All Forum Posts by: Shane H.

@Ned Carey   You get it - I think @Michael Plaks was missing that key detail.

@Account Closed - Yes you could hire it and get someone in house possibly - we did just over 7 figures in revenue last year - I dont want our books to go to an amateur - I'd have to pay more to have someone in house FT and I dont really want someone doing finances, activities, payroll etc - I'd end up paying way more than that when you factor in employment costs.  I live and work in Topeka - I still have rentals in Wichita - Believe it or not Topeka has higher labor costs from what I have seen at least on the direct care side - I haven't looked closely at what FT professionals ranges would be on the finance/bus side - frankly most of that can be done remotely so it doesnt matter where you live...I'd just like someone good and available.   

The person I left was good at QBO and an expert at it -  her business focus changed middle of 2018 as she had growing pains - I kept telling her to hire someone to help her - she did but then she wanted to focus on business coaching and something about profit first and forget her main gig which was a mistake and why I left and I'm sure others did as I know she has had a mass migration of clients leave the past few months - when service goes off the rails I'm not sticking around.  I am to the point I needed more than a one or 2 person shop.  I nearly went with a firm in Kentucky or North Carolina - can't remember - found them on Upwork - and had planned to fly out to meet them - but I circled back to one other local contact one more time - we met got on the same page and they are within walking distance of my office and readily reachable with a few employees in the office so I should be good with them for sometime.

I use a # of things that automate stuff so there is no point in wasting human labor and time on it from ordering groceries online, deliver what we can then curbside pickup the rest - ordering all of our supplies online, empowering kitchen staff to take charge of the food ordering etc - there were a million inefficiencies we had - still plenty left but got the lions share taken care of.

Use a service in Cali to have our bills mailed to - they open the mail scan them in and then I forward them to Bill.com - I click a few buttons and can pay the bills which are then synced with QBO - receipts can go to Hubdoc and payroll is outsourced to the bookkeeper as well - so for the $18k which inc payroll and software fees there was a # of moving parts going on - I could just tell with the automation she wasnt doing much at all due to very little responsiveness the past 6-9 mos and no reports, large swaths of time to have books reconciled among other things - I could do it all myself frankly now but I dont want to worry or stress of it - it's worth it to farm it out.

I stayed away from in house as well as the prior owner had an in house person and I later found out his books were all screwed up - I was also sold something that was not entirely accurate due to a few other things - but it's fine - we found the problems and fixed them.  I'm a Marcus Lemonis Homer and firmly believe he simplifies things a lot - 3 P's - People, Process and Product - we had a good product, ok people and 1 great one when we took over - now have all Great People, and our processes are WAY better - they sucked at first - still have some process work to correct but we have turned a 180.  We have empowered people to make decisions on their own and think on the fly - one thing I cant wait to do is roll out a profit sharing for everyone - did it for a couple of key staff in 2018 and should do good enough can do it for all this year.  I think I'll be a rarity in the medical field if I profit share.

From my perspective I'd have to agree to disagree.  You're not comparing apples to apples when referencing a car.  Never buy software from an accountants or bookkeepers wholesale account.  Let my near fiasco be a lesson to anyone else as you can not control when someone loses their marbles.

My mistake was letting someone else have that much control - relationships aside I can not control the level of crazy in others nor can anyone else especially when it did not show it's ugly head until it was too late for me to do anything.  I had sensed for sometime when I saw warning signs that when we parted our professional ways this type of thing could happen - it was a catch 22 - hurry up and move when i saw the signs and pick the wrong person or put up with the risks and pick the right person to switch to.

Letting someone else handle all of your financials and have control of it is akin to taping a kick me sign on your back and hoping no one actually wants to.  I wanted to put another analogy here but probably not appropriate.

This still perplexes me - I paid her for the month of March prepaid - only 8 days of work (gave the dear john email march 8th - so how is that not paying? Then they were requesting additional fees on top of that which was extortion in my eyes?  Ethics aside.  Based on all of y'all's responses above this to me is a complete BLACK EYE on the bookkeeping industry/profession.  Bookkeepers and accountants are not musical artists, artists, authors etc where you can trademark/copywrite your work - all you do is put numbers the business owner gives you in an organized fashion.  I'm really curious how often this happens - when I was calling QB support the people I was speaking with said it's a common occurrence.  Would like to read some case law on it.  

If I never paid her any money i could see an argument but she was paid every month on time for the last 18 mos or so and prepaid in advance.

So based on this knowledge now - if I own the software license and invite an outsourced bookkeeper to work inside of my license they'd never be able to hold me hostage like this correct?  (I'm also paying to keep backups now)   I never want to deal with this headache or nightmare again and hope someone reading this thread can learn some lessons from it.  

I'm just ready to open one or two more facilities and hire my own in house admin/bookkeeper or if I want to go bigger hire a CFO - at that point my biggest worry will be embezzlement and I'll have to put safeguards in place for that.

@Jana Cain @Ned Carey I ended up getting the QBO access 100% yesterday - after my tone changed from being nice to more direct with a deadline.  She kept saying it was not her problem and I had to deal with it - If I'm to believe her supposedly there is a glitch in QBO where sometimes it will not release all the way.  Initially when she made me the master admin I could not even delete anyone else and when I tried to delete her an error would show up on the screen saying you cant do this now or something to that effect - couldnt even invite another accountant.  Supposedly after much back and forth she contacted QB Support who in 2 hours resolved the issue - however the support request had to come from her and she was basically in her texts/emails kept telling me to pound sand.  The whole bees with honey approach did not work with her at all - maybe it did as we got most of what we needed but there are still a few things that would save our new bookkeepers a LOT of time to get payroll rolling and she's not providing it - What I dont get is the payroll issue really isn't just about me - it could potentially affect our staff which is the most frustrating - a lot of folks are paycheck to paycheck and need the money to hit their accounts when they count on it and looking to sabotage my team in a round about way really disturbs me.  Come after me all you want but dont mess with my family/team.

And as far as the data it was never hers - it all came from the previous business owner as I bought his data as part of the business transaction and we used his QB files to start ours.  

All I know is it will be over my dead body if anyone ever holds any of the software licenses over my head again - Our business will control that aspect 100% so nothing like this happens again - I'd hope this could serve as a lesson to others out there - DO NOT LET AN ACCOUNTANT OR BOOKKEEPER SELL YOU ANY ACCOUNTING OR BOOKS SOFTWARE ACCESS OUT  OF THEIR WHOLESALE ACCOUNTS as I had no idea QB and after doing a bit of reading XERO has the same thought process that you are just screwed if someone decides to hold you hostage.

Yes I could have started over but who really wants to spend hours trying to get everything to sync correctly again - I had multiple things tied together via automation.  Now at least out of this I have purchased another backup software solution to help keep backup copies of the files and will never let anyone hold me hostage like this again.

I got off I guess fairly lucky however there will likely be legal action taken for the other issues we've experienced.  Funny thing is had this all been handled professionally on the other side and like an adult thus making it easy on everyone we'd be moving on and it'd be water under the bridge - who really needs all this added stress and negative energy in their lives - I certainly dont and do not like being drawn into someone elses negative black hole and as I alluded to in an earlier post I'm not the only one she's treated this way - as she's done it to others - I'm not sure if we have a mental health crisis, personal issues started to pop up etc but just glad we are able to move on.  This has been 3-4 mos in the making as I made up my mind a while ago I was moving - just took a while to find the right fit.

Believe me - you dont know the entire story - I've held back on a lot of her dirty laundry and some of the other financial mistakes she caused near the end of the year - some of my frustration is probably coming through in the posts but I'm a very easy going guy.  I just got a call from my accountant in the past 15 mins that she is doing the same sort of behavior with another client who is switching from her for the same reasons I left.    I'm an easy guy to get along and took 3 mos to find the new bookkeeper I moved to now.   

I'm not sure how paying someone $1400 plus at the beginning of March for March services - then canceling 8 days in and not expecting a refund - and even stating nothing but positive things in the "breakup" letter and offering to pay additional for help in transitioning is not diplomatic.  I didnt even need her help - just access to the documents to get what we needed as when we asked for her assistance we received none and only that she'd be willing to speak with us on the phone 2 days before our employees paychecks are due next week and only then if I pay her $750 for the privilege of speaking to her on the phone.  If that's not near extortion Im not sure what is - not to mention mysterious charges that showed up on my bank account this week by her.  

After the "breakup" letter we got nothing but pushback, started getting our accounts deleted immediately which I had most of it off, but never had control of my wholesale accounts, mean vindictive texts/emails even when we were still being nice etc - it was like I'm dealing with Dr Jekyll Mr Hyde.  Something must have happened in her life to become this way as that is not how it started.  I feel sorry for her.

That goes both ways - I was paying her $1200-1600 a month depending on some of the software fees - she was not putting more than 5-7 hours on my books/payroll if I had to guess - I very rarely received any financials and had to manually go in and do a lot of the bookkeeping myself since she did not do it on a timely basis - at one point we went 4 mos w/o having our books reconciled.

Going forward there is no bookkeeper accountant etc selling me software access to anything out of their wholesale account.  

I paid for data input - she hardly did it and just did the initial setup - she was probably so pissed as she was taking my money and doing nothing.  Anyways sorry for the curt reply - but I'd love to see caselaw saying that is her work - it's my damn business books - my financial transactions etc - not hers - the software did a lot of the recording.  QBO irked me on their argument and it's a reason I hate the company to begin with - at some time in the future I'll likely switch to something else - only using it since most outsourced accountants and bookkeepers all have a "thing" for the software.

@Jana Cain What is frustrating is that on the accountant screen the "Invite" link is grayed out - so I can't invite anyone else and it will not let me delete her company/access even though she is not the master admin.

Complete bull - I'll be battling it again today.  She's made appx $6k in errors not to mention trying to extort money out of me yesterday - I'm probably going to be forced to take legal action unless she works with me to relinquish her name off of the account.  I'm going to talk to my bank about not authorizing the ACHs she's been doing the past 2-3 mos as I have not auth'd them - she hit my account automatically and I never signed any sort of agreement allowing her to do that.

@Scott Mac my accountant uses QB and he's not sure what to do at the moment - other than he's pretty disgusted how she's acting - as they used to work a lot together -- IE she'd do books for folks and he'd do the accounting side - he hasn't worked with her much during 2018 when I noticed the slide in her performance and he no longer refers anyone to her.

Anyways what she did is relinquish master admin rights to me but she did not click the button or drop down for "transfer billing to client" or the button says something to that affect.  Since she has a wholesale account my QBO billing was always under her wholesale entity - QB says until she releases the billing to me there is nothing I can do - that seems like complete BS.

Have you dealt with this situation?  QB was telling me the only thing I could have filed a dispute for was the "Master admin" but that's it and theres nothing they can do since she gave that over to me - here's the kicker - I cant delete her off the account and she still has full access.

-->> My own disclaimer - I understand any replies/comments etc are not legal, tax or financial advice and I should seek out my own professionals and hold anyone responding harmless

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So cliff's notes version - I am an owner in an Assisted Living business - we do just over 6 figures in revenue per month - so not gigantic but nothing to sneeze at either - When I bought the business fall 2017 I found a local bookkeeper that had her own business managing books and outsourcing payroll - she did great - we hummed along and middle to late summer 2018 she completely changed her business focus and I started having problems with her follow through - work was getting done and payroll was completed on time so we moved on as I wasnt ready for the stress of moving to another bookkeeper.  

(For those that ask why not hire in house - I just dont have the scale YET to hire our own in house - when I get another facility up and going i will - as I want to pay someone doing the books well so I get someone good)

Anyways Jan 2019 through 1 of my former staff and 1 present staff when they went to do their taxes we found out the bookkeeper screwed up on withholding for these staff and it may cost me around $5k or more - we also found other mistakes recently like sending out payroll deductions (garnishments) on an employee who was on our payroll but hadn't worked for us in 3 mos since they had a child and were  on a leave of absence.  And the last 2-3 mos if you even wanted to talk to her you had to use an app to schedule a call - if I ever called I was always sent to voicemail and my text messages were hardly returned.  We paid her over $18k in fees last year.  

So I found someone else local that is a larger company and let her know via email that I was switching accountants and that I'd be happy to pay her for her time in getting things switched over - wrote in the email even praising her for what she did when she came on board with  us etc - ABSOLUTELY nothing negative

Fast forward to today - she deleted all of our prior payroll information and wont give us access - has not fully deleted herself out of our QBO and in my eyes is holding it hostage and then hit my bank account for an ACH yesterday for nearly $200 with no invoice or explanation for what the charge was for then sent me what I am seeing as an extortion demand for $750 for her to talk to my new accountant on the phone about transitioning next week 2 days before our next paychecks are to be issued.  (I told her today I was perfectly fine with paying the $750 however after the transition was completed and information handed over - she said she was canceling our call we had set up and she would do nothing until I paid first).

Complete bs and low brow move and completely shows her true character.  I have practiced EXTREME constraint today and wish I could show her text messages and snarky emails - I learned a long time ago that when dealing with people like this if you get angry in your responses it only eggs them on even more so I've been taking the "more bees with honey approach" but it's not working very well.

Does anyone have any advice?  I am getting nowhere with Quickbooks - they will not release our account all the way to me even though I'm not a master admin - since the bookkeeper did not release me from her wholesale billing account I cant "delete" her off of our QB access and QB says there is nothing I can do - seems to be crap since that is my information I paid for.

Tsheets worked fine with me and she did release some of the other apps we used for automation to us but this one she is leaving half done in my mind to hold me hostage - I do not believe she did this on accident as she knows QB backwards and forwards - I have another business QB account and she released it to me fully and correctly.  

I'll be speaking to an atty tomorrow but this has wasted 6-8 hours of my time today and I'm sure plenty m ore the rest of the week - and will make it WAY more time consuming for our new bookkeeper to get payroll set up.  

Here is here last text message to me which was basically a big middle finger

"Just a heads up for the future - if you ever cancel these kind of services, have them in place before you do.  Thats a tough lesson but it is what it is."

For Christ sake -- I had most of it set up but who would think Quickbooks would let someone hold your account hostage - the only way I can get her off if she doesnt "fully release it" is legal action or to backup the information then start a desktop account then start a new online account - Can you imagine how much time that will take?

LESSON OF THE DAY FOLKS ---- IF YOU EVER OUTSOURCE BOOKKEEPING -- NEVER LET THEM SELL YOU SOFTWARE ACCESS FROM THEIR WHOLESALE ACCOUNTS - MY BIG SCREW UP WAS doing this and underestimating the level of crazy. 

For Granite - Heartland Granite - Owner Yoshen Maa (I may have mispelled his name but believe he's from Japan) - good dude - he had a Hispanic crew install the granite in 1 of my houses, not sure if they did the 2nd house as I wasnt there - was happy with it - they only pissed me off when they did my personal house - had my Ram air Transam with only 68k miles out of the garage so they could work and the dip***** were throwing granite dust all over it by cutting the granite right beside my car - My paint needed to have claybar used on it anyways to remove contaminants but regardless of what car was there they should have set up and cut somewhere else or given me the opportunity to park down the street.  

Anyways his stuff was around $45/sq ft - pretty affordable - it's a bit thinner since they use plywood underneath the granite and it's somewhat of a veneer with a thick edge -- it'd make sense if you saw an install.  

Yoshen has a showroom over at Cent./I 235 right off the exit/access road of 235 SB at Central