, but even all these other small items, just, you know, be sure to send out a midyear checking email with clients, things like that have you could be big or small.
DC: 24:03 Beautiful. Absolutely. And it's, what's interesting about the human mind is we're, we have the ability to retain every single image thought, idea, everything goes into our brains. But accessing that is not something that we are good at. So if I think the number is 21 seconds, you've thought of something that needs to get done. If you haven't recorded it somewhere, that will remind you, it will be gone in 21 seconds. And so that's the big problem that's going on is that some people are good at keeping a bunch of stuff, uh, intact. But as you said, once you start to move and scale beyond the few people that your natural abilities as human beings can, can handle, you're gonna, it's gonna fall apart like a cheap tent. And that's not going to be good for business.
MP: 24:51 Yeah. And, and for the owners that are listening right now, that are already overwhelmed with their workload. Um, cause we, we definitely have talked with those and they said, well this sounds great but in a given week I just feel burned out by Friday or Saturday evening depending on when they stopped. You know, they have a small team because they've hired a small team there. Their time is now stretched between being high-level practitioner, um, then completely in the trenches practitioner at sometimes and then also as a manager. And so for the, for those that have made their first couple of hires and the workload is Olin increased and you see the benefit of trying to become a more process-focused organization than what I recommend. And I recommend this for anybody even if if you have, but it's free time, do this as well, which is to include your team in the process of putting together the process.
DC: 25:37 Now it's a little Meta but your team also has valuable input on what should be documented, what should be added. And you can roll out a project in which anytime a team member asks you something, you just put it into a Google doc. And so now you have this repository of answers and you just make it so, and if they have a question for you and you know you're on the road and you answered on the phone, they need to put it in the Google doc and you just have them part of the process and you have them also update and enhance and give feedback to it. And not only does that help you put together your process or your scripts faster because they get to take on some of that, but I do believe it helps with your team retention because then they take a lot of ownership over how the, how the business is being built out. Your practice is being built. The best team members are going to absolutely love being a part of that and they're going to contribute, you know, in ways that are going to be so valuable that you didn't foresee them contributing but, but please include them in the process. It's great for your own sanity, for your own time. And it's great for team retention.
MP: 26:38 Yeah. Beautiful. So I'm going to ask a couple of questions here cause I think for the listener looking at, they don't know anything about your company, I'm going to help speed up the process for them to evaluate what you, what you're doing. And so what would you say jet packs best features are?
DC: 26:58 Yeah, so we have this thing called the jobs tab, which for those that are coming from a project management system, jobs and projects are essentially the same thing. We just happen to call them jobs. The reason this tab is so important to us, and it's, it's the most used one inside the application is because you can set up your, your initial job or set it up as a template. So here's our bookkeeping services, here are the five steps to complete it. It happens at the end of every month. It's on a recurring basis. You set that up, you duplicate it out to your 50 or 500 or 5,000 clients and all of a sudden you have these standardized recurring checklists that you can manage in the system. And so you can see the job, you can see the job due date, you can see all the tasks associated with that and the progress of them, whether it's been started or not inside of a single area.
DC: 27:47 And so when, when owners get set up, they're there. There's kind of two Aha moments. The first one is when they finish rolling out the, the, you know, tasks and jobs to their clients and they're shocked that it was kind of that straightforward to do. And we try to make it as straightforward as possible cause we know that's a big leap getting set up. And then the second one is once you have the information in there if you need to quickly pull up, show me bookkeeping clients in the search bar, you can do so. Or if you want to pull up a client file, show me, you know, Chris Stello bookkeeping, then you can pull up that and see all their outstanding work, the progress of all that work. It really is the Goto, you know, control center for your practice where you can check off work, you can track work, you can set it up that that is the place and that's when you're going through it. It has a look and feel of kind of this project management tool but built specifically for firms that have, you know, a large majority of recurring work for a number of clients. They need them.
MP: 28:49 Beautiful. Cool. That sounds very exciting. I mean, I, I'm intrigued. I think for the listener it's, it's starting to be more, let's have a look at this. What does this look like? And I know at the end we'll, we'll give them information on how they can go and start having a look at what, what you're doing. I'd like to know as well, where are you taking it in the future? What are you excited about, uh, in your development?
DC: 29:09 Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean this is one area that we are just super passionate about. Um, both working with, with current customers, talking with prospects and then some of our own internal ideas. Um, we are investing very, very heavily. We've actually just doubled the product team. There's a case that it could be doubled again by the end of the year. So for us we feel like the, the initial step of the product was the project and kind of task management level and we started to venture into other parts of going into a fuller practice suite. We want to do it in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming because we've seen practice management tools and they, they ended up being kind of this Frankenstein application that's very, very hard to set up and use. So we started with this recurring job management in the, in the near future we're going to bolt on and we started to do this.
DC: 29:59 We just released our one-way GMO integration, client email integration. So having one place to view the client communications between you or between your team and the clients. So we're doing a big push around more client collaboration, client communication saying, so email integration is on the near horizon, being able to assign work out to clients. So whether that's for onboarding clients or, or you just have recurring things that you need from them. Um, you're going to see, uh, some, some pretty major features, uh, coming up this year around that. And then we have a, we have an entire new uh, interface that we're rolling out this year and again, we're going to do that kind of section by section just like you would update a, uh, home more or less. So those are kind of the near term things that people are going to see. And then kind of longer-term, again, we're, we're passionate about helping firms from start to finish manage their clients.
DC: 30:52 So building out that, that fuller practice management experience, time and billing, better client portals, things like that, um, are also being put on the roadmap. And so those are the high-level things. And then there's a whole bunch of kind of smaller updates we do as we go integrations, we kind of, you know, queue up as, as we're exploring that opportunity. Um, but yeah, those, those are some of the features that people will soon, uh, see more of.
MP: 31:23 Beautiful. It's really exciting, really exciting. So let's, let's talk a little bit about..
DC: 31:30 Sorry, I forgot. Oh my gosh. I can't believe I forgot this one feature. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt. No, but, uh, so, so one thing I didn't mention, you can kind of an earlier point is inside of the application we are tracking budgeted versus actual time. We're tracking your turnaround time to understand the velocity of the job.
DC: 31:40 And so there's already reported in the system. It's the metrics downloaded, it'll show you target due date versus actual duty, the number of days you thought it would take versus the actual, uh, the budget of time versus the actual, and it can give you an understanding of the profitability broken down by client or job category or if a team member. And so that's a downloadable report. Right now you're going to start seeing those reports appear in the application, uh, starting this year and it's gonna continue to be enhanced and, uh, even start to potentially earn some benchmarking stats around that as well. And to help you understand where your firm is measuring up against the other firms as well. But so yeah, we're reports are gonna be a really exciting, uh, uh, feature that we're digging into.
MP: 32:23 That's exciting. So tell, tell the listener how they can get access to a trial of jetpack workflow.
DC: 32:31 Yeah, absolutely. So if you go to Jetpackworkflow.com/freetrial, it will take you straight to a signup page and you get two weeks, uh, unlimited usage of the application. You can add as many team members, you can create as many jobs, you can attach as many documents, upload as many documents, as many clients as you need. It's really the full version of the application. And a couple of things about that free trial. One, every new free trial that comes in, you get an email directly from me and it says your in Smiley face. Quick question. So if anybody listening replies that email and say, hey, heard, heard about jetpack through pure bookkeeping and the podcast with Michael, I'll go ahead and just throw an extra week onto your trial so he gets three weeks out of the free trial. I'll also make sure that you get set up to have a personalized one-on-one walkthrough of the application so you can really expedite your own research to see if it is a good fit for us.
DC: 33:30 That's what that trial period is about. It's not this kind of high-pressure sales environment because we are a subscription model. We want you to be very successful inside of jet pack because that's how we succeed as a company. And so really that personalized walkthrough is just making sure it is a good fit, highlighting some of the features that could be very, very impactful, uh, for your firm. But yeah, if you go to jetpack, workflow.com/free trial two weeks that you also get access to the template library. So you can drop in a few sample templates if you want. I'll add that extra week into your trial. I'll make sure we send over the calendar link so you get set up with a personalized walkthrough as well.
MP: 34:11 Beautiful. Well, I think that's amazing. Amazing offer and a, I'm sure you're going to get a lot of people opting in just to have started having a look at this. It's a must-have any practice that's growing. You have to bring technology to it. This is a great place to start and you know that's why we wanted to have you on the show. Helping our customers be more successful is exciting and I'll also mention as well pull back the curtain a little bit on the pure bookkeeping system is we have our checklist which is called the session checklist and again that will be on this episode. We'll have a link to go in, get to the free resources section and you can download our session checklist and have a look at that and how that can help you work better inside of David's wonderful program that he's built. So this is, this has been great. I really think that our listeners going to get a lot of value checking this out if they're not already using it. So thanks for being on the podcast.
DC: 35:09 Absolutely. Um, been a big fan of the content you've been putting out there and, uh, thanks so much for having me on.
MP: 35:15 That's right. Absolutely. And don't forget, as we mentioned in the beginning, there's Growing Your Firm podcasts that David hosts with all sorts of great guests as well. So make sure you check that out. And, uh, and thanks again for listening.
DC: 35:28 Thank you, Michael.
MP: 35:29 That wraps another episode of The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. To learn more about today's guests and to get access to all sorts of valuable three business-building
MP: 35:38 resources, you can go to Thesuccessfulbookkeeper.com. Until next time, goodbye.
