EP242: Heather Smith - What Apps You Should Use For Your Bookkeeping Business

Ad Read: I went into so many businesses that just simply had income as a single line and then had 300 expense lines. And I'm like, well, how do you know which service or which area is doing better than the other? And they didn't know. They had no idea. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back. Welcome to the Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a fantastic one. Our guest is an Australian who hosts the accounting technology podcast called Cloud Stories, curates an accounting apps newsletter, and is the author of Xero for Dummies. Heather Smith, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Michael, for having me on the show. Really looking forward to this, and hello to all the listeners out there. Yes, wonderful to have you. And really, I'd love to— I mean, what an interesting bio you have. I'd love to know your career journey leading up to this point.

Excellent. Yes, I'd love to share that with you. So I sit at the intersection of bookkeeping, accounting, and content creation, and I'm educating the community about accounting apps, which is something that I'm really passionate about. I love bookkeeping accounting and I chose to study it because it's an international language and really enabled me to travel. So I've lived and I've worked in England, in Singapore, in Canada, and now I'm based here in Brisbane, Australia. I always say that my practice fits in my handbag. I've gone completely virtual and I work with clients across the world. And when it was permitted, I traveled extensively. So I've run a micro— a virtual micro business since about early 2000s. I'm obsessed with how effective automation and integration can produce timely, clean data, and I work with clients in various different areas, but I'm sort of very focused on the education piece now and the content creation piece. Very cool. So you, you— how did you get involved in all of this technology around the accounting industry?

I think I'm an early adopter of technology when it comes to everything. So it was, uh, as soon as they started, um, coming on the market, I was always the first tester. I think I'm, I'm