Editor’s Note: As the nominations for the "2022 Top ProAdvisors of the Year" roll in, we wanted to shine the spotlight on last year's winners. This is another installment in a series of profiles of our esteemed candidates.
If you’re looking for the go to resource for QuickBooks Online in Australia, Lauretta Finis has you covered. The owner and founder of Quick Bizness Bookkeeping Solutions (QBBS), Lauretta was one of the first members of the Trainer Writer Network for Intuit Australia.
QuickBooks Online® for their clients. And if that isn’t enough, she also is the go-to person for any and all QuickBooks help and rescue work. Through bite-size, easy to follow videos, her training sessions are designed for business owners stuck on a particular bookkeeping issue, but who still want to manage their bookkeeping themselves.
In addition, Lauretta is a Fellow member of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB), the Australian Bookkeepers Network (ABN) and a Registered BAS Agent. We sat down with her to get her thoughts on the year ahead.
Give us a snapshot of your business.
The business commenced in 2004. We either traveled to our clients locally by car. We processed information on hard drives and saved it to CD drives. Paperwork was filed in filing cabinets, along with folders and folders of financials, bank statements, correspondence and bank reconciliations. We saved everything for our clients.
Today, our clients are based all around Australia, with a couple overseas. Everything is in the cloud—from QuickBooks to all other software and apps we use to streamline our work. Our library of client work is in the cloud.
Back in the old days, our business service was primarily bookkeeping. Now it has evolved to rescue work, reviews and consulting. My passion is training business owners to understand their business and being able to see where they can improve it.
How long have you been in business?
We started in 2004 for two clients. I went on to hire four staff members. We’re now down to two. I have streamlined our bookkeeping work practices. Our business now is known for support and training in QuickBooks. I decided early on to niche my business to help business owners take control and understand their own businesses. This is done by showing them how to look at their financials, more importantly, their accurate financials.
How does your ProAdvisor award fit into your overall business mission statement?
Each business and the way the business is run is different. We tailor the solutions our clients are after to meet the business needs, regardless of size and services required.
We take a look at the many different solutions, discuss this over with the client, and then ensure we can streamline their processes to give them their time back. I believe in teamwork, so I have a mutual agreement with my clients. I want them to succeed, so I am always on the lookout for new and improved software and apps to help them.
By being able to offer personalized service, always listening to our clients and what their business needs. Everything we do is to help grow their businesses. As our business motto says, "We help you grow." Their success is my success, and I love it.
What are some of your strategies/initiatives for 2022? Business? Personal?
Offering business owners more cost effective one-on-one 1 training via my new training website. They can purchase one lesson or a complete module. Being able to train and guide them where to look at their business by having smarter financials is important. We want to show them how they can improve, what services or products are selling well, and which are not, and help them see the monetary value in everything. Do they retain their current products and/or services or look at other possibilities?
Personally, I want to be able to visit friends, have coffee and visit my daughter in Northern NSW. I live in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, which has had the title of the longest city in the world to remain in COVID lockdown.
What are your expectations for 2022?
Hopefully COVID will be under control and I can go back to those pre-COVID days where I visited the US to attend conferences. I love to do that. I always learn so much in the way of new offerings, and new software and apps.
Having an overseas holiday once again, even a holiday within Australia, would be super awesome. I want to be able to help my clients take control back of their work with no shutdowns and no disruptions to their business.
What’s the best piece of advice you can offer your clients for 2022?
Stay safe and happy. We need happiness in our lives to be able to dream big, visualize where we want our businesses to grow and get outside help from the experts. You cannot do it all on your own. Let's help each other to achieve this.
Is there a story/anecdote you can share that really sums up the work you do for your clients (a recent success story)?
One of my favorite clients ( I have lots of those) runs a dog training business in NSW. When she came to me, her files were really, really a mess. She had gone through two accountants, and had four different types of software and apps that were not talking to each other correctly. She wanted to take control of her business. After we started working together, well, I will let her tell you from her testimonial:
“I still am so grateful for how much you have helped me! My dog training accounts were sending me barking mad! I highly recommend Lauretta. My Business uses QuickBooks, Acuity, Square and PayPal, and they were all a mess, which proved too much of a challenge for two previous accountants. Lauretta untangled it all. She got them working smoothly. At last, I can see the true financial position of my business. I wish I had found her sooner! Thank you Lauretta.”
I love "untangling messes."