In this episode, Perry Nunes walks us through how Found can revolutionize the way you handle everything from bookkeeping to taxes.
Highlights:
Resources:
Try Found today and see how easy managing your money can be. Sign up using our exclusive link to get started with Found for free! https://found.sjv.io/reneebowen
*paid partnership with Found; Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Business banking services are provided by Piermont Bank, Member FDIC. The funds in your account are FDIC-insured up to $250,000 per depositor for each account ownership category. The Found Mastercard Business debit card is issued by Piermont Bank pursuant to a license from Mastercard Inc. and may be used everywhere Mastercard debit cards are accepted. Filing business taxes through Found is applicable for Schedule C filers. Found's core fea
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In this episode, Perry Nunes walks us through how Found can revolutionize the way you handle everything from bookkeeping to taxes.
Highlights:
Resources:
Try Found today and see how easy managing your money can be. Sign up using our exclusive link to get started with Found for free! https://found.sjv.io/reneebowen
*paid partnership with Found; Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Business banking services are provided by Piermont Bank, Member FDIC. The funds in your account are FDIC-insured up to $250,000 per depositor for each account ownership category. The Found Mastercard Business debit card is issued by Piermont Bank pursuant to a license from Mastercard Inc. and may be used everywhere Mastercard debit cards are accepted. Filing business taxes through Found is applicable for Schedule C filers. Found's core fea
BOOK A FREE DISCOVERY CALL WITH RENEE
LEAVE A REVIEW in 5 seconds flat
JOIN the Podcast & Creative Community
LEARN MORE about Renee at
www.reneebowen.com - main site (photography + coaching)
& www.reneebowencoaching.com (coaching + courses)
SOCIALS:
Instagram
Facebook
TikTok
PHOTOGRAPHERS: Join ELEVATE:
https://reneebowen.com/elevate
FREE TRAINING for Photographers
Make sure you TAG me when you post on social and once a month, we choose one person who leaves us a review and we'll send you a FREE audible book of your choice!
Welcome to Tried and True with a Dash of Woo, where we blend rock-solid tips with a little bit of magic. I'm Renee Bowen, your host, life and business coach and professional photographer at your service. We are all about getting creative, diving into your business and playing with manifestation over here. So are you ready to get inspired and have some fun? Let's dive in. Happy Wednesday.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to Tried and true with a dash of woo. I am your host, renee bowen, and I am excited to chat with you guys today about a topic that most of you probably don't want to talk about, but that means you must. Okay, as tony robbins always says, if you can't, you must. I know that talking about your finances and and how to organize them is not something that is fun or interesting to most of us creatives, but it is necessary and I found a phenomenal resource for you that we are going to introduce you to on this podcast. Quick disclaimer this is a sponsored podcast. I'm working in collaboration with Found and we are going to introduce you to what Found is and what it can do for your business. But here's the thing I do not endorse products that I don't actually use and believe in, so you need to know that going in, I think this is a really great resource and, yes, it's a collaboration, but I don't just do straight ads and things like that. I think this is a really great resource and, yes, it's a collaboration, but I don't just do straight ads and things like that. I want you guys to actually get some education on the things that I believe in.
Speaker 1:So today I'm speaking with Perry and he is with Found. He's going to walk us through the platform so that you can actually see what it is capable of, because unless you actually see it, it's going to still feel foreign to you. Also, if you're listening on a podcast platform, you're probably going to want to go over to the YouTube channel and watch it, because he is walking us through and sharing his screen. So below in the show notes, you're going to find the link to my YouTube channel. Click that and you'll see the video. That's what I would prefer that you do for this episode, because I think it's important for you to see how cool this platform is and how effective it can be for your business.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we're going to get right to it. Let's jump in. Hey guys, welcome back to the show, where we dive deep into turning your creative passions into a thriving business. I'm Renee, your host, and today we're tackling a topic that touches every single one of us managing our business finances with ease and, hopefully, some insight. Today we're joined by Perry from Found, the all-in-one banking app that's revolutionizing how freelancers and entrepreneurs handle everything from bookkeeping to taxes, so we're going to explore how integrating tools like Found can not only simplify your financial workflow, but also empower you to make smarter, more informed decisions that propel your photography business forward. Hey Perry, thanks for joining us here today. I am very excited to have this conversation with you, because it is something that's so, so needed in our community.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, Renee, for the kind intro.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course. So Perry is going to be showing us around. So, just as a side note, I know that if you're listening, you can still definitely listen to the podcast, but he's actually going to be showing us around found, and so he's going to be sharing his screen. So this is also going to be up on YouTube for you guys. So definitely check that out. The link for that's going to be in the show notes so that you can find it easily. And, just as a side note too, I created a PDF for you guys that's also going to sort of help you with all of this stuff and help keep you organized. So make sure that you get that link from the show notes as well and follow along there. So, yeah, I'm excited, let's let's dive in very Share my screen to make this a bit easier.
Speaker 1:I'll sit back over to you to dive in.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, I can see all of that. So, as you know, cause you and I have had this conversation before and you know we've been talking in my Facebook group as well with the photographers there. We know that this is like a big point of contention for people just in general finding a platform that is going to work for us, that's going to do what we needed to do and also, like, not make us feel super overwhelmed. So, you know, on the live, we were talking about how a lot of people just don't look at our resources even like enough, but sometimes at all, right, yeah, so I know that that's a big, big problem and you know we were definitely talking about ways of, you know, making that more fun, and I'm a big believer in all of that. But I want you to kind of walk us through what that could look like, right? So, for someone like us, someone who is a freelancer, a photographer, and how that could work for us using found as well, because I feel like it's so nice when people have a visual.
Speaker 2:For sure, yeah, and I find it's often helpful to start this conversation around like what is the status quo? How are people currently doing this today? You know and Found has been around for several years and has worked with tens of thousands of freelancers, and so I pulled together a snapshot of what we've seen that freelancers and self-employed finances often look like with the example of my good friend, phyllis, who's a photographer and I'd love you to chime in and add some more colleague here because I know you're a photographer yourself. You work with a lot of folks in a variety of coaching programs but I think Phyllis is really representative of kind, of the opportunity, but also the struggle of being self-employed. So, phyllis, she started a wedding photography business, big money there, she loves it, she captured that special day and it actually started as a side hustle. She was a full-time W2 employee working in marketing, was doing this on the side and then realized like wow, this actually has some legs and this could become a full-time thing.
Speaker 2:It's a story we heard time and time again of like side hustlers turned, turned passion project, turned career. She's a sole prop and she's the only employee, so she she's a one one woman show, but she does often work with a lot of other self-employed people, and that's something we often see with folks that are working for themselves and have their own businesses. They often have a lot of other contractors and subcontractors they're working with a lot of other contractors and subcontractors they're working with so photographers I know we've talked a lot about second shooters or lighting collaborators, design collaborators, where you're often paying each other and passing projects together and collaborating in various ways, but sometimes there's a lot of administrative work that comes with that, even if you're not a full-time employee, and so we'll talk a little bit as we dive into Found about how we manage some of that complexity and make it super easy to collaborate with other self-employed folks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's big.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then the last thing I'll say is I mean just in terms of lifestyle. Here I mean, phyllis loves the independence of running her own business, but there's a lot of the thing time and time again she says is there's a lot of like financial and administrative overhead for being your own boss. You don't have, you know the, you don't have your company to be taking care of things like tax withholdings. In terms of managing you have to be kind of not only a photographer but also a CFO and an accountant and all these other roles that that folks in bigger businesses will play for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it all falls on us and so that's really a lot of pressure. I feel like so many of us creatives, right, we, like you said, we kind of like Phyllis we fall into it and then we realize, oh my God, I actually have to know what I'm doing when it comes to like the numbers, and no one else is going to come to save me. So, yeah, this is a big, it's a big issue For sure, and because of that, phyllis's finances are kind of all over the place.
Speaker 2:So she'll, she'll be the first to say this. It was like she, as she started this on the side hustle, she decided, oh, I'll, just I'll, I'll send invoices and have people pay me in my personal bank account. I don't need a separate business bank account. Um she, she Googled, like how do I do bookkeeping? And got QuickBooks and tried QuickBooks, but quickly got lost in it. It was like way too complicated and way too expensive. And so now she literally has a Google Sheet that she tracks her expenses so she can find potential write-offs. She will like auto attach receipts into a folder. It's like really clunky. Really manual Taxes she has an entirely separate workflow and she tried TurboTax, but there was all these nuances about being self-employed, and so she's now looking for an accountant to help.
Speaker 2:And then she has a bunch of other tools. She doesn't want to create her own invoices, so she uses an invoicing tool. Business has really picked up and so she started to use her own CMS as a separate tool. And then a lot of folks want to pay in a variety of different ways, so she uses demo, she uses Cash App and so she has like half a dozen different tools she's using for business finances and it's really hard to keep track of, particularly around tax deadlines and goal planning for each of the years coming up.
Speaker 1:Yep, phyllis is a lot like the people that I work with, so yeah, I get it, I was Phyllis.
Speaker 2:Totally, and so Phyllis is not alone. I believe you did this poll, so I'll let you run through this, but this is a really interesting snapshot of, like the general population of photographers and where they stand in terms of their financial organization.
Speaker 1:Yeah, super common. This is a poll that I had done in my Facebook group just recently asking people like you know, where are you kind of at with all of this? How organized are you? You know everything from. How often do you look at your finances and all that kind of stuff?
Speaker 1:And really this was the main takeaway here is that very few people are super organized about how everything looks. There's always that small percentage and you know that's awesome, but for the most part, it is this you know this middle, this middle one here. Like I know what I'm supposed to do, like I've heard what I'm supposed to do or somebody's told me, but I'm not really organized and I just kind of leave it to the last minute, because it's just like anything else, if you don't like doing it and if it's not, you know, fun, it's so much easier to like. Just put that aside, because we have so many hats that we have to wear in our business and so many things that we have to do. So that just gives a left until you absolutely have to deal with it, which is usually tax time and that's not a good place to be.
Speaker 2:Just gives a left until you absolutely have to deal with it which is usually tax time, and that's not a good place to be. Totally yeah, why? Why be organizing the books or preparing tax paperwork when you could be writing a creative brief or doing a photo shoot? I totally hear you.
Speaker 2:And so we'll talk a lot about this kind of this emotional and like psychological side of running your own business and how found has been specifically designed with simplicity and automation in mind and consolidation in mind, so hopefully it can streamline a lot of that and give you peace of mind, while also letting you focus on what you actually love, which probably isn't paperwork.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but enough about the problem.
Speaker 2:Let's switch gears and talk about Found which I'm excited to walk you through the platform.
Speaker 1:Me too. I was pleasantly surprised by the platform when I logged in.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Can you see my screen? Now it should show found. I can. It's saying hello to you, renee, at the top here with hi, renee, perfect.
Speaker 2:This is not for full disclosure. This is not Renee's formal account. This is a sample account, but this is illustrative of what you'll see within the Found platform. Yeah, one thing I'll say before we dive in. I know my compliance team wants me to read one disclaimer which is necessary whenever we're talking, so to keep me honest, I'll read this out loud. But yeah, I just want to reiterate.
Speaker 2:You know Found's a financial technology company, we're not a bank. So the actual banking services are provided by PureMount Bank, which is a partner of ours member FDIC. The funds of your account are FDIC insured to $250,000 per depositor for each account ownership category, and the Found MasterCard business debit card is issued by Piermont Bank pursuant to a license from MasterCard Incorporated and may be used everywhere MasterCard debit cards are accepted. Found's core features are free, but we also offer a paid product, found plus. I know it's the fine print, but it's good to say up front yeah, and we'll dig into some of that as we click through the platform and what that all means in terms of the banking experience provided to our banking partner. Now back to the fun stuff.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, as we talked a lot about thus far in this call is you know, running your own business is often like very disjointed across a lot of different tools, and we find a lot of people like Phyllis are using, you know, one business banking provider, one tool for bookkeeping, one tool for invoicing, and it's really hard to keep track of all those different processes, particularly when those processes are interrelated. So, for example, in your bank account you have all these different expense information, but if you want to flag those expenses as being a tax deduction, you need to import that to a tax software or import that into QuickBooks for bookkeeping, and it becomes a big administrative pain to be able to manage all this different data in all these different places. And so our founders realized this and thought why not build this all into one app? Why not have a business bank account, a full-featured business bank account, where you can add money, move money, pay people, have a debit card linked to that but then also build in all these embedded tools around taxes, bookkeeping, invoices without even leaving that app? And so today we'll walk through the desktop experience of what that looks like. On Found. We also do have a really sleek mobile app that a lot of our users prefer to use, just because it's quick, easy, you can do it on the go. But for today we'll jump into the desktop experience, and so when you land here you'll see kind of the core banking homepage, and so this is where you can see a snapshot of everything going on in your found account, and so at the top you'll see your total balance, which is all the money in your found account.
Speaker 2:There's ways to add money. So, like several bank accounts out there, you can get direct deposit. You can add money to your bank account through a bank and wire transfer. You can deposit cash or check or, if you're using other popular apps like Cash App and Mo. Those are all ways of getting money into your account. And then, similarly, you can move money, and so that's both moving money to yourself, which is like in between different sub accounts, which we'll talk about in just a second, called pockets. You can send. If you say you have, like a personal bank account that you want to be transferring money up, to say, a portion of your business income. You want to be paying yourself, you can do so there to a debit card, or if you want to send it to others. So if you're working with other people and you want to pay them as a contractor, we'll talk about how you can do that in Found and manage a lot of the complexity in doing so or otherwise paying other people or other businesses just like any full featured, online only business bank account.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:I'd say the first big difference between Found and any other business bank account is the ability to set up what we call pockets. And so, you see, here we have our total balance here about the left, but then underneath we have several of these, um kind of some smaller sub accounts or pockets, pools, sub pools of money, um, that have different names and are for different, um, either budget you know, budgeting for different parts of your business or for different savings goals you've set up as part of your business, and so, by default, your founding account comes with two different pockets your primary pocket, which think about as your main pool of money.
Speaker 2:that's where money is, by default, getting deposited into your account as well as your taxes pocket, and so I know last week we talked a lot about one of the big financial mistakes that freelancers and self-employed people often make is not having a tax strategy in place. Yeah, and a big part of that is, you know, when you work for yourself, you're not having taxes withheld from your paycheck from your employer. Each month, you also have to pay self-employment tax, and so, as you're gearing up to pay on a quarterly basis your estimated quarterly taxes, a lot of people will realize like, oh crap, I didn't set aside enough money here and they get hit by an unexpected tax bill, which can be a really painful process, particularly if you don't have that money in your account anymore. And so what Found has really done is, with the taxes pocket, what we'll do is allow you to automatically set aside a proportion of any income coming into your found account and set that aside in this sub account for taxes, so they give like a tax savings pocket. So if I click in here, I can see that there's all these different income streams that I have into my found account.
Speaker 2:Microsoft I did a collaboration with Eventbrite, youtube there are two wedding shoots and if I go into the settings of this pocket, I can see that, oh wow, there's actually a percentage that has been set for all of the income coming into my found account that I'm gonna be automatically moving into this taxes pocket. So this can be smart. This can be a smart percentage where found will automatically kind of recommend what percentage of your income we should be setting into the taxes pocket based off of some information about your business, about your income, about your filing status, or you can set your own percentage and so you can say hey, I know that I live in New York State, I know the tax rates and I know my full financial profile, and so I want to set 25% of all incoming income into my account to go automatically into my taxes pocket. Nice.
Speaker 2:And then, lastly, you can set none, and you can manually transfer between pockets at any time. So if you want to be able to kind of get a recurring exercise, maybe during that weekly date, with your money, to transfer money manually, you can also do so free of cost.
Speaker 1:Sweet, that's awesome. That makes it so much easier.
Speaker 2:Totally yeah. And we've seen people do this in spreadsheets, where they'll keep it all in their main business bank account and then they'll have different line items in a spreadsheet, and we felt like, why not allow you to visually see where all these different pools of money are and then put it on autopilot and say, hey, I'll let Found give me a smart percentage I should be setting aside? I'll then be able to actually generate my tax forms based off of this financial data which we'll cover in a bit and even file my taxes from the Found app with that information. Therefore, I don't have to toggle between tabs, between the Excel spreadsheet, between TurboTax. I can do it all in Found.
Speaker 1:That is so helpful and, honestly, just the visual of it is so nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I'm very much a visual learner. I imagine a lot of photographers are. And then the fun thing is you can set little custom colors and icons as well for the design folks out there to make your banking experience a bit prettier, which is not a sentence that's often said.
Speaker 1:That's actually really helpful because I mean, you know, as we talked about before in the live and just in general you guys are probably hear me talk about that a lot you know, like if if we like doing it, we'll do it, and so you got to trick your brain into thinking that it's fun. So it's cool that you can customize that, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, and so those are the two, that. Those are the two pockets that come by default the primary pocket and the taxes pocket.
Speaker 2:You'll see here though that in this account we have a few other different pockets that have been set up for either different savings goals so gear and equipment or for different kind of like expense categories or like portions of your business. So here there's money set aside to pay second shooters. Here there's a rainy day fund which is currently empty, but I bet this person's focusing on filling that up. So if you click into each of these pockets, each of these can have different deposit allocations that you set when you're creating the pocket. So in this case, the gear and equipment pocket Renee here is setting 10% of every incoming deposit aside to save up for, say, a new camera or a new piece of lighting equipment.
Speaker 2:She has a savings goal attached to this one, saying, okay, I know that that equipment's going to cost $5,000.
Speaker 2:And so she can see how she, in real time, is tracking against that of just over $2,500 here.
Speaker 2:And she can even link a specific virtual card that only can be used when using the funds within that pocket. What that means is I talked a little bit about how we offer you a business checking account with all these different sub-accounts. We also offer you a physical business debit mastercard, so a debit card you can use for all your business expenses. We also, if you click into the cards tab, in addition to that physical card, allow you to set up virtual cards. So these are these are cards that are with just numbers that you can use online, and you can you can assign different virtual cards for different categories of your business, and so this is really helpful because you can. You can. This allows you to really stick like create a budget based off of what are the different expense categories or parts of your business, or even entire separate businesses that you have, and then make sure that you're managing your expenses so that you're only spending expenses when you actually have the money within that category, within that pocket.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that, I love that. That's really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I remember. So last week we talked a lot about another big mistake is not having a budget and also not having a budget based on cash flow, this concept of like how much money is coming into my account, how much money is going out, and then how can I budget based off of that, and so, between the banking tab and the cards tab, it's a really powerful system of budgeting and cashflow-based budgeting where you can set up different pockets for different goals or different parts of your business. You can automatically make sure that you're kind of filling up those reservoirs as you get income based off of these deposit allocations that you set, and then you can auto-assign virtual cards to make sure that you're controlling your spend relative to how much money is in each pocket.
Speaker 1:That is so cool, like and again, like I know it seems like a lot like to kind of think about, but the way that it's set up I don't know it visually makes it so much easier for me to. It just feels better. I can't explain it and it kind of just makes everything feel a lot more calm. You know, because, like historically, when I log into any kind of banking thing, it's just like ah, it's a lot, and those of us with, like overstimulated brains it'll shut us down. So, like I don't know, I think this is very aesthetically pleasing as well.
Speaker 2:That's great to hear. I'll pass along your feedback to our design team. Yeah, we're very proud of the design, and this is. This is again. This is the desktop experience. There's a really sleek mobile app as well, for iOS and Android. That's all equally calming and in the palm of your hand, so I highly recommend folks check that out. So these are two. This is kind of the central nervous system your, your, your, your banking tab and the cards tab, where you can create virtual cards and assign them to pockets and set spending limits based off each card.
Speaker 2:I do also want to double click into the taxes piece. So we talked a little bit about the taxes pocket and how you can auto set aside money dynamically for taxes, because those quarterly tax payments come up pretty quickly and you want to make sure you have enough money. We do have a separate taxes tab which will pull in that information on how much money is in your taxes pocket, as well as in real time. We'll give you what do we think that your tax estimate will be, and so that's both a combination of how much federal income tax and then, in the case of this account, the person's based in New York City or New York State, rather. So how much state tax, and then, in the case of this account, the person's based in New York City or New York State, rather. So how much state tax. You'll note that there's a slight difference in between these two, and that's because this is how much you set aside, based off of all the income. The tax estimate will then also take into account.
Speaker 2:If you tag various expenses in your account as tax deductions, it'll lower your taxable income and therefore give you update in real time what your tax estimate be and so we'll talk a little bit about what that looks like in the app as we move to the activity tab, but really, really powerful in that because we are your bank account, we have all your income information, we have all your expense information and allow you to tag expenses as tax deductions, we can in real time calculate this is how much we think you owe for taxes. Wow, and even better, the cherry on top is we can help facilitate you actually filing your taxes through the app. So we work with a partner, call and Tax, where you can click start filing. You can securely share and sync your data from found to Call and Tax and then actually prepare your taxes and file your taxes online in that way, sweet.
Speaker 1:That is super cool. Yeah, I love that real-time estimate. That's awesome. Yeah, again, like those little things that you don't think about, that really make a big difference.
Speaker 2:Totally Like those little things that you don't think about, that really make a big difference Totally. And you'll see the experience when you, in just a second, when you tag an expense as a tax deduction and you get a little like real-time dopamine rush when you say, oh, actually, by tagging that I saved X amount on my tax bill. I'll show you that in just a second.
Speaker 2:I love that, and so activity is what I was alluding to, which is this will look similar to like a bank statement or a credit card statement, where you'll see all of the different income and expenses, as well as any pocket transfers that happen between those different sub-accounts, all on a list sorted by date, and there's ability to do a lot of fun things here in terms of categorization and tagging to stay organized on your books. This is a lot simpler relative to some of the other like bookkeeping software out there where you're getting kind of swallowed in this complex logic of rules. We try to keep this super simple, specifically designed for solopreneurs and business owners who are owner operators and work for themselves and don't have a finance department. And so you'll see here the bottom May 3rd, I had a really productive day and I got all of this different income from Eventbrite, youtube, two different wedding shoots, but you'll also see a bunch of different expenses in here. So not only is this tracking income, but it's also tracking all the different business expenses that could be potential write-offs and could be potentially lowering that tax bill.
Speaker 2:And so here, for example, benihana this was on May 3rd. I went on a business dinner to Benihana, so it's a tax deductible expense. However, it doesn't have a category yet. So what I can do is I can click into Benihana. It says needs category and there's an ability to if one of these two tools. So this is not a contractor service, this is not a software subscription, but I can search down this library of different business expense categories, and so in this case, I'll search for meals. Great Business meals is a category. I'll select that and, wow aha, I saved $12.37 on taxes by categorizing that business expense.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I love that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a, it's a. It's a nice little moments of joy while you're in the middle of your it is.
Speaker 1:It is like, honestly, because this part of it and I always recommend like doing this stuff once a week, you guys like don't let it get too far behind, but like knowing that you get to see like little pops of, oh, I save money, that's pretty cool yeah yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:Um, and then also, as you see this, this, this expense panel has a bunch of different things you can do as you get more sophisticated with your expense management. You can add note. You can add notes. You can add tags yeah, associated with that expense. Um, you can. You can attach that here if you're using the desktop version, or you can just snap a photo if you're using the mobile app.
Speaker 1:Oh cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then you'll have some additional information on the expense, like what pocket is it associated with, which card, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you can just do that in real time, like after your dinner you know what I mean Exactly, yeah. That's that's really important your dinner.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. Yeah, exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:That's, that's really important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no more, no more like shoebox full of receipts. Yeah, I will say so. This is. This is an example of all the different income and expenses you have in your found account, and I think it's we've seen it most powerful when you're running all of your income and expenses through found. That said, sometimes people are using different credit cards or different apps, financial apps or maybe they're still using QuickBooks and they have some data there. There is a way to add transactions, either manually or from other accounts.
Speaker 2:And so you can. Either you can enter an expense you wanted to to um have that expense captured so you you can see that its impact on your business. You can do that here. You can also connect other banks and apps, as well as popular apps like cash app and quickbooks, to import transactions to this activity log from external sources nice, okay, yeah, so, yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's like the hub.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, so this will be like the single source of truth and it will feed into that real time tax estimate. But there might be a world in which you still have transactions outside of found, in which case you could use this connected accounts feature.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's good, okay, cool, and so this is a transaction level view of your activity.
Speaker 2:If you want more of an aggregate view, the reports tab is really is a really helpful view, and I remember in the live last week we were talking a lot about various time periods, your income, broken down by separate vendors or types of income.
Speaker 2:You can do that here. Similarly, expense as you categorize them, you can see, ok, what's the breakdown of, like where I'm actually spending money on my business. So like, oh wow, I'm paying contractors 71 percent. 71 percent of my categories expenses were for contractors. So that means I have a contractor-heavy business and I can help you sense, check and say like where might there be opportunities for cost savings or reallocation of funds when you get this kind of like bird's eye view of your income and expenses?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it looks like it's a lot easier to run the reports too than some of these other things, like it's just it's not like super complicated so you can just see it right there like profit and loss, like a lot of people don't even know how to run that. So this is, you know what I mean like. So that's really, I think, important that it's just right there for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's right there for you, just another tab in the same banking platform, um, and if you want to export it, it's also really easy. So we have an export feature where you can generate a PDF of any of these reports. Also, there's this ability to share with an accountant. So a lot of people ask me is like is Found trying to replace accountants? Should we work with an accountant? Like, what do you recommend? And it kind of depends. So, like Found can both be a standalone, really powerful tool for taxes and bookkeeping.
Speaker 2:A lot of people are on top of it and they want to use it by themselves. Other people say, like I have this account I've worked with for 20 years. I want to keep working with them, but I want to make it more efficient, in which case this accountant access would be really helpful for them. Or you can essentially put the full name email of your accountant share access to select parts of your found account to allow them to view these reports, to allow them to manage transactions, to access tax documents that are generated within the platform, which makes their life easier, your life easier, and ultimately just streamlines the whole process, even if you're still using your account.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really cool. I mean that could also be used like if some people have bookkeepers right, like so, like they know that this is a big pain point for them, or they're not super, they're just really busy, so they have someone who kind of does their books like. This makes it so easy to grant that person access to just get it done.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and it speeds up their life Like they don't have to go through cleaning up all your receipts transactions or digging, digging into that shoebox of receipts. It's all cleaned up and categorized already. Great. So, yeah, we've walked through a lot of banking cards, taxes, expense management. There's some other bells and whistles that we've built in over the years based off of what we hear self-employed business owners need.
Speaker 2:One of those is invoices, and so we heard a lot of folks are either building invoices by themselves or they're using separate invoicing tools, and we figured why not build that into your bank account and allow folks to send an invoice from this centralized place, allow the person receiving that invoice to pay in a variety of different ways and then have that income come directly back into their bank account. It get classified as income and do all the things that we talked about as part of the banking tab. So I'll show you what that looks like. It's relatively straightforward, but I already have a handful of business contacts here I wanna add an additional business contact. I can kind of treat this as like a lightweight contact book, which would be really helpful both for invoices, so like clients that I'm asking to pay me, as well as contractors that I'm paying to talk about on the next tab but say I want to create a new invoice. It's relatively straightforward.
Speaker 2:I did some work for Ansel Adams. It was a client of mine, it was a nature shoot and it was $1,500. I can adjust things like the quantity. I can add a discount. You can see here the dropdown of the various payment methods that the person will see when they click on the link that's sent to their phone number. So they can if they have a found account, they can do a free, instantaneous transfer from their found account to my found account Really powerful if you're working with a lot of folks that I found or want to want to encourage them to sign up for, found to make that a really frictionless process. But similarly we work with other really common payment providers, things like we integrate with Stripe and allow folks to pay on credit or debit, direct debit, cash out pay.
Speaker 2:So the nice part is like it's all coming to your same account but you're allowing people optionality as part of the recipient experience to choose do I want to pay with found, do I want to pay with a credit or debit card or do I want to pay with found? Do I want to pay with a credit or debit card or do I want to pay with cash app and a couple other things. Here is just like the manas, the invoice workflow. We allow things like payment reminders, so like if it's the due date's passed at the three-day mark and the seven-day mark, we've built in some features to send reminders for folks to pay the invoice and then similarly, things like scheduling sending that right now when you press send or on a certain date, and then like when you know, are you operating on that 15 terms, that 30 terms?
Speaker 1:you can set custom terms on when exactly things are due. That's awesome. Yeah, this would be really good too for people who are not necessarily using like a client management system yet, or they want to just like keep all their invoicing in one one place. Maybe you still want to use your crm for other things, but all your money can be in one place.
Speaker 2:Like that's kind of life-changing actually definitely and if you want to review I'm sorry preview of what that invoice looks like. Again, this is all customizable, but it's very simple, very sleek and you can see what they'll see when they see the invoice. So pretty, pretty simple and nice to have peace of mind that you have something that looks professional and not something kind of whipped together and brushed up on the side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2:So, speaking of contractors, I think a really powerful tool here and we've alluded to it a couple of times in the call is the contractor management tab. So the idea here being, if you're self-employed, you're often working with other self-employed people or other contractors that maybe are not full-time employees but are often doing work or doing work services for you. So there's the need to not only manage, um, the you know those contacts, but also manage paying those people and then and then if you're paying those people more than six hundred dollars, a lot, of, a lot of folks don't know this, but there's actually like a tax form that you need to be filling out, a 1090 109999 NEC come tax time that reports the income that you paid them. And so I'm curious what you've seen folks do you know, either in your own business or in?
Speaker 2:the businesses you work with, of like one like what are some examples of contractors people are working with? And then two how are people handling that headache of actually like sending folks a 1099?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I know you know makeup and hair artists. A lot of a lot of us, including myself, some people pass that on as a separate, you know, like they have their makeup artists charged separately. I've always included it from the very beginning because I want it to be more of an experience for my clients and I don't want them to have to, like you know, deal with multiple things. Um, so it's just a choice, but that's a big one. So I have to um issue that every year. Uh, second shooters, obviously is another one. Um, even like retouchers, anyone that you have like helping you with your business.
Speaker 1:Virtual assistance is a big one. A lot of us have VAs, you know, because we just need a little bit of help with admin or like even a bookkeeper or anyone that you're having to pay, like you said, more than $600 in that year. You're going to have to issue them a 1099. And what I've seen most people do is run around and be like oh my God, it's January 20th, I have to get this done before the end of the month and the forms are gone. You have to go to, like you know, you have to go physically to the store, get the forms. They're not there. It's like a nightmare if you don't plan ahead.
Speaker 2:So yeah, Well, hopefully this will stop you from running around, but I'll walk you through how our contractor management features can help ease some of that pain. On both making payments to contractors. But listed in the contractor profile Ansel is also a contractor, tim, julie and James he's a frequent collaborator of mine. We have similar aesthetic styles. I want to add a new contractor who's not on this list. It'll show me automatically a list of all my found contacts and so, for example, abed here, if I have him in, say, maybe he was a client of mine or he was otherwise a business contact. He's not yet tagged as a contractor, but I'm actually. I want to make a payment to Abed, so I'm going to select him Immediately as I set him up as a contractor. We can help send him a new contractor packet and so, essentially what that is, it's requesting his W-9 information, which is a form that will have information that you'll need in order to populate his 1099 come tax time.
Speaker 2:You can either send him a packet. You can enter that information manually if you have it, or you can skip. For now I'm going to send it and request as an incent. You'll see in the contractor management tab that the W9 status here is updated accordingly, and so I've requested it for Ansel. It's missing for Tam and Abed. I just requested it and so that's reflected in the contractor management. If I click into his contractor profile, you'll be able to see over time, as you interact with that contractor, what's the status of the W-9 form. If I hadn't just sent it, I could send a reminder or I can add that information manually.
Speaker 2:I can track all the payments I'm making to that contractor and then ultimately, once you have the information from the W-9 and you have all the tracked payments, you can actually see the 1099 be generated based off that information, which is pretty powerful, wow. Also, if you want to understand what the payment experience is as well, there's this button up here to pay a contractor. Say I want to pay Julie and I work with her on a project $750. I can choose back to the pockets tab. I can choose which pocket do I want this to come from. So I actually have a pocket set up for Second Shooter, so I'm gonna choose that.
Speaker 2:I have enough money there and I can add a note if this was for the wedding shoot, I want to track this as a 1099 payment so that in the activity tab it's auto categorized as a contractor payment and therefore is flagged as a business deduction, a deductible expense, and it'll update my tax estimate in real time. After I do that, it'll confirm who I am through a one-time password to my phone, so I'm not accidentally sending a payment to the wrong person and, alas, that's off. And ultimately all those payments will be tracked in the 1099 payments report. Or you can see where all the payments that were over $600, where there's this obligation to report, and then where were the payments below 600? But I don't need to report.
Speaker 1:And you can do all this from the app as well, correct?
Speaker 2:Yep, that's exactly right. That makes it so much easier.
Speaker 1:I'm just kind of like blown away by the whole 1099 thing. I love that. I love like the whole packet, the thing that you can send out, that you know, just get that done, because most people are just waiting to the last minute to get it, you know.
Speaker 2:Yep, cross off your list. It's all in the same experience. I know we talked last week a lot about procrastinating on tax work, and so the idea here is we make it super easy, super, almost even delightful to be asking for tax information so you can be really organized and not leave it to the last minute. Through a lot and I know we're probably coming up on time.
Speaker 2:I did want to click one into our final tab here which is business toolkit, and so this, the genesis of this was we realized there's a lot of other products and services that found does not offer, or at least does not currently offer, but we want to connect our users with, because they're going to need those products and services to successfully run their business, and so we partnered with a variety of kind of preferred partners in each of these categories to allow you to, you know, get an EIN for your business and click out and do the sale with our partner.
Speaker 2:LegalZoom start an LLC, get small business insurance through one of our two providers as part of the toolkit, get set up with a business email through Google Workspace, auto insurance through one of our partners here, as well as loan options. So this is intended to be kind of a one-stop shop for everything beyond banking, taxes and bookkeeping and we're like hey, we hear you, you have all these other needs about incorporation around communications, around insurance, and so're going to link you up to trustworthy providers that we've vetted and we think would be a good option for you.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. The business insurance as well. Like and just kind of like making sure I love that you guys thought of all that. It's really cool.
Speaker 2:Definitely, and I guess, needless to say, as you can see by the app, this is ever evolving. We're constantly talking with our customers and understanding what are your needs, both within some of these core capabilities, but also in terms of additional capabilities, and so we're always looking to improve this and evolve this, and I think that's one of the benefits of working with a really nimble organization versus a large, slow-moving bank. I won't name any names. We're constantly innovating and trying to improve this for the people we're serving.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to ask you that how often things are updated and all of that. So that's really good to know that you guys are listening to your customers and wanting to refine and offer more options for us as well, because, yeah, you're right, like you don't get that with your run of the mill bank.
Speaker 2:Totally. And the last question I often get on all this people are like, wow, this is amazing. But like, how much is this going to cost me? What is the price? Here we do have a pretty detailed overview page of Found versus Found Plus, which is our premium subscription. The good news, which often stuns people, is the majority of what I just showed you. So banking pockets, expense management, real-time tax estimate, virtual cards, sending invoices, paying contractors all of that is included in our free option. So actually there's no subscription cost or fee whatsoever, or no required fee for you as a customer for our bank, and so we make money for merchants as you swipe on the debit card and things like that, um, or if we refer folks out to our, our preferred partners, which allows us to make our, the bulk of our, our core features, free for for the people actually using the product. We do have found plus, which I just wanted to ask you about that yeah.
Speaker 2:So found plus um is our, is our premium plan where there is a subscription as part of it, and so if you go to foundcom slash plans you can learn more about what's in each. But I mean a quick side by side is, as you can see, on Found the free version, the bulk of the banking kind of core features you're getting included. What Found Plus will give you will allow you to earn some interest on balances up to $20,000. And so if that's something that you value a lot and you want to be earning interest on that money, found Plus could be a good option for you.
Speaker 2:In the activity section. So in some of the bookkeeping functionality we talked a little bit about like setting up custom rules and categories and tags linked to your expenses you have unlimited manual rules and tags as part of the free version. But if you want to automate that and create custom built tags, categories and rules, there's a limited number of those you have during the free version and so if you want unlimited, found Plus could be a good option for you. And then a few other features around auto auto importing expenses by scanning a receipt, some of the connected account feature I talked about in the expense categorization and then, for folks who are on the annual plan for Found Plus and our Schedule C filers, that you can actually file your taxes with our partner for free through the app.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:All things to consider, as you're saying like, hey, do I want to just do found and use that for the bulk of the features, or do I care a lot about making interest on balance, a bunch of different custom rules and expense management and filing through their partner?
Speaker 1:Right, and there's like a 30 day free trial anyway, correct?
Speaker 1:So people can just try it and see how they like, and all this information, I'm going to have a link for you guys in the show notes so that you can check it out and just, like you know, sign up for the free trial, at least for sure, and just and see, you know, play around with it and get some integrations going, to see how that looks for you. I definitely um want you guys to to check this out. So, perry, I have a question for you too, like from the perspective of someone who is like Phyllis right, who is coming in from kind of running their business by the seat of their pants, um, they want to be organized, like they know that that's really important and they want to do that, um, and so they decide, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to give this a shot, right, I'm going to sign up for found and just start playing around. What is like one big piece of advice that you can give that person to not get overwhelmed and to like be successful with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say I guess two that are related to each other. One is like start small, and so, like I would say it's free to sign up for the app, it's free to familiarize yourself with the app and so maybe start, you know, putting some money in there and testing out like what that workflow could look like for you as part of your weekly and monthly processes. This doesn't need to be this painful exercise of like ripping out all of your financial processes from five different apps and moving that all at once. Like I think you can test into it and familiarize yourself with the app. You can use the free version or even a free trial, found plus Plus, so there's not additional expenses involved.
Speaker 2:And then I would say, in addition to starting small and testing into it, staying consistent in that you talk a lot about the weekly date with your finances, so start incorporating Found in your weekly date. Have a weekly date with Found and see, pour yourself a glass of wine or a lemonade and use found as you're kind of like weekly reconciling as you put more of your data there and income and expense data and found. Start to like do trial and error and learn as you go and then over time. If you think it's valuable, then like great, then get all of your income deposited and found and use the found debit card for all your business expenses. But it can be a gradual process that doesn't have to be timely or time intensive or super costly or disruptive to your status quo before you kind of commit to switching entirely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really great advice Definitely take it one step at a time. I feel like as creatives a lot of times we we tend to just kind of like go all in, do all the things you know and try, try and bite off way too much. Um, because we want to just like, yes, we can do it. We have the focus in that moment and then we're like, oh my gosh, that that was too much.
Speaker 1:So breaking it into chunks like that it's great advice just in general, but especially when it comes to stuff like this, and especially if you have like money triggers, like especially if you either have like scarcity issues or if, like, looking at your bank accounts is triggering, this is actually, I think, a really great way to reframe that because, like I said before and a few times, aesthetically it doesn't have the same feel as a lot of the things that you look at, and because it's different, I like that you can create that like neural association with it being different and be like, oh okay, now we're doing it this way, Now we're making it peaceful and calm, now we're having and so you really have to, you know, be the the ruler of your mind when it comes to that stuff and like step in and say, nope, this is how we're doing things now, and this is my weekly date with found and you know, and it's pleasant, so you can also time yourself too.
Speaker 1:I think that helps me. Just as a side note for you guys like I'll set a timer, sometimes like just for like an hour, like okay, I'm going to get through as much as I can in an hour and then I'm going to move on to something else, and so that way you don't get so burnt out. And then, of course, if, like that, the timer goes off and you're like, oh, I'm almost done. You know you can kind of finish it up, but that for me sort of helps as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. We want this to be bringing a little bit of joy, if we can, to your financial process, and really the end goal is to reduce the amount of time you have to spend on finances so you can actually spend time one running your business and two living your life. And so, as you test into it and integrate that weekly date with found, hopefully those dates will go shorter and shorter and more efficient and you'll be having a healthy business in no time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love it. Awesome. Well, this is great. Thanks for doing all of this for us and walking us through it, because this is also part of the thing that I think can be really overwhelming for people. It's like, okay, this sounds great, but like now I got to sign up for it and poke around myself, but you've already done that for us, so that takes away that pain point for sure for you guys. So definitely watch. If you guys listen to this on the podcast, make sure you head over to YouTube and watch the screen share, because I think that the way that Perry is, you know, breaks it down for us. It makes it so much simple more simple than you trying to poke around and figure it out on your own. So thank you so much for doing that and for being here.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure and I hope you all learned a little bit more about found and how we can help you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course. Yeah Again, I will have all of that information for you guys in the show notes and you know there's information out there for you, so don't feel like you can't find it. You know, reach out to me on Instagram. You can always DM me. I'm happy to point you in the right direction if I can. So, all right, perry thanks a bunch.
Speaker 2:Thanks, renee.
Speaker 1:Thanks, thanks again for having me and have a good day. I really hope that that gave you a lot of great insights into what Bound can do for your photography business and how much easier it's going to make your life. And if you want to try that out for free, I highly suggest you do that. Sign up below at the link. All of this is in the show notes for you. I want to try and make this as easy as possible for you. Again, my goal is for you to be profitable. You can't do that if you're not looking at your numbers.
Speaker 1:So below in the show notes also is a link to the YouTube video that Perry and I did as a Facebook live in my photography Facebook group last week. So if you're not a member there, you might want to go ahead and listen to that, because we are also talking about the five financial mistakes that I see photographers making and how to avoid them. So you can watch that video as well. And now that you've seen this video, you have a really good idea of what found can do for you and your business. So again, that link to the other YouTube video is going to be down there. The link to try found for free is going to be down there as well and, again, you can do a lot with that free account. So you don't have any excuses. Okay, you need to find a system that is going to work but that you're also going to use. Don't get something and not use it. That's the whole point. So I hope that between last week's live that hopefully you tuned in for or listened to after this, between that video and this video, I hope that you have a more clear picture of everything that this platform can do and I'm happy to answer any questions as well, because, yes, I do use it as well. Hit me up at Instagram at Renee Bowen, or you can now in the show notes you'll see the little top thing, very first thing. It says text us a love note. That is an actual thing. You can click that link and then just send me a quick little text feedback question, whatever it is. That's a cool new feature that my platform that hosts my podcast is doing for us. So use that, or hit me up on Instagram or email me at renee, at reneebowencom. I'm always excited to hear from you guys and I'm always excited to get reviews and ratings as well, so you can do that by going to ratethispodcastcom slash reneebowen. Thank you again, bound, for partnering with me on this show, and I am looking forward to introducing all the listeners here to your platform. I think you guys are doing such an awesome job and I personally love it.
Speaker 1:As a side note to all my photographers who are listening we are heading into the last week of May. We're about to jump into June, so if you are a high school senior photographer, you might be wondering how the heck am I going to get clients right now, because this is sort of that dead zone. Typically, that happens between one class and another class right, we're ending class of 2024. And then, if you don't have bookings already for class of 2025, it can feel really stagnant for you because a lot of people aren't thinking about booking right now because school's over and they don't want to think about school. So if you are struggling with that, you need to head over to my blog. That link is below for you as well.
Speaker 1:I just posted the last few days a really awesome blog post that walks you through all the things that you can and should be doing to get new clients, because I want you to get some cashflow into your business ASAP and, as always, if I can help further. You know where to find me. So go out there, get some cashflow in your business, get those bookings. You can do it. You just need to brainstorm probably about a few different ways to do that, and what matters is your intentionality Okay that and who you're being, because, remember, you don't get what you want, you get what you are. So you need to be that energetic sequence and put that out into the universe, and it's hard to do that If you're living in scarce mentality. I have tools that help with that. Those are going to be below as well. Let me know if you need any further guidance and have a phenomenal rest of your week. I'll see you guys next time. Love you, bye.