Create an online questionnaire to send to prospective bookkeeping client prior to your official consultation
You can use Google Forms or other free programs to create a nice looking document for a prospective bookkeeping client to complete prior to your initial consultation. Having some basic information about the prospect’s business helps you guide the conversation, know their pain points, and is also a nice to reference when you are finished with the consultation and developing your proposal. Whether you are brand new to virtual bookkeeping or already have some experience or clients, this free tool can help you streamline your client selection.
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Step 1: Determine Your Questions
You need to decide what questions you want to ask your prospect. There is a tension between wanting them to take a thorough amount of time and give you all the answers you could possibly need vs creating a document that is too long that no one will complete. Only you can decide what you want to ask. And remember, you can easily tweak your Google Form over time as you bring on new clients.
Here is a brain dump of possible questions. Please do not use all of these.
- Company Name
- Date business started, or How long have you been in business?
- Fiscal year end date
- Number of owners?
- Type of Corporation (Sole Prop, LLC, S-Corp, C-Corp, etc), perfect question for check boxes
- Current accounting software, list of popular ones in check boxes and an “other”
- What is your average current monthly (or annual) revenue?
- What is your average current monthly (or annual) income?
- About how many transactions do you have each month (sales and expenses)?
- Number of employees, ranges to select with one that is “just me”
- How do you currently handle payroll?
- Do you pay sales tax? check yes or no
- Do you have any loans? check yes or no with a short answer box for “describe”
- Do you have any fixed assets? check yes or no with short answer box for “describe”
- When was your bookkeeping last up-to-date?
- What are your main problems that a bookkeeper could help with (i.e. bookkeeping is a nightmare, little to negative profit, too much debt, not paying yourself, not sure where your business stands financially)?
- What do you think is the biggest obstacle to solving these problems (be as detailed as you can so that we can better help you)?
- How involved do you want to be with the bookkeeping?
One last tip to consider is to somehow put a bit of your personality in your questions. Can you ask one question that will reveal a lot about your personality, work style, priorities, etc? Maybe ask a question about dogs vs cats? If you have a mouth like a sailor and your clients need to be o.k. with that, can you add in a bleeped out curse word with some @#$^* characters? If avoiding work-aholics is a priority of yours, can you put a question in there about that? Can you ask them their “why”? Take this tip with a grain of salt. Business owners are busy and don’t have time for too many shenanigans. It won’t work for everyone and might not even work for anyone! Ha! This is just a tip for you to chew on.
What other questions can you think of that would be good for a new prospective bookkeeping client questionnaire? Comment below or tell us in our Bookkeeping Side Hustle FaceBook Group.
Step 2: Compose Your Questionnaire
I used Google Forms to create my questionnaire. It is free and easy to use. I think SurveyMonkey is another free option. If you know of other free options for questionnaire creation, please comment below or come to our Bookkeeping Side Hustle FaceBook Group and share the resource! I will update this article with any useful resources.
Be sure to use the functionality of the program you choose to make it as user-friendly as possible. Use check boxes. Use Yes/No. Use multiple choice.
Step 3: Share Your Questionnaire
Try to give your client an appropriate amount of time to answer the questions. Let the client know that you are sending it so they look for it in their email inbox and also let them know how long you think it should take them to complete (ideally no more than 5 minutes).
Step 4: Capitalize On Your Questionnaire
Having these answers before your initial consultation is worthless if you don’t capitalize on the information.
- Give yourself plenty of time to digest what they wrote.
- Research anything that is unfamiliar to you. If they use a payroll provider that you’ve never heard of, research it. If their apps are new to you, then get feedback from some of the online accounting communities about them.
- Make sure you don’t simply re-ask the same questions in your consult, but use the information to ask better, next-level questions that dig in to their business and their problems.
Using an online questionnaire to collect initial information from a prospective bookkeeping client is a great way to kick off the data gathering and to know what sort of bookkeeping project you are walking in to.
If they say they haven’t filed their taxes in 3 years or say that they need 2 years of bookkeeping done in less than a month, you know what you are getting in to. That client might not be a good fit. Or you might decide you need to charge a premium for their particular situation? Or you might be able to customize one of your packages to fit their unique needs. But you can think about all of that ahead of time instead of in the moment as you are having your consultation.