FRESHBOOKS: Kristen Keats, Breakaway - 'Collaborative Accounting'

Twyla Verhelst  00:04

Hi, I'm Twyla Verhelst. I'm a CPA and I'm Head of Accountant Channel at FreshBooks. FreshBooks is a leading cloud-based accounting platform built for owners and their accountants. So you might be wondering: “What the heck does the role of Head of Accounting Channel at FreshBooks actually mean? Well, like any role, it's kind of complex and rather diverse, but one key element of it is community building. Through our accounting partner program, my team and I connect modern accounting professionals with tools and resources that empower them to better serve their clients and build accounting practices they're really proud of. 

And recently, FreshBooks launched something game-changing for accounting professionals, a new methodology and framework called Collaborative Accounting. This is unlike anything you've seen before and today we're going to unpack how Collaborative Accounting can be impactful for you and your clients. 

But first, I want to take a moment to introduce my guest, Kristen Keats. Kristen is a CPA, an industry leader with over 20 years of experience serving small businesses and self-employed clients. She's the founder of Breakaway Bookkeeping & Advising and the practice owner of Sherwood Tax & Accounting. Kristen is a valued member of our FreshBooks Partner Advisory Council, or what we fondly call our FreshPAC. Kristen is an avid and early adopter of new accounting technologies and an expert on all things cloud accounting. She's passionate about listening to her clients and gaining a well-rounded understanding of their needs and long-term goals. Kristen’s life mission is to bring joy to accounting. 

Today, we're gonna do a little bit of a flip the script. Kristen has kindly offered to ask me her questions about Collaborative Accounting, which we formally launched on October 3.

Welcome, Kristen, I'm so excited to have you here. 

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Kristen Keats  02:16

Thanks, Twyla, I am excited to be here. This is such an exciting time for FreshBooks right now. You guys just launched Collaborative Accounting and I was lucky enough being on FreshPAC that I got a little sneak peek of it, which we loved seeing it and I've been thinking about it ever since and how to implement it in my firm. But tell us more about it. What is Collaborative Accounting? What do us accountants need to know about this Collaborative Accounting business?

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Twyla Verhelst  02:41

Yeah, let's kick it off with– I'll give you the kind of– the formal definition and then we can dive a little bit deeper. So Collaborative Accounting is a new integrative way of working with your clients in a single platform to more accurately and effectively manage their finances. And what I mean by that is through a combination of technology and workflows, this model is designed to give you the capacity to deliver an empowering and ongoing advisory experience to your clients, to differentiate yourself, and give your clients something that they truly value. With Collaborative Accounting, it allows you to bring advisory services to the forefront of your offerings, because your firm finally has the systems and processes in place to put your clients first.

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Kristen Keats  03:32

Okay, you said a mouthful there. There's a lot of stuff to unpack, I feel like, because you mentioned technology, you mentioned advisory, you mentioned workflows. So you're saying that Collaborative Accounting will kind of solve all these things. So let's just break it down a little bit. How does the technology of the platform help us with this client relationship that we have?

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Twyla Verhelst  03:55

The platform is key. I mean, accountants build their firms around platforms, tech stacks, and then, of course, the workflows that go along with those or line with those pieces of tech and those tech stacks that you built. And so that technology is key. And what we've learned over the past few years from accountants and from customers –so, your clients– is that right now, accountants and business owners or clients are really operating, in many cases, in disparate systems. They’re siloed, despite the fact that they're engaged together and they work together. 

And this platform becomes key to be able to unlock this way of working, because if your clients are doing their work over here, and you're doing your work over here, and you're constantly kind of the nagging professional to say, “I need something from you, in order to close the books or in order to give you those financial statements that you need for your bank, or in order to advise you”, then it becomes this relationship that's actually a little bit frictional as a result of the technology. And so with Collaborative Accounting, the platform becomes a key element of it working and being successful, in that your clients and you as the accountant are inside of one central platform. And that's where FreshBooks is well positioned to be that platform. 

Because FreshBooks has been on the market for 20 years working with business owners, and you know, as a humblebrag moment, customers who are on FreshBooks, they love using FreshBooks. And it's designed to empower them to do their day-to-day work, including, you know, invoicing and expenses and project management. Inside this platform, it's intuitive and easy to use, but now, with more product features that we've launched for accountants, you can pick up where they left off and do your work as well. So it creates a single place of truth, single platform for you both to use together.

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Kristen Keats  05:53

I can appreciate you talking about the friction with us and our clients. And I think we've tried to have different applications solve for that friction and we– it's like, we try all these different ways to get what we need out of our clients and then it creates this kind of app fatigue, right? Like app fatigue is real, because we've got it, our clients have it, you know, you bring a new person on board and their eyes cross, you're like, “Oh, we have these 20 different things that you need to go and get certified in”. So that could be huge to have one thing that serves it all just– and you’re right– to kind of ratchet down that friction that we have created with our clients just in this push and pull to get the right information. 

Okay, so then you talked about creating space for the advisory. So how does that work with this Collaborative Accounting model?

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Twyla Verhelst  06:38

Yeah, well, if I take it one step further, to kind of double-click on the model, the model is designed to, like I said, enable business owners to do what we call pre-accounting tasks. Those are the pieces of invoicing, expense management, in some cases, project management, time tracking, that front end of the workflow that's required in order to finish the rest and take it through to compliance. So the business owner is going to do that piece, the accountant is going to pick up where they leave off and do the other piece, which means the accountant can remove themselves from trying to take on that piece of the workflow. 

Because what we've seen over time, in fact, I'm guilty of this myself, when prior to joining FreshBooks, inside of our firm, where our motto was “Take work off of the business owner”. In fact, we felt like we were alleviating the business owner's stress by saying, “Don't worry about expenses, don't worry about time tracking, don't worry about matching your payments to your invoicing.” And from our side as the accountant what that did is it created more work for us where we thought, “We're going to control the information, and we're going to control the data and the quality of the data.” But what it did is it meant that we now needed people to staff that side and not only staff it but to oversee that side. 

And as somebody, you yourself, who has a team, I'm sure you know that, you know, as you onboard new people, sometimes the quality of that work isn't necessarily where you need it to be, especially right out of the gates. And then now with the ongoing elements of the staffing and talent crisis inside of our profession, adding another layer of complexity to managing that front side.

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Kristen Keats  08:21

Well, not only that, like, I feel like in that part of the process that you guys have the clients doing, which is where it should be– like, I always have a hard time because it's like, “Well, how do I know what to bill your customer? If you go to Amazon or Home Depot, how do I know what that is?” You know, and so, then, that's another back and forth with the client where they're like, “I thought you were gonna take care of this for me, and I'm still doing all the work.” So that's another friction point. Right?

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Twyla Verhelst  08:47

I think that's a great call out. Because, as you think about our models that we've created, our workflows are created historically, which has been these tech steps, which create app fatigue, they don't always create efficiencies. And I think that that's something the profession is starting to recognize. 

And hopefully what Collaborative Accounting brings to life for them or brings to the surface for them is sharing that. That workflow is friction. It's causing inefficiencies, it's actually pulling the business owner away from the financial heartbeat of their business, which we've learned from our customers that that's actually very stressful. And then, you know, with the talent crisis on top of it, it's hard to maintain that peace. 

And as firm owners, we're seeing that you all are getting bogged down in that side of business, keeping everything going, that the space for advisory just isn't there. And especially not the space for advisory at scale. Right? It might be some advisory moments that you can sneak into some conversations or you've got the odd engagement that it's like, “Okay, this one's working really, really well, and I've got the space to do that.” But that doesn't seem to be the scalable model. And that's the feedback we heard. It wasn't just, “Okay. How do we help accounting professionals use FreshBooks as a platform now that we've evolved accounting features?”, it was like, “How do we unlock this advisory at scale, so you can really lean into it?” And this model is designed to unlock or free up that time for accounting professionals, because of the way you work with clients and the platform.

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Kristen Keats  10:18

Yeah. Okay. So let's pause there for a minute because I think I, like many other accountants, have heard tech companies tell us before to move toward advisory and that word gets thrown around a whole bunch, but there's a lot of us out there going, “What does this mean? Like, what am I doing now? Like what's advisory? And what's not advisory?” Like, I think that's a very nebulous thing for a lot of us out there. And it's kind of a buzzword. So what does that mean in the FreshBooks world? And what do you think it should mean to us and the accountant? 

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Twyla Verhelst  10:48

Yeah, great question. In terms of what advisory means, in all honesty, I think advisory means what you want it to mean. But if I kind of summarize it, I'll tell you what advisory is not. advisory is not filing a tax return and getting out the door. Very important to do, to clarify, but that's not advisory. Advisory is not handing somebody their financial statements, because you've committed to giving them financial statements every month, or every quarter aside of the engagement that you set up with them originally. Advisory is not running their payroll, because that's part of the engagement. 

Advisory is beyond compliance, beyond filing of a tax return. And it can look very different for different accounting professionals, which is okay. But what I really want to support accounting professionals, within what FreshBooks is committed to partnering with accountants to do, is give business owners something beyond that. And sometimes that can look like something very formal, where every month we're gonna meet, and we're going to interpret these financials and proactively look at what we can do to help you grow. Sometimes it can be even, if you think about the tax return, what can the business owner do different this year compared to last year, that supports their growth or unlocks an opportunity? 

And this is the support that business owners need. This is the piece of information that they just don't know what they don't know. They know that they need the necessary completed, but they're looking for and they're craving, “Give me things that I don't already know, give me things to support my business.” And, interestingly, when we talk to some of our customers about this, we learned that they're seeking this financial advice elsewhere, and they're paying for it elsewhere. Because they think their accountant can't offer it because their accountant has never initiated that type of conversation. And in your defense person, or in the defense of the profession at large, you haven't necessarily had the space, right? The sentiment I'm hearing is, “Are you kidding me? I'm trying to keep my head afloat, my team afloat, my clients from, you know, banging down my door.” That's the world that you live in. And we understand that, we know that, we're empathetic to that. We're trying to change that and support you with that change.

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Kristen Keats  13:08

Yeah, we definitely, we definitely feel that and I know a lot of accountants will say, “Yeah, I would love to do that kind of work but who has the time”. You know, I was just saying, we're kind of just getting through some of the pandemic-related craziness that was going on in the accounting world, you know, let alone the world at large, you know, with everything that was going on with the pandemic. So we haven't even gotten a chance to catch our breath really, after getting through that. So I think we welcome anything that will help us kind of get our head above water.

And to your point, you know, whenever I meet with a new client, I always ask them, you know, like, “Why are you changing accountants? Like, what's going on?” And they'll say, “My CPA, my tax preparer, my bookkeeper, I never talked to them. I didn't know. They ask me for information, but that it was kind of a one-way street, and I don't really get any advice or conversation back.” So that's always like an eye-opener, you know, it's like, yes, the customers want that, the clients want that. 

I think it's interesting that you guys have a little window into your customers, and I love that you're talking to your customers, our clients, about what they want and need from their accounting professionals. I think that's fantastic. So it sounds like that really– like we’re kind of creating this model, listening to them, listening to the accountants and really bringing us together, which I love. 

And then the other thing that I love about this model is that I think that in a lot of ways –you talked earlier about us having these disparate systems, these really like separate systems going on: our clients didn't know what we did. It's kind of a black box to them, right? They know that they see the information and sometimes they get something back, sometimes they don't. But I think creating this transparency around that relationship is also so huge in really underscoring that accounting professionals’ value to their clients so the client can go, “Oh”, you know, “I didn't know that all of this went into just that 45-minute meeting that we have every quarter or every month or whatever that's happening.” And so I think that that helps. 

And then I also, the other thing I kind of want to point out, too, is that a lot of us, I think, aren't giving ourselves enough credit for the advisory work that we are doing as well. I think there's a lot of us that are having conversations that are going beyond just delivering that tax return that are looking at like, “Hey, have you thought about a retirement plan? Have you thought about this?” It just comes naturally to us to do those things. And maybe we're not really communicating that value to the client like we should. And so that's just my little soapbox thing about– I think that us as accountants really need to realize the value that we are delivering. And I think that this model helps to really bring that into the limelight.

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Twyla Verhelst  15:40

I think you're absolutely right, Kristen, I do think that in a lot of cases, accounting professionals are already doing it. And I think some of the missing pieces are the informality in which you're doing it, and that visibility, or that transparency, like set us to like not just what it takes to go into this, but this is the moment. 

And let's be perfectly clear customers of ours or clients of yours, they don't appreciate the word “advisory”, that's not in their language. And so instead, it needs to really be framed to them as, “This is where we lean into interpreting your data and really help you with that forward-looking view as to how you're going to grow your firm and let's talk about what matters to you. Do you want to grow your business? Do you want to increase your margins? Do you want to leave a legacy business behind for somebody else to take over or to purchase from you?” What matters, and then insider what matters. That's where you can, every time you connect with them, have that double click on, “Remember when we talked about how you wanted to grow your business in this way? Well, this number is a number that we need to focus on. And here's how we can look at changing it.” 

Now I'm double-clicking a little bit on some some real-life examples, but, perhaps, I'm pulling also from some of the tools and the training that we provide to accounting professionals who are looking to adopt this, that we do that double click and we say: “Here's a moment where you could have a conversation that isn't just ‘Oh, here you go, here's your information.’ Instead, it's ‘Let's talk about what matters, let's dig into this more’.” 

And a lot of advisory is asking more questions, and really doing that second and third layer into what matters to them, and how, as accounting professionals, you can support them because you all do have the expertise and the knowledge to do that. We just aren't really enabled– we haven't historically enabled you with a model, in my belief, to make that really possible, make it possible on this repetitive basis or consistent basis, as well as rolling it out to more of your clients that you're already engaged with.

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Kristen Keats  17:50

Okay, so I want to touch on something that you brought up. So you brought up tools and training because I think a lot of us feel like, “Okay, we've been on this hamster wheel of compliance, and just getting all the deliverables out to the clients.” And some of us don't know where to start, like, “What do the clients even want?” You know, “Where do we kind of jump off on this advisory journey that we want to have with our clients?”

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Twyla Verhelst  18:11

Yeah. And you know, I think that the team and I, over the past few years– which I say few years because launching Collaborative Accounting has been nearly four years in the making. In fact, back in 2020 –which Kristen as one of our legacy Partner Council members, you may remember–, back in 2020, we soft launched this to the profession, and recognized very quickly, in the thick of a pandemic, this was not the time to come to accounting professionals and say, “Hey, with all you have going on, how do you feel about adopting a new way of working with your clients?” and “Hey, here's what our customers are telling us: they're telling us as your clients, they're not getting the financial insights and expertise from you that they want?” I'm pretty sure the answer, if we had rolled that out at large to the profession, the answer would have been like, “Take a seat, we don’t have time for that.” 

And so we used that time over the past three and a half years to really go deeper on the insights as to what it was accounting professionals were telling us from those adopting the model and those who hadn't yet adopted it. We listened even more to their customers who in the thick of a pandemic obviously had very different stressors than now in 2023, where they're kind of back to, like you said a bit of recovery post-pandemic. We also evolved our product, our product in 2020 versus our product in 2023, and our product as to where we're headed for accounting features for accountants, is wildly different and we're on a path to continue to evolve the product for accountants, workflows, and efficiencies inside of the Collaborative Accounting model, and also further enabling you to have these advisory conversations. 

But I say that because the model itself is quite simple, but I know –and Kristen, you probably know– accountants like to double-click on “How?”. And sometimes when when we learn something in the accounting profession, we think, “That sounds great, but how?” And then you explain it and it's like, “Still sounds good, but you still give me more ‘How?’” And so we're making sure that we have gone through the layers and the depth to set you up for success. 

And one of those is with the new certification that has just launched, which is a very robust certification, and you can complete that in under four hours. But it's the most elaborate and elevated training we've ever created for accounting professionals that will teach this workflow, it also encompasses teaching the product inside of there, if you're unfamiliar with FreshBooks, as well as showcasing these advisory opportunities, and really honing in on “This is a moment where you can have an elevated or value-added conversation with your client.” So that's the first thing that I think is super important. 

The next obviously, is the platform, we've built this platform that is very intentional with our usability, meaning that it's easy to use, it's intuitive for your clients and for you, and we continue to evolve that platform. But you know, it's important for business owners: if they're going to be in the same platform as you, they need to be set up for success, they need to be able to do their work accurately, efficiently, and on time, in order for you to not have to rework or nag them to complete their work. 

Then the next thing, of course, is our support. And if you're familiar with FreshBooks at all, FreshBooks has award-winning support. So for those listening who maybe don't know, that's probably– my second humble brag is around our support. And our support is really, really great. And with our accounting professionals, we give them even more elevated support than that in that they get a dedicated support team. And that support team has product knowledge, of course, but they also have accounting experience. Are you kidding me? They can talk debits and credits, right at the start of your support needs. So that helps with onboarding, that helps with ensuring that you're using the platform and the workflow effectively, and then of course, any other needs that you have, from a support perspective. 

We launched the accountant hub. That’s something that was new this year that came from accountant feedback that you all wanted this hub, you wanted a centralized place where you can set up your firm, set up your clients, and really have that manage all in one place. So that's something that we launched this year. Again, we've got more product features coming for accounts, which is super exciting. 

And last but not least, Kristen, you know this well, we are all about community at FreshBooks. We're about really committing to partnering with accounting professionals. And we know that you garner value and knowledge from one another. And so we want to facilitate that for you, we want to ensure that we have set you up to have this really elite place where you can go and connect with other collaborative accountants to share best practices and really make this model work for you and your firm.

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Kristen Keats  23:13

I want to highlight just a couple of things that you said there. So one of them is that you when you’re talking about the tasks that the clients do, I think, a little bit, that might strike fear in some hearts of accountants because we've all had that really terrible data file that a client's been working on that's awful. And so I think what's interesting about FreshBooks is you guys really put some guardrails around what the clients can and can't do. There's only so much damage they can do in that thing. 

Now, having said that, I've also, you know, when new clients come on, they can certainly, you know, with data– Obviously, they don't understand the accounting principles. And so to have that support, I mean, I can attest to that, that your support team is just like A+, amazing, like from an accounting professional standpoint. Absolutely. Because they help really bridge that gap between the client and us, and I think it's a place where there could have been a lot of friction because the client doesn't understand, they think everything's fine. So I think to kind of bridge that and be like, “Yeah, you're doing a great job, but we just need to do these little things.” You know, I think that that has helped a lot. 

And, you know, you're speaking my love language when you talk about community. Now, I know that in addition to, like, an online community, you guys also have, like, monthly meetings and calls and things like that. So there's actually, like, real-time things that can happen as well. Right?

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Twyla Verhelst  24:25

That's right. We have things like office hours, we have product updates, we're right in the spot of now looking ahead to 2024. What are we going to do to set people up for success with what we call switching season which is January? It’s obviously a really ideal time to convert to using a new platform for your clients because it reduces the amount of work that anyone has to do to pull in historical data. Now, we can do that, but often it's kind of nice to do a nice clean cut off on Jan one and so we're looking at what else do you need from us from that community perspective, that education perspective that's ongoing, real-time giving you access to these books that I'm talking about here, FreshBooks. 

They understand the product, they understand the workflow, they understand accounting, and they also understand the needs of your client, as they're supporting you with what it is that you need. So that, you know, we don't inadvertently set the accountant up for success, only to impact how the client is going to do their work at FreshBooks, because it's key that both are set up for success for this model to work, which is why I believe that FreshBooks is so well positioned to be the platform of choice for Collaborative Accounting. But also to not just give you the platform, give you the education and be like, “Okay, see ya, hopefully you don't file a support ticket.” Instead, it's like ”We are locking arms, we're going to do this in lockstep together to ensure that you have not just a success to start, but also to keep going and, and continue to use this model.”

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Kristen Keats  25:55

Yeah, I mean, honestly, that's what I love about FreshBooks. I feel like you guys are in it with us, in it with your customers as well. So this, I mean, this all sounds amazing. So now, the next question is like, what do we do? How do we get started? What's the next step for accounting professionals to be able to jump into this Collaborative Accounting pool?

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Twyla Verhelst  26:12

Yeah, happy to share that. And, you know, as somebody yourself, in your case, you're already an accounting partner. So you got to dive right into completing your new certification and embracing Collaborative Accounting in that way, you already had a Hub account inside of the product, etc. But if you're net new, you're brand new, even, you know, like, “I haven't looked at FreshBooks ever, or in years”, this might be the time. 

Then the first thing to do would be to go to freshbooks.com/accountants, and join the partner program. Joining the partner program kicks off the entire journey. It kicks off the education that you get served up in terms of “Okay, now, here's how you complete your certification”, which is a self-service, online environment that you can take at your leisure and complete in one fell swoop or you can do it over the course of a couple of evenings or whatever works for you. 

So you take that certification, you set up your Hub account, and then we encourage accountants to set up a free trial, because as a certified partner, you get a free FreshBooks account for the lifetime of your involvement or your enrollment as an accounting partner. So set up that free account, start playing with it, start using it and getting your feet wet inside of inside of the platform, and start to see, “What is it my client’s going to do in this workflow again? What is it that I'm going to do?”, and really start to play with the features. 

Some of the feedback that we've heard –and I think you alluded to this– is accountants have even tried to break FreshBooks and they can't. No, I'm not trying to put that out there as a challenge, but, that said, that's what our support is for if you do but, you know, you won't break it. You can play with it. If you ever need it to be a clean slate we’ll support you with that and starting fresh if you've really gone haywire inside of your demo account. But get your feet wet and get inside the product and really start to explore it. 

And then start to think about who is the client that this is a good fit for. “Which client do I want to start my Collaborative Accounting journey with?” You know, there's certain signals that you hear from clients, one being if you've got a client that you are constantly after for documentation, invoicing, “What did you do here? What did you buy at Amazon items?” Always the worst, right? “What did you buy at Amazon? Is this a business expense?” That client that you feel like you're constantly –or your team’s constantly– trying to pull information from, that's potentially a good client to start with because it could be the tech that they're using, or the workflow, you know. From a place of good service, you set it up in a way that you thought was going to support them and it potentially isn't. And those are signals that a different workflow, different technology might really serve them better, and in turn, serve you better and then, in turn, unlock that advisory for them.

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Kristen Keats  28:53

Awesome. Well, I know I'm excited about and hopefully, everyone who's listening is excited about it.

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Twyla Verhelst  28:58

Yeah, thank you. We're very excited here and we appreciate all of the input that you Kristen, and Fresh PAC members and some of our early adopters have put into this. We're excited to bring this profession and really support you all with evolving the way that you're working with clients and that you're doing things inside your firm. So thank you for taking the time to chat.

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Kristen Keats  29:18

Thanks for answering all my questions.

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Twyla Verhelst  29:21

So there you have it: a rundown of Collaborative Accounting and the way it can revolutionize client interactions and the way you work in your accounting practice. Here at FreshBooks, we really believe that you, the accounting professionals, are the future of this profession. And we're committed to you and your clients. FreshBooks’ Collaborative Accounting is an integrated approach that reimagines the way you work with your clients. 

So if you're looking to stay ahead of the curve, or bring what you love to do back into focus in your firm, Collaborative Accounting is for you. Check out FreshBooks’ Accounting Partner Program and the new Collaborative Accounting Certification at freshbooks.com/accountants. Thanks so much for joining us today. See you soon.