This solo episode is inspired by a question from our community about wrangling client communication and staying organized. Tune in to hear some practical advice to keep you out of your inbox and your business running smoothly!
In this episode you’ll hear:
managing client emails
streamlining client communication
utilizing central client care inbox for team visibility
Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram stories and tag me, @ambitiousbookkeeper
For more information about the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:
Thank you for your support of our show. If you haven’t left a review yet it’s super simple. Please go to ambitiousbookkeeper.com/podcast and leave your review.
This solo episode is inspired by a question from our community about wrangling client communication and staying organized. Tune in to hear some practical advice to keep you out of your inbox and your business running smoothly!
In this episode you’ll hear:
managing client emails
streamlining client communication
utilizing central client care inbox for team visibility
Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram stories and tag me, @ambitiousbookkeeper
For more information about the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:
Thank you for your support of our show. If you haven’t left a review yet it’s super simple. Please go to ambitiousbookkeeper.com/podcast and leave your review.
Have you ever wondered how to wrangle and organize all the different places that you communicate with clients? Or maybe you're just starting your business and you want to set things up for ease and success. Right from the start. Well today, we're going to tackle client communication and hopefully keep you from getting overwhelmed. This episode was inspired by an audience question. A bookkeeper wrote in. The area that I'm struggling with is communicating with my clients. Sometimes it's over email. Other times it's through spreadsheets on our shared drive. And I feel like I have information all over the place and with some duplications. sometimes my clients only have a short time to chat and it's difficult to prioritize what to discuss. It would be good to know how you manage these areas of your business to keep things moving in, organized. All right. So if you're a struggling with clink communication too, you're in luck because today we're going to unpack this one together. I'll be sharing my recommendations on how to streamline communication and organize it for your own internal use as well. But it's going to take some commitment on your part. So are you ready? Let's dive in. I'm going to preface my advice with this. I don't know the size of this firm of the bookkeeper who wrote in, I don't know the volume of communication that is coming in. All I can do is assume, but I will try to give some multifaceted advice that can be applied in various size firms. So if you're listening and you have a team that is also responsible for helping manage client communication, you may want to have them listen to this episode too. Or you can take notes and relay what you need them to implement. Chances are, if you're feeling overwhelmed with communication, being all over the place, then so is your team. I'm going to begin with the first part of the question. Communication with my clients is sometimes over email. Other times it's through spreadsheets or our shared drive. And I feel like I have information all over the place. And with some duplications. So first off I'm going to tackle. A sub section of this question where she asks about communicating through spreadsheets. on the share drive. So we have a couple of clients where we do communicate through. A Google sheet. We have each of our clients, we give them a suspense report, or if you're in QuickBooks, it's an ask my accountant report of all the uncategorized transactions that we need their support in. Either some information or whatever. So all of our clients get one of those each month, we use the same one every month. So we're sending them the same link. We've streamlined things, and we just create a new tab for each month transactions. In that spreadsheet, they typically will write in what it is that we had questions about the answer, the questions on the transactions. This is something that you want to make sure you have in your monthly checklist to go back through this. Suspense sheet or ask my accountant or uncategorized, whatever you call it internally. Have a task where you go back through that. And you mark everything off, you implement it into the, or record it into your bookkeeping software or relay information to your team or update your bank, feed, rules or whatever you have to do. Make that a task. Check it off. And then don't worry about that spreadsheet. Now there's other clients where we have spreadsheets that are like budgets, basically. And occasionally our clients will. Assign us something through that. Budget Google sheet or, you know, create a comment. And tag us. So then we get some email alerts and this might be what this bookkeeper was talking about. And so in those instances, we make sure that whoever was tagged, right? If it's me, I'm going to use myself as an example because typically I'm the one that gets tagged in these communications. Those emails are going to come to my email, my serena@ofcoursebookkeeping, email. And so it's my responsibility to action those, and then mark them complete in the Google sheet when they're done. The way that I operate is if something's in my inbox. As unread than it needs action. So if I look at that email, I open it and then I'm like, I don't have time to go in there right now. I'm looking at my phone. I'm not going to be able to do this right this moment. I mark the email as unread. And I come back to it later when I'm at my desk. So this is something I would recommend you do something like this with your team, where if they're getting assigned something in a Google sheet. They adopt some sort of rule like this, where you mark your email as unread until you're able to action it. And then once you are able to action that you've completed the task that the client assigned you in the Google sheet. You can mark it as done. You can close out that comment. And then, you know, that it's done. However, if there's something that then needs to be relayed to the team, you would just have to make it a habit to communicate these things with the team. So let's get into how to communicate and relay things back to your team, or keep notes in your own internal records. If you don't have a team so that you don't forget about these things. So we prefer to. Have most of our client notes now are living in notion and that is becoming our project management system. He'll probably talk about this a lot later on. As we're currently in a transition from Asana into just having everything in notion. Currently since we're in this transition. I'll talk about Asana. we do keep, and this is going to be the same in notion we have a client overview page where we have client nuances, where we talk about different things that are unique to that client. So if there are certain types of transactions that we want to make sure always get coded a certain way, that may not be always captured by a bank feed or something along those lines where we've made a decision and we want to make sure we're consistent with it. We put that in. The client nuances. And so whether that's in Asana or a notion, you want to have some sort of document like that. Where whoever is working on the bookkeeping every month can pull that, that document and know what the heck is going on with the background of the client. So that's one place that you want to make sure you relay that information to whether you have a team or not, because eventually you're going to forget all of these decisions that you've made about clients in order to keep things consistent. And you, you want to have that document. Plus, it's just great. If you do end up hiring and then you don't have to explain everything. You can just refer your teammate to that client overview. So that's one area. If it's something that, for instance, Is a new thing that has come up with a client and we want to make sure that it gets communicated to the team. We will. Put it in that document, but also. Ping the team. in an internal slack channel. So we have slack channels labeled as each of our clients, as the topic, but our clients don't have access to our slack. And so I will put things in there to tell people, okay, look, I added, we we're adding this process. So if I added in Asana task or I added it to the overview or whatever the case may be, I also relate it to the team in the channel related to that client. That way everyone knows that there's something new. And we use that slack channel to communicate about what's going on with the client. We try not to do any like back and forth communication within Asana. Because it gets lost really easily. And people don't see alerts all the time and things like that. So, That's our process for communicating. Things across the team. I'm going to caveat this, that, like, even though I'm talking about this. And, this bookkeeper had the question about, it feels like there's things duplicated everywhere. Yes. That's going to happen when you are effectively communicating across all channels and to the whole team. You're going to end up duplicating some things. So like I said, you're updating the client overview and you're also updating the team that you updated the client overview. You don't necessarily have to copy everything in there, but you can refer the team to the client overview and say, Hey, I've added something to the overview. Everybody. Please take a look and let me know when you've. Looked at it or whatever. So there are going to be times where things are duplicated in, not just. Is a product of over-communicating, to be honest. Okay. So, what is the best format for client communication in your team? This is a question that I want you to ask yourself. If, what I do sounds like it would work for your team by all means. Take it and run with it. If you don't use slack or a, a chat function with your team, or you're not in a remote environment and you want to have maybe team meetings about stuff. Then do that, but ask yourself the question. What is the best format for client communication for me and my team. If it's email. Even if it isn't, I'm a strong proponent of setting up a central client care inbox. This means that whatever email service you use. Gmail outlook, you create a common one email inbox, like help at or support at that the entire team has the login to and can add it to their email client so that everyone can monitor the communication coming in from the client. I don't know if I specified that now we're rolling into communication with the client. Not among the team. So if the client emails, one of your team members directly, you want to create an expectation and rule with your team and your clients. To be honest, that we're trying to move all the communication to a central inbox so that everyone has visibility to what's happening with our clients. So if that client emails someone directly, whether it's you or someone else on your team, copy on your reply, copy the help or the central inbox, whatever you end up naming it. And remind the clients, please email this email address going forward so that we all can see the communications and things. Don't get buried and lost. And people's personal inboxes. And then Once you have, you know, trained your team and your clients to only communicate through that central inbox, the help inbox or whatever. There's always going to be a thread. And it can be tracked by anyone on the team so that anyone can pick up where anyone else left off. So at any point in time, for example, I can go into the outbox for our help email and see what activity is happening from my team to my clients. And it's wondrous. I can go in there and see all the financial summary emails that go out at month end and have peace of mind that things are done. We also use an email client called spark. So rather than outlook, we use something called spark where we can create shared drafts and co-write emails to clients. And this becomes really handy when. We want the email to come with my email signature as if I wrote it inside the help inbox, but I need the team to fill in information that they have at their fingertips, because maybe they're the ones that are working on the account and they needed something escalated. So. Maybe We've been waiting and waiting and waiting on a client for something, and they're not really responding to the team. So it becomes escalated when I go to communicate. And usually that's when the client jumps on things, when I'm like, Hey. My team has been waiting on this information and we can't move things along without it. And so I will draft that email. The team will pop in like the link to the spreadsheet that they need the client to look out or whatever it is. And then the team can send it off when they're ready and it looks like it's coming from me. We also, like I mentioned before, have this rule that if it's still in the inbox, we know someone still has to do something with it. And if it's one person on the team And we have one person on the team that's ultimately responsible for keeping the inbox clear and to nudge people if things are outstanding for too long. for instance, if there is an email in there that's assigned to me and it's like three weeks old. Someone on my team will be like, Hey, Serena. Do you remember what's going on with this? Why it's still sitting here. And a lot of times I'll be like, oh, whoops, I forgot to archive it. But sometimes it is in there for a reason because I don't want to forget about it. And I don't want to forget to follow up either. So this is something that you could have an assistant manage for you as well. So the majority of our external communication with clients actually happens through email, which is, um, Kind of funny that I named this episode the secret to staying out of your inbox, but. Hear me out. So. The majority of our external communication with clients happens through email among the team. We do not communicate through email. We communicate through slack. So if it's about a client, we communicate in the client slack channel. Related to that client. But our external communication mostly happens through email with our clients. And that's why we have that help inbox. So we are not emailing from our individual emails to clients. We want everything to be in that central inbox. We also do have a couple of clients that get zoom calls and Voxer access with me. And so for those clients, whoever is the person that is communicating with the client on zoom or in boxer is responsible for relaying that need to know information to the rest of the team in this case, that's me. So I have created a couple habits to help with this. Number one. I turned on the AI meeting summary for zoom in my meeting settings, so that all meetings, it automatically runs. Instead of having the team watch a video call, I can skim the summary and pull out the action items or the updates for them. And then I put them in. The month end summary document or in the slack channel, if it's something that, I need someone to pay attention to immediately. And like I said, right now, our month end summary. Document is in the sauna project status update screen, but we're currently working on. Migrating everything over to notion. Number two, if a client messages me on Voxer, I either forward the voice note or a screenshot, the text to our internal slack channel for that client. And then tag. The team that needs to know about this update. And number three. Anything via email that is noteworthy for the team to know. I also do the same update, the slack channel. We don't put any communication in Asana tasks because it gets lost more easily. And let's talk about text messages for a moment. Cause I know that some people end up. Communicating via text with their clients. If your clients are texting you and it's your personal number that probably needs to stop. Get yourself a business number through open phone and migrate those conversations to that number. You can still text message and what's even better is it can be managed a lot, like an email. You can schedule texts for business hours and you can keep a history of communication by client. Very easily. And everyone on the team can download the open phone app on their computers. And this is how we also gather two factor authentication codes. And it's amazing. Okay. Now for the second part of the question. The bookkeeper said as well. Sometimes my clients have only a short time to chat and it's difficult to prioritize what to discuss. So as a CEO, you will have to get good at prioritizing and sometimes not getting to things that aren't as important. I always start my client meetings with an ask of the client. Anything top of mind for you that you really want to make sure we tackle today. If we run out of time. And then I usually prioritize the points on my own agenda, either on a post-it or my notebook. Of what I wanted or needed from them during that meeting. It's also our job to use the meeting time efficiently with our clients for everyone's sake. So that if you, so if you're a little chatty or the client is overly chatty, A good practice is to hold everyone accountable at the start of the call with something like.
Hey, I have a hard stop at 10:
00 AM and I have several things I want to make sure that we get to today. So I'm all business. I hope you don't mind. If we have time at the end to chat, I would love to hear about your recent vacation or whatever it is that you want to make sure that they understand that. you care about their personal life, but also we want to do business first. I promise that your clients are going to appreciate you for staying on point. And there may still be times where you don't get to everything. So when you get to where you have about five minutes left, you can say, Hey, we're about at time, but I still have about four things. This, that, and the other thing that we didn't get to tackle today, Would you like to schedule another 15 minutes this week to knock these out? Or are you okay? Pushing them until our meeting next month? Give them the option. Right? They might want to just be like, Hey, well, can we just stay on the call for 15 more minutes and knock this out right now? Or maybe they are okay with waiting until next month. And that's all right, too. Something like this puts the ball in the client's court. You've done what you could at this point. And if it's important enough for you and them, you can book another call or extend the one you're on. Don't be afraid to make that ask. That is a leadership skill that your clients are going to appreciate. All right. I hope you found this episode useful. I'm going to give you one more little tip about staying out of your inbox. And that is to use a tool like Hubdoc or DExT where you've trained your clients to not email you documents, do not email us documents. Send it into your hub doc or your decks account. And that gets organized by client. So you don't have to spend your time sifting through your entire email, figuring out, okay, this belongs to this client, this belongs to that client. I need to make sure we get this bill in and that statement and all that kind of stuff. We don't have that issue because we've trained all of our clients from day one, all documents. Go to Hubdoc, whether it's a tax document, sales tax stuff. Bill's whatever. And then I try to let them know that if it's something that's urgent to just shoot me an email that says, Hey, I sent this into hub dock. Like for example, when I'm setting up sales tax accounts, they usually get something in the mail that I need to be able to quickly get on and set up their online account for sales tax. So, something like that. the client has already usually aware that that's coming. And so I let them know like, Hey, when this comes in, let me know when you get it. but everything else goes to Hubdoc and I've also trained the team that if they do see a tax document coming in through hub dock to let me know in our slack channel, So all of this communication. Is about setting up habits and expectations with your team and your clients. And following through. So I hope you found this episode useful. If you have any additional tips for managing communication and prioritizing with your clients, drop a comment below this video. If you're watching on YouTube or if you're listening on Spotify. Or you can always shoot me a DM on Instagram. I'm @ambitiousbookkeeper and I would love to hear from you. Also make sure you're following me so that you know, when our next episode drops and if you'd like your question answered on air, like this one, you can DM me on Instagram or email me at support@ambitiousbookkeeper.com. And if you're feeling a little extra brave, you can record your question as an audio at speakpipe.com/ambitiousbookkeeper. All these links are in the show notes where you're listening or watching this. And I'll talk to you next week.
