How we work with you
We’re excited to partner with you!
Our goal is to make our partnership as easy as possible and answer any questions you may have before you even have to ask them. This section should help you understand what to expect during our engagement with you and your organization.
What Happens First
We meet to determine if we’re a good fit for each other.
Since no two organizations are exactly alike, we’ll want to meet with you in an initial consultation. (Don’t worry, we don’t charge for that.) In our meeting, our goals will be:
To meet you! This will be the perfect time to start building our relationship together.
To share more information with you about who we are and how we work.
To fully understand your organization and needs so that we can determine if we’re right for you.
We’ll send you some package options to choose from.
Once we have a good sense of what you’re looking for and how we might help, we’ll put together a quote of service package options. Our quotes are extremely customized, and you’ll have plenty of opportunities to fine tune them until you end up with something that works for you.
We’ll get an agreement in place and begin the onboarding process.
If you decide to move forward, we’ll send you a month-to-month engagement letter (aka agreement), create our first invoice, and begin collecting all of the necessary information we’ll need to do our work (e.g., contact information, accounting files, access to systems, etc).
After You’re Onboarded
When and how you can expect to hear from us.
We will always be available for questions or anything else that comes up throughout our engagement with you. It’s typically best to reach us via email but setting up a meeting works, too.
We offer our team flexible schedules, so you may regularly receive messages from us outside of typical business hours. Please do not feel pressured to respond to these immediately. We deeply value everyone’s time and boundaries (yours and ours) and are happy to receive your reply at your earliest convenience. Likewise, know that we will typically respond to any messages you send us within a few business days.
Of course, we will definitely respond more quickly if you have an immediate or urgent concern. Our agreements include the option for “rush” work — that is, if something very important comes up for you and you need us to drop everything to turn our attention to your organization, that is always a possibility.
We don’t want you to be surprised by any of our invoices. Here’s what you can expect to pay.
We strive to be as upfront and transparent about our fees as possible. Since we tailor our services to what you need, we aren’t able to tell you exactly what our fees will be until after we meet with you. Our pricing page can give you a rough estimate of our fees for regular, ongoing services based on organization size, complexity, and needs. But again, you won’t know the exact fees until we send you an official quote.
If you’ve signed up for these ongoing services (such as bookkeeping, payroll, financial reports, and other tasks that happen on a regular basis), we’ll come up with a flat monthly fee that will include all of our applicable services for the year. That means that your costs won’t go up during busier seasons nor will they go down during slow seasons. Ideally, this billing structure will make budgeting and planning easier for you.
Alternatively, if we’re completing a one-time project for you (such as setting up accounting & payroll systems, recruitment process for a new employee, or doing a clean-up of your financial records), we will bill one flat rate for the full project.
We don’t often bill for hourly work unless you are already a client and want to add on a small-ish project. But we never say never.
For ongoing accounting and bookkeeping, we try to stick to a timeline.
If it’s part of our engagement, we’ll aim to provide you with your monthly financial statements no later than 25 days after the month’s end. But this is heavily dependent on you and your team. We will not produce reports until we’ve received all of the information necessary for us to fulfill the obligations of our engagement and close the month.