What’s It Like to Work with Sherry

You’re probably going to hire me to fix your QuickBooks.

I definitely will. But that’s really just how the relationship starts.

At first, I’ll disappear into your data. I’ll ask you for a bunch of information and figure out what the hell has actually been happening in there. For the most part, I’ll leave you alone to run your business while I sort it out.

Then I’ll sit down with you and show you what your data has to say.

And that’s where working with me becomes something different entirely.

I’m not going to hand you financial statements and explain accounting terminology to you. I’m going to sit beside you and show you your business in those statements.

You’ll recognize things.

You’ll see that great month you had. That awful job. The new employee. The equipment you bought. Something that happened six months ago that you remember perfectly because you were the one dealing with it.

And once you recognize enough of your business in those numbers, you’re probably going to start pointing at the things you don’t recognize.

That’s exactly what I want.

I’ll explain what you’re looking at. I’ll show you how to open the number and see the transactions underneath it. And we’ll keep going until it all makes sense to you.

Because once you recognize your business in the numbers, you start realizing how much more there is to know about it.

And we’ll do it again next month.

Except next month, you’ll understand a little more.

And that’s where this starts becoming something much bigger than fixing QuickBooks.

Because your questions begin changing the accounting system.

Maybe now there’s something you want to understand that your accounting can’t show you yet. We’ll figure out what information you need to answer that question, what would have to change in the business to capture it, and whether knowing the answer is worth the additional work.

If it is, we’ll build that into the process together.

The system starts evolving into what you want to understand about your business.

Meanwhile, I may start giving pieces of the accounting back to you. Not because I’m trying to turn you into a bookkeeper, but because you’ll begin seeing the advantage of having your hands on the information as it’s happening.

And then, somewhere along the way, the relationship changes again.

You’ll start looking at the numbers before you meet with me.

You’ll call me excited because something you changed worked. Or you’ll be pissed because it didn’t.

You’ll start talking about decisions you’re considering before you make them. The two of us will look at what might happen. What will it cost? What else could change? What do the numbers tell you? What aren’t you considering?

I won’t make the decision for you.

I’ll help you see it clearly enough to make the decision yourself.

And if you make the wrong one? Next month we’ll look at what happened, figure out what you can fix or mitigate, learn from it, and move on.

After a while, I’m no longer the person explaining your accounting anymore.

I become the accounting professional sitting beside you who knows your business almost as well as you do—and we’re both looking at the same information and seeing the same things.

Eventually, you may not need me sitting there every month.

But you’ll still have me available to you.

Because by then I know your business. I know why the system works the way it does. I remember the decisions that got you there. And if you’ve let me in, I know you, too.

You may have hired me to fix your QuickBooks.

But somewhere along the way, something much bigger happened.

You learned to see your business from the accounting perspective. And it changes how you run it.

You know your numbers. You understand how they got there. You know what they’re telling you and how to use them to make more informed decisions about what happens next.

You're not the person just doing the work anymore.

You're running the business.