EP312: Lyla Smith - Bookkeeping Mastery: Getting Back To The Basics

Lyla Smith (Aug 9): You can never become the master of, of one thing and know it all because there's always somebody out there that knows a little bit of something that you don't have an area of knowledge in. 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 to The Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a fantastic one. Our guest is the owner of Much More Accounting and Bookkeeping Inc. And she's also a Pure Bookkeeping licensee and mentor in our community. Lila Smith, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you, Lila. And every time we speak, I'm always learning something new, and I know many in our community would say the same. And I'm looking forward to this conversation. So Lila, please, Tell us a little bit about you and your career journey leading up to today.

Ad Read: I'm going to age myself, but that's okay. I started my journey just about the same time that I started my family. So, I'm going to say back in 2002, 2003, family business. My father and grandfather are both CPAs and it was a temporary job while I raised my family and my husband got his career on the go. And 20 years later, my temporary job is still my job. So yeah, I learned from the ground up. I learned bookkeeping from having a written ledger put in front of me with a bunch of bank statements and saying, figure it out. So I remember the first time that happened, I called my grandfather in tears going, I have no idea what I'm doing. Can you please talk to me? So I learned a lot in the many, many years that I worked with my grandfather and my father and just learned how to bookkeep, learned how to tax prep, learned how the accountants like things prepared, and just a lot of the different background from starting from paper to moving it over to technology. It's an interesting journey, and I would say it's almost— I could almost say it's like an old-school way of learning the craft. It's like the apprentice model of really spending your life becoming a master of something. I guess my question would be, how have you seen your trajectory in learning bookkeeping and being a bookkeeping