About Us and Why We’re Hiring
Let’s Do the Books provides basic bookkeeping services to life coaches, solo consultants and freelancers. We’re different (maybe even a little weird) because our primary bookkeeping platform is You Need A Budget (often called YNAB, pronounced why-nab).
Our service is especially well-suited to clients whose businesses are very simple: they don’t have many employees, they don’t sell physical products or carry inventory, and they don’t have physical assets like fleets of trucks or widget-making machines. We provide a simple service to simple businesses, and we really enjoy it.
Who You’d Be Working With
I’m Mark Butler, the founder of the business. I’ve been the “money guy” for life coaches and other online business owners since 2014, and I’ve supported businesses that generate up to $25,000,000+ per year. For most of that time I worked closely with a small handful of clients in a Chief Financial Officer role. Along the way I started offering simple bookkeeping to clients whose businesses I understood well, but who didn’t need an expensive CFO.
In 2020 I launched Let’s Do the Books as a stand-alone service. Since then, the number of bookkeeping clients has increased over 10x, and I anticipate similar growth over the next few years. That’s why I’m hiring you.
How We Work
We work from home on a semi–flexible schedule.
I’m busiest between 10am and 2pm, Monday through Friday, so that’s when you’d be working (for the most part). Sure, we can answer client emails at any hour of the day or night, but I like to be able to close up shop in the late afternoons and evenings.
This is not a completely remote job: each month we do a bookkeeping “sprint” where we update all of our clients’ financials. These sprints happen during the first three business days of the month between 10am and 2pm. We do these sprints in person because it improves speed, accuracy, and training when we’re in the same room working together.
Other than our monthly bookkeeping sprints, we’re consistently onboarding new clients and answering our current clients’ questions. That’s why this is an “every weekday” kind of job.
That said, there won’t be a ton of work on any given day. I anticipate you’ll work 5-10 hours per week outside of the early-month bookkeeping sprint, during which you’ll work about four hours per day.
In other words: you’ll work about four hours each of the first three business days of the month, and five to ten hours per week the rest of the month.
We don’t have many meetings.
The work we do is highly-repetitive, so there’s not much to talk about in any given week. We keep in touch via text, and we’ll meet occasionally to talk about changes to processes, specific client issues, that sort of thing. When do we do have a meeting, we’ll schedule it mid-morning on a weekday, around 10am Mountain Time.
We spend 98% of our time in these three tools.
You Need A Budget. Yes, it’s personal budgeting software. It just happens to also work well as a bookkeeping platform for coaches and freelancers.
Google Sheets. If you don’t like spreadsheets, you probably shouldn’t apply for the job. We live in Google Sheets.
Gmail. Yup, we keep in touch with our clients using nothing but good ol’ Gmail.
More about the job.
You need to live in Utah, ideally within a 20-minute drive of Lehi Main Street.
This will be a W-2 employee position. I’ll provide a computer, monitor, and other accessories to make your work as smooth as possible. I also provide a $40 per month reimbursement for your internet connection.
Hourly pay, paid vacation (and the second half of December off).
Your hourly rate will fall between $20 and $25 per hour, depending on experience. (My bookkeepers typically start at $20 per hour.)
Our vacation policy is that you’re expected to take at least three weeks of paid vacation during the year.
We also take the second half of December as paid time off, and that’s in addition to the other three weeks of vacation.
Bookkeeping tasks.
The bookkeeping part of the job looks something like this:
You’ll import transactions from the client’s bank accounts, credit cards, and payment processors into You Need A Budget, then you’ll give those those transactions a category. You’ll flag transactions whose category you’re not sure of, then you’ll make sure the account balances in YNAB match the banks’ online balances.
Depending on the client’s transaction volume and number of accounts, you’ll repeat this process daily, weekly, or monthly.
At the beginning of each month, you’ll send the client an email asking them to clarify transactions you’re not sure about. You’ll use their replies to finalize the client’s financial statements for the month, and then it all repeats.
If this sounds boring, please don’t apply. I’ve been categorizing transactions and reconciling accounts for over nine years, and I still enjoy the meditative nature of the work. It also gives the same kind of satisfaction as vacuuming, mowing the lawn, or clicking the last piece of a puzzle into place. After you’re finished, you stand back and say “that’s just right.” You’ve brought a little more order to the world. Very satisfying.
We’re also using more and more custom software to automate these bookkeeping tasks. I’m writing the software myself, so be prepared to patiently help me troubleshoot issues. The tools save us tons of time, but they also break a lot. You’ll need to be able to roll with it when I say, “Give me a week to fix that bug. In the meantime, go back to the manual process.”
Client care.
Clients occasionally email with a special request or question. Your most important job will be to reply quickly, in a way that makes them feel cared for, so their confidence in our service increases, they stick with us for the long term, and they tell all their friends about us.
To thrive in this job you really need to have a basic love of people, and an enjoyment of solving their problems.
What about an accounting background?
You don’t need to know anything about accounting, but you really do need to be wired for detail-oriented work. Meticulous, bordering on obsessive would not be overstating it.
This will be a great job for you if you like checklists, processes, and systems.
If you’re wired like this, it’s easy enough to teach you the accounting aspects of the job.
Of course if you do have an accounting background, that’s a big bonus. I’d love to have a team member who can make a journal entry to fix a broken balance sheet. Man, that would be awesome.
How to apply
Please write a short email explaining why you’re the right person for this job. If you address it “To whom it may concern,” I will know you’re not a good fit. Send it to team@markbutler.com and include the phrase “nerdy by nature” in the subject line. Thanks in advance for applying; I look forward to getting to know you.