Bookkeeper Uses Float to Help Clients Pay Themselves
Iyanna Vaughn is a virtual bookkeeper based in Atlanta, Georgia and owner of iyanna.co. But she’s not just any bookkeeper — Iyanna specialises in providing monthly bookkeeping services, coaching and business advice to entrepreneurial women.
Like all business owners, Iyanna’s clients want to have successful and profitable businesses. But the single most important goal most of her clients have in common is the desire for a meaningful and reliable income.
As an experienced bookkeeper, Iyanna knew that it wouldn’t be possible to help her clients achieve this if they weren’t able to understand and engage with their numbers.
At first Iyanna tried using the Xero Budget Manager to build a picture of her clients’ finances. But the profit and loss view did not provide the clarity she hoped. It doesn’t show any taxes, for example, or when debtors will actually pay their invoices.
As Iyanna explains, “clients can be profitable with a P&L, but have cash gaps and not be able to pay themselves what they want.”
In addition to the information gaps, her clients also found it very difficult engage with. P&L just wasn’t helping deliver on their most important goal.
Soon Iyanna came up with a 3-step plan to guide her clients towards success:
- Talk about cash – Ultimately cash is what makes the difference between her clients paying themselves at the end of the month or not. It’s more real than a profit and loss view.
- Start with goals – Instead of starting with accounting data that was difficult for clients to wrap their heads around, she started setting goals and used the accounting data to explain progress towards those goals.
- Visualising cash & progress – In order to truly get through to her clients, Iyanna needed a way of visualising both the cash movement through their business and their progress towards their goals.
“I realised that to help my clients understand their numbers I needed a better picture of cash and where it’s going; whether my clients are planning for a new service structure, product launches, or a new team member”.
After a bit of research Iyanna discovered Float. By presenting a cash view of her clients’ businesses, Float enables Iyanna to show her clients exactly how much cash has been moving and how much will move in the future. She uses the scenario tool in Float to communicate clear action plans to her clients to make sure they can pay themselves a regular income.
Now Iyanna has a visual tool that her clients can engage with. And because Float automatically updates, she doesn’t have to spend billable hours manually reconciling data. Instead she’s able to dedicate her time to planning ahead with her clients, using Float to frame important conversations about how to minimise outgoings and maximise cash coming in, leaving enough headroom for her clients to take the drawings they want (and deserve!).
5 months later Iyanna now has 8 full time monthly bookkeeping clients, 4 of whom are on her “premium plan” which includes Float. She says it has transformed the way she works with them:
“One client has been able to increase her income by 40% in the last quarter. She’s been able to pay herself more than enough to live on, which means she now has extra cash to re-invest in the business and I am able to offer more services to support that growth.”
Iyanna used Float to help another client create a plan to make $250K by this December. And she helped a third client cut costs dramatically, enabling them to pay themselves properly with the leftover cash.
Float has helped Iyanna over-deliver for her clients, expand her services beyond pure bookkeeping, and clearly communicate progress towards clients’ business objectives in terms of cash.
