Conquering Workflows & Systems For Bookkeepers & Accountants | with Alyssa Lang (Workflow Queen)

Step-by-Step Quality Control Process to Eliminate Errors in Your Work

• Alyssa Lang • Season 1 • Episode 80

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In this solo episode, Alyssa Lang covers all things quality control. She shares why you should have quality control in place if you have a team (or plan to), the exact step-by-step process and everything you need to know to implement it.

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • What quality control is and why this process is one of the most important processes to implement
  • Who is involved in quality control and who does what
  • Step by step process for quality control
  • What assets you need to create to put together quality control

Resources mentioned in this episode:

⚙️ Loom

⚙️ Notion

⚙️ Asana

⚙️ Google Docs

💻 Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants

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, @workflowqueen

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Hey listener and welcome back to our lovely podcast. So if you are someone who currently has a team in place, or is really desiring bringing someone on to help you, especially a bookkeeper to help you with the day-to-day work. And maybe you're really, truly fearing that. What happens if they mess it up? What happens if it's not accurate? What happens if I get on this call with my client and I find out that I look really stupid because the bookkeeper didn't get it ready for me. And now I have to defend myself to my client. If you've ever been in that scenario, or you really want to make sure that you have quality work being produced up to your bar and how you want it done, then this is the episode for you. And today's episode is going to be solo. And I'm going to be sharing with you the step-by-step process that you can follow to implement quality control on your team. So, so we call QC. And it is such a game changer. So like I said, if you've ever been in that position where you think that nobody can do the work, like you, I'm going to call BS on that today and show you why it's so important to have a QC checklist in place and a QC process to make sure that the work is being completed. To the standards that you want in the deliverable that you want for the client in that experience. So today we're going to be talking about the QC checklist. And a Montana off, who's going to be involved in the QC process. So both the roles that I'm going to recommend. And then what are those assets that you need to create in order to move forward? Your QC process as well? So, if you've ever been in a position where you've hired a contractor or a hired employee, that's a bookkeeper on your team and you found yourself wanting to fire them, or you did fire them because they just couldn't do the work or they just weren't accurate. It's probably because you, as the owner have failed to actually put quality control into place. To make sure to catch those errors and to educate that team member and to build them up qc will solve a lot of those problems that you're finding on the excuse of why you're not hiring and so today i'm going to get really real with you and just really lay it down and so i can't wait make sure you bring a pen and paper because i can guarantee that you are going to be writing down a lot of this stuff if not you can check out the blog that is going to go alongside this lovely podcast episode so you can also read through the step-by-step as well there's a lot of golden nuggets and i can't wait for you to listen. Listen. Hey everyone. And welcome to this episode. I am so excited because today we're going to be talking about a topic that a lot of people. Just maybe aren't aware of, or they haven't implemented or something that I see a lot in the industry where people are lacking or they're letting themselves get in the way to not have this little piece. So we're going to dive into the lovely topic of quality control. So if you have no idea what quality control is, essentially, it's just an opportunity for you as the firm owner, to make sure that the team is producing the quality of work. So whatever that output that you want to achieve, making sure it's up to your standards. And so a lot of the times. What I don't see in the industry is people implementing the quality control. And I do have to say the reason why is the fact that we typically start our business as a side hustle or something that we don't intend to grow and make this big thing. Right. So typically it's just you for a really long time. And then all of a sudden you hit this wall and you have to hire, but you really fear hiring because you're scared that maybe, you know, you might tell yourself nobody can take care of my clients like me, or you might be even saying. What if the person does a bad job representing me to my clients or just doesn't have the right quality of work, will the common solution to this. And a lot of times we tell ourselves these things. And a lot of the times it's because it's all of what we convinced in our own head, instead of really looking at. What is the logical solution of what we could do and the things that we can fix to reduce that fear of the errors that our team creates. Right. And so we'll talk about that solution here in just a second, but I really wanted to dive into what that quality control really means for you. So, like I said, you start your business, right? It's just you, no problem. You don't need to do the QC because ultimately you're the quality control because it's just you, but as you grow into the business and you start to hire people, there needs to be some sort of a layer between almost like, I don't know if this is a retinologist. Because I screw up every analogy in the world, but essentially just think about you have people playing football, right. And there's the frontline, the line of defense between the other team, but then there's like the quarterback that's like behind them. Right. So think of like the bookkeepers as that quarterback, but then yet there's a quality control line of defense it's between the other team. And so the quality control before delivering on your month end, you know, the reports and all those different things, you essentially have a line of defense, which is your quality control. And this could be done by someone like you. If it's. It's just you and you don't have an account manager, it could be you who's doing it to your team members. So your team of bookkeepers to one bookkeeper, whatever that looks like for you. However, if you do have intentions of really growing, then you might want to hire someone like an account manager. That can actually do the QC on your behalf. The whole point of the QC, which is quality control is that there is someone in place, whether that's you or someone you hire that will make sure that everything that is being done is up to par and delivered up to your standard of services. And so couple of different things will be happening through the quality control process, which we'll talk about here in a second. I'm going to be sharing that process and what that actually looks like. So we were talking about a little bit ago that when you hire a team and you start to have people come on, or you might have objections. To hire a team member because of these mindset blocks. But you might be telling yourself that there's no way someone can do the work. Like I can. And I'm sorry to tell you this, but there's someone out there in the world that might be smarter than you. And I don't even want to use the word might it's. There is someone out there in the world that's smarter than you. And so just remember you don't always have to be the smartest person in the room. And I think that when your business shifts from, oh, wearing this badge of, I always want to do everything myself and I'm the best at everything and where you really value. You know, money over your time. Eventually your business will shift where all of a sudden, you really just value your time over money. And that's kind of where I'm at in business. And a lot of the people we attract and like my group coaching program breakthrough is people at that stage where. I just don't have time to learn all these things. And so once you understand that concept, You'll start to understand why this QC thing in place needs to happen, because it allows you to transfer the knowledge that you have to someone else and allow someone else to shine to really help you move forward. So let's talk through that. So like I had mentioned earlier, if you tell yourself things like, no, one's going to be able to care for my clients like me would, if they mess up, what if they like. You know, I get on a call with the client. I hear this all the time. What if I get on the call with a client Alyssa and I'm reviewing the report and the client says what's up with this negative number. And then I look really stupid because I don't know the answer because I didn't do any quality control on the team. And the next thing, you know, you're firing your team member. I hear this cycle happens so often. And so the logical solution to this mindset issue is to solve the fear of errors. And so how you're going to do that is through the quality control. So quality control is like the set of checks and steps. That you and your team can use to catch and fix any of the mistakes. Before they actually reached that client, making sure that everything is accurate. And up to your standards. So it's a logical solution. So you might be asking yourself, well, who's involved in the quality control, so we'll just use a very straightforward approach for this. So who's involved are typically two people, the bookkeeper and the account manager. Now you might be saying, I don't have an account manager. Well, then if you don't, then you are the account manager. So typically it's a bookkeeper's involved and the account manager as well. So let's talk about the bookkeeper's role. So the bookkeeper's role inside of the QC portion of things is the bookkeeper will do like the monthly, like the day-to-day work to get the month end. Ready? Right. They'll actually complete their month end. So that includes things like reconciling accounts, making sure all the transactions are categorized, whatever that looks like. The next step of the bookkeeper. As they will fill out what we call the end of month handoff. And this is a concept that was taught to me by Brooke Swan. She's actually one of our coaches over in breakthrough and we provide the end of month hand-off to our breakthrough students as well. So props to Brooke for really helping me with nailing down, even my own QC and my own and a month as well. So the bookkeeper will fill out what we call the end of month handoff. And this end a month handoff really gives. a double-check system for the team to make sure that they double check that. For example, The payroll suspense was zero. They double check that there's not any weird negatives inside the accounts receivable, whatever that looks like. Right. So it's a double check system and we use notion for this. So instead of notion, we have the end of month handoff and the end of month hand-off is the same across all clients. It's literally the same double-check system for the bookkeepers, because our bookkeepers don't go and do like the deep dive into the books because they're just not trained for that. Right. So they fill out their end of month handoff. Then the bookkeeper goes in and is going to let the account manager, whether that's you or an actual account manager know that the end of month handoff is ready to go. AKA they've completed their month end and their end of month handoff is ready to rock and roll. This is where the account manager will be stepping in and they'll be playing their own part. Well, essentially there'll be double-checking the bookkeeper's work. Making any notes and handing it back to the bookkeeper to let them know that there's, you know, changes were made or that there are some review notes. So the last step for the bookkeeper is that we review notes and changes at the account manager made when they essentially hot potato it over to the account manager. So let's talk about the account manager's role in this whole process. So the account manager will actually review the end of month handoff that the bookkeeper filled out. Remember the end of month handoff is not client specific. It's the same in a month handoff for each and every client. Across the board. So the account manager will review the enema handoff. And then what they'll do is they will follow their own set of QC checklists and information that will help to guide them. To double-check things for accuracy. This is where you're actually going to be using a very specific QC checklist per client because the review points. So as essentially quality control, which is QC, is like, you're doing certain review points to make sure that for that client specifically, the information is accurate. So essentially what you're going to be doing is each client will have their own sorts of review points. And so we have these housed in notion as well. You can do this in Google docs. It does not need to be a notion. It could even be an Asana task, but it's totally up to you how you want to house this. The reason we chose not to do one at a sauna is because we wanted more details of being able to have a chance for our. You know, team members to be able to write stuff out. And so it just made more sense to put it in notion. So each client will have their own QC checklist that the account manager will follow as they review the work. So they'll have their QC checklist open. The end of month handoff from the bookkeeper. And then they'll also have the account open in QuickBooks, online for us. It's QuickBooks for you, whatever accounting software you use. So I have all three of those open. The account managers then going in and looking at the reports, looking at the information, looking at the review points that are kind of called out inside the QC checklist. To double-check the work. And then they're looking at what the bookkeeper had noted. This is where instead of hot potato going back, if there needs to be any edits to the bookkeeper. Instead for what we do, which everybody's different at this point. What we do is we actually have the account manager, make the edits and the notes. Inside of the end of month handoff that the bookkeeper originally filled out instead of trying to hot potato it back to the bookkeeper to go fix it, then hot potato back to the account manager, because I can take several days to do the hot potato. And so instead the account manager makes the notes, but when they do that, they need to fix anything. Like, let's just say, I don't know. There's a weird negative balance in undeposited funds. I don't know. I'm making things up. They're going to go in and fix those things. But when they fix them, they are going to record themselves doing it via loom. This is super important. So they're going to do this via loom and this allows them to then educate the bookkeeper that did the original work to let them know like, Hey, this is what we did. This is what we had to fix. Here's how to fix it for the future and whatnot. So this allows us to then educate the people underneath. And so then what happens is once they make the edits inside the account, And they make any notes on the end of month handoff for the bookkeeper. They also update the bookkeeper on the status. So how we do that is we have a channel inside of slack. That we send the month-end closed like in a month, handoff. Link. To that specific bookkeeper. So we tagged the bookkeeper, add the link to the end of month handoff to the bookkeeper, and we let them know one of two things. One it's good. It's great. You don't have to make any changes or make any edits or the second option is, Hey, there were some things that we had to edit and we had to fix, I need you to go to the, in a month handoff and go to the notes section. So we have a little section in the enema tan off that says notes from am, which is account manager. And we have them go review all that information and then they have to come back to slack to let us know that they have acknowledged and learn and seen what they did. We've had people tell me all the time. We'll Alyssa. I have my team members who say that they looked at the end of Montana, or they said that they looked at something. And then it doesn't register and that's been three months. And they continuously have issues and they're continuously not learning what they said that they were going to remember. Right. Well that's because you're probably lacking KPIs. So this is where you're going to want to be tracking KPIs and having those in place that will help you to track the number of errors that, the account manager is catching from the bookkeepers. And if those errors keep going up, then that means that maybe your bookkeeper it's time to let them go. And so once you're making those edits and notes on the end of month handoff, you're going to update the bookkeeper on the status. Whether that it's good, there's no edits or yes, there's edits. Please acknowledge it. Learn it. Next step from the account manager is for them to update their KPIs. So we have like a KPI spreadsheet. This is something that we give inside of a breakthrough. And this spreadsheet allows us to have like a tracking system for each of our team members per client to see the number of errors that they have each month during month end. So the account manager will update that on their end. And then the next thing the account manager will do is then produce a reports for the client and sends it over to the client. So you can see how first there's like the, the bookkeeper is really doing the bulk of Getting the end of month handoff done sending it off to the account manager. Who's then reviewing it on alongside their own QC review points. Making notes and edits and then handing it back to the bookkeeper to let them know if there were any changes or if there wasn't. The account managers then updating the KPIs. And then there were producing reports and sending it to the client. So it's a full cycle and to be honest, a lot of people are like, oh my God, that sounds like a lot of work, but at the bookkeepers are good bookkeepers and the QC should be really fast. And so if you have over like so many clients, you're going to want to like evaluate a few time track to see how long it takes them to do the quality control, which was the account managers portion of it. While the end of month handoff is the bookkeeper's side. That way you can see like the full cycle of you guys doing this whole full quality control process. So a couple of things I wanted to cover real quick, just to make sure that you understand where these things can kind of be housed. So when we talked about the end of month handoff. Those can be created as something like notion. Google docs. It can also be created inside of a task manager. Like I said, we use notion and we also even give the notion in a month handoff inside of breakthrough. This is something that Brooke Swan had created. And so she is like the queen of QC. And she's really, truly helped even myself with my own QC process. And it's a beast. So. We use notion for this, mostly because we can actually have our bookkeepers note, certain things in the end of month handoff. But like I said, you can totally do this inside of a sauna or even a good old Google doc. So let's talk about what an end of month handoff is. So that's going to include a list of things. They need to de double-checking. They also will include a place to make notes or any issues or any odd things that the bookkeepers see that maybe they need to point out. For example, we had one of our team members recently at my firm. Was going through one of our client's books and had recognized that towards the end of the month, because we don't do so many, like check-ins for the client, like constantly, if their volumes really low. And she recognized that the account was detached. Like the actual like bank account is no longer available and it wasn't feeding transactions in. So those are things that the bookkeeper needs to be noting because like, if it wasn't noted and the account manager goes in and sees that the bank feed was disconnected. They're going to be like, Hey, yo, why didn't you like note this for me? Right. So other things is it'll also include a place for the account manager to provide feedback. So that's why I don't prefer to task management system for the end of month handoff and why I prefer notion because in notion on the end of Montana off page, We have a little section that says like feedback or notes from account manager, that way the account manager can add those notes. And then we have those forever as like resources. And so when do we do this? No one's hand off. This is when after the bookkeeper has completed their month end close for the client, they will then fill out the end of month handoff. So let's talk about the Quality control checklist. So where can these things be housed? Things like notion, Google docs, your task manager, whatever that looks like for you. Like I said, we have our quality control checklist inside of notion, but we're not actually checking anything off. If that makes sense. It's really just like, almost like a document that just has information about review points. And now one is specific to each client and so minimal hand-off will be used one type of form over every single client versus a quality control. Each client should have their own review points. So, what are the things that will be included in the quality control checklist? This is things like including specific review points for each client. It should also include specific things to look out for on the. P and L so the profit and loss. And the balance sheet as well. So if you work with a very unique client that may be they always have a reared odd amount of money that's in X account. Then maybe those are some of those were viewpoints that says like, if this is under XML, there's an issue. And so that's why you want to make the quality control client specific because the account managers should have more knowledge on how to investigate. So, when do you complete the quality control checklist? This is usually done. After the bookkeeper has done their month end handoff. So after they filled it out and they've handed it off to the account manager is usually when it's going to happen. So let's go review one more time. What that full process looks like when you are building out the. The quality control process in full. So number one, the bookkeeper performs a month end close to bookkeeper fills out in a month. Hand-off form double checking their own work and noting anything unusual. Three account manager reviews, the end of month handoff and performs their own quality control based on the client specific checklist. For account manager, corrects errors and notes changes made. Five account manager, produces reports, emails, the client, and schedules a call if applicable. So if they do consulting. Six, the account manager, notifies the team member of notes and details in a specific channel inside of slack. And then number seven, account manager tracks the KPIs, which it will include the number of errors that they found from the bookkeeper. And then the last step is that the bookkeeper will review any notes that the account manager made. So my recommendation, and this is new to you, or you want to hire this will immediately eliminate and also showcase what team members are not performing. It will also give you the opportunity to make sure that you don't look crazy when you go to your clients and the reports are wildly not accurate, and you don't have to defend yourself or look stupid in front of your clients. You'll now know that these things are in place. I see, like I said, from the very beginning, a lot of people firing team members, because their lack as the business owner of actually putting quality control in place, they get pissed off at their team because the team can't perform. Yet it's your fault for not giving them the opportunity to have that quality control, to be trained up, to fix these issues as they go. It's super important to remember that the bookkeeper does the end of month handoff while the account manager does the quality control aspect of things. My recommendation for you is to take the time to create your own and a month handoff. And then also your own quality control checklist for each one of your clients. And then if you are using something like slack, I do recommend that you have a specific channel just dedicated to your month end. We do teach all of this inside of Breakthrough for Bookkeepers and Accountants, even alongside the KPI spreadsheet, we actually do provide that you can track the number of errors per client, per team member. During that quality control. And then we even give resources like having performance reviews for those team members that are consistently having errors, what that looks like. So if you want support with that, I do recommend that you check out breakthrough for bookkeepers and accountants. If you don't move forward, don't worry. You just pretty much got a step-by-step process when it comes to what that quality control should look like, but this would really change the game for you as you do implement team members. And it is so important. Quality control can be used. In so many different industries in so many different ways, it doesn't even have to be just for bookkeepers. It can even have quality control in place for a newsletter that you have your copywriter, right. It can be used in tons of different ways. Just, hopefully this helped you out. My recommendation, like I said, is to start slow, implement these things slowly over time. Test it with your team member. Double checking your time tracking to see that everyone has been working faster and more efficient. And I promise you, it will change the game. And if you have any questions or you want to chat through this and all the fun things I dropped a bunch of links underneath this. I lovely recording for any of the apps that I recommended that we use when doing this. And if you want to chat through some things, just let me know and come over on Instagram @workflowqueen. If you loved this episode, make sure to leave a review. I said, I want to know. Do you want to hear more about my step-by-step processes that I share? To others and that i also use in my own firm i'd love to know and thanks for today