“Really great interview. I appreciated how the highlights were amplified. Nancy is smart and real. Blake does a great job allowing the interviewee talk and share her knowledge. Well done!” -YouTube viewer comment
I was honored to be interviewed recently by the one-and-only Blake Oliver for Relay‘s “Gearing Up” series, where every two weeks, he talks to a real accountant or bookkeeper about ONE challenge in their firm — and how to solve it.
In this episode, we discuss how to build a team with whom you love to work (kudos to Bookkeeping Buds for helping me make that happen).
As our firm grew, I realized that building The Dancing Accountant in a traditional way was re-creating working conditions that our team and I didn’t love — it was immensely important to me that above all, we enjoy working with each other.
But first I had to convince myself I had something to offer — and decided to focus on what I knew employees wanted: meaningful work.
In the latest episode of Gearing Up with our host Blake Oliver, I open up about the a-ha moment that led to our building an entirely different kind of remote firm. In the episode, you’ll learn: Why Nancy is known as The Dancing Accountant Nancy’s favorite tool in her tech stack Three things employees want from work The non-traditional structure of Nancy’s team
If this or any other posts on the website were useful to you, and your financial situation permits it, please consider contributing to my tip jar. Ths allows me to continue to provide free accounting resources to small businesses who do not have the funds available to hire a CPA.
IRS Officials at Thursday’s NYU Tax Controversy Forum, presented by CPA Academy.
As the IRS begins slowly opening its offices in various states over the next four weeks, a panel of IRS officials discussed the recent changes and next steps at Thursday’s NYU Tax Controversy Forum, presented via CPA Academy.
I had been frustrated recently by a pretty big “fail” on the part of the IRS, where suddenly all of their notices — the letters that were not sent out during the period when employees were offsite — were mailed to taxpayers months late, causing a great deal of confusion and anxiety. As it turns out, for as many changes as the IRS was able to make to allow employees to process work offsite, one thing the IRS was not able to pivot effectively was anything that involves paper.
Sunita Lough, Deputy Commissioner for Services & Enforcement at the IRS, explained, “we’ve had 136 million returns filed and we’ve processed 134 million, but there are a number of paper returns that are in the mail that need to be opened and processed. We estimate that we receive 1 million new pieces of mail each week. Think about all of the weeks that we were closed. Our mailrooms are opening 5 million per week. We’re working really hard to open them. We currently have about 11 million pieces of mail that are unopened, but we are continuing to make progress.”
Accounting Today reported that among the areas where improvements were made, the IRS was able to offer some more flexibility for communicating with taxpayers and tax professionals by enabling secure email to be sent. “We created a way for people who are in compliance contact with us or have applications pending like the exempt organizations to be able to communicate with us through email, which is something we have never done,” said Lough.
They also reported that Eric Hylton, Commissioner of the IRS’s Small Business/Self-Employed Division, said he has seen more collaboration than he’s ever seen before in his 30 years at the IRS. “We’ve been extremely busy,” he said. “A lot of long conversations, late-night conversations….”
“Yes, we were hit with the crisis, but we also thought about what is the opportunity that we can take advantage of. I think we did yeoman’s work as it relates to getting our nonportable workforce into a telework environment. With SB/SE, we increased our numbers by 40 percent, which was outstanding. We had a lot of different efforts and a lot of different managers doing outstanding work to try to assist employees to get telework ready. Ultimately, that’s going to be a paradigm shift for us as we move forward.”
He believes telework will offer more flexibility with new seasonal hires, as well as office space. “There are certain pockets around the country where we could actually have more employees if we have the space, so it gives us an opportunity to look at this environment and turn this crisis into an opportunity,” said Hylton.
Doug O’Donnell, Commissioner of the Large Business & International Division, is seeing more collaboration across divisions. He also highlighed the new secure email system. “This really improved our ability to work in a telework environment. In addition to being able to send and receive documents, we also had an improved capability to accept signed documents,” he said. “We greatly improved our ability to operate in that environment and are actually progressing on work from our homes, which was a significant change from where we’ve been operating previously.”
Tammy Riperda, Commissioner of the IRS’s Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division, said that some of the managers in the her division would retrieve applications for tax-exempt status that arrived in the mail and deliver them curbside to the determination specialists who were driving up in their cars. The employees could then take the applications home and work through them in a telework environment. “Kudos to those managers and the ingenuity that they had and the ambition that they had to keep things going,” said Riperda.
But she acknowledged there is still a delay with paper-filed information returns, such as the Form 990 series. “We’re still trying to proceed with the processing of those as best we can,” said Ripperda. “But even those, as well as the processing of the applications, we’re unable to get them uploaded to TEOS, the Tax-Exempt Organization Search tool on IRS.gov, because of some back-end processing requirements for those uploads.
“But really it can almost be seen as fortunate timing that we stopped accepting paper applications for 501(c)3s on April 30 of this year.” Lough pointed out that the Form 1023 application for tax-exempt status was mandated to be electronically filed after that date.
If this or any other posts on the website were useful to you, and your financial situation permits it, please consider contributing to my tip jar. This allows me to continue to provide free accounting resources to small businesses who do not have the funds available to hire a CPA.
More than ever before, people can work where they want, when they want. Research shows that flexible work allows people to take better care of themselves and spend more time with family and friends. Conversely, research also indicates that just the expectation of receiving work emails after hours can cause anxiety and stress -– not just in the worker, but in members of their family.
“The first step toward establishing boundaries is to realize that you need to take responsibility for setting them. Often, the biggest enemy is ourselves – not the technology, clients or employers. We think we need to be available all the time because we have a mobile device or a home office, but in most cases, it’s simply not the reality – nor should it be.”
I recognize this is true — however, I take great pride and derive fulfillment and satisfaction from my job when I feel like I can be there for clients as they need me. Possibly more importantly, I love being able to take at least one stress off the shoulders of my small-business clients (who are wearing far too many hats as it is) by their just “knowing” that I’ve got their back. So even if there isn’t an emergency, they find themselves with less anxiety, because they don’t necessarily need to anticipate the possibility of having one. They can focus on the day-to-day of running a business.
It feels terrible to find out that a client had a crisis and didn’t contact me, because they “didn’t want to bother” me. I want them to bother me when I’m needed. I want to help make their problems less painful. And chances are, if they’re having an accounting “emergency”, I’ve seen it happen before, with other clients, and I may have some insight on how to deal with it as painlessly as possible. And sometimes, when they try to deal with it themselves, without assistance, it simply causes a bigger problem for all of us down the road.
So what’s the solution? What happens when too many clients have crises simultaneously? What happens when a client feels their needs are time-sensitive and you disagree? And how do you ever take a true “day off (when you know no one can reach you, or there’s no need to even think about your phone or laptop)?
I don’t know the answer — and neither does this article, but it gave me some more ideas to consider. For example, the author discusses “practicing what you preach” if you are setting boundaries with clients:
“Occasionally, I’ll open my laptop outside of my “office hours” to catch up on emails in the late evening. To respect my clients’ time and reinforce my own boundaries, I set up a rule on my email to only deliver emails during work hours. I can compose a response at 10 p.m., but it won’t hit my client’s inbox until 7 a.m. the following day. If you tell your clients you’re not available in the evenings, then you’re sending emails at 10 p.m., clients will start thinking you actually are available at that time.”
That said, I love getting work done in the wee hours, when everything is quiet and I can concentrate with few interruptions. It’s a joy to find a client responding to my emails at that time, bonding over our night-owl tendencies, and working out a solution to a problem before bedtime.
For me, the ideal situation would be not to set these boundaries — but also to make sure that folks know I can’t be there for them 24/7. When I was in the hospital and folks had an emergency, I simply had an out-of-office email response set, explaining my very real and human situation, and asking them to text in the case of a true accounting “emergency”. Everyone was great about it except one client — who I later decided to leave, since it was clear we weren’t a good fit. The experience, though challenging, brought out the best in my staff and my clients.
I recently brought on a client who said that her biggest frustration with her former CPA was poor communication and unanswered calls and emails. I responded and told her outright that there are only four of us in my firm — and three are part-time — and we just don’t have the capacity to respond to emails within 24 hours — in fact, it’s sometimes 48 hours, or a week, or three weeks! But that if she ever had an urgent need, she could always text me, and I’d let her know if it was something I could make happen on short notice… or, if she felt like she’d been waiting on a response that may have fallen through the cracks, that she could always just shoot me a text. She loved the transparency and the setting of expectations, and realized in the end that it wasn’t a quick response she wanted… it was knowing what to expect, and knowing how to respond. And we’re enjoying working together.
So although I disagreed with much of the advice the author of this article had to share — for my own time and place in life at this moment, at least — I definitely saw the value of thinking through the whys and hows of running your own business in an “always on” culture. She closes with some very wise words, which I wholeheartedly agree with:
“If you’re having dinner with your family, leave your phone in another room, turn off your ringer and let calls go to voicemail. When I go to dinner with a client, I leave my phone in my purse or even back in my hotel room so I won’t be distracted during a face-to-face conversation.
The way we honor relationships is to give them time. Protect and honor your relationships with your family, friends, clients and yourself by setting boundaries, communicating them clearly, and turning off your phone and laptop. In an increasingly ‘always on’ culture, we can’t forget the importance of unplugging.”
Why Nancy is known as The Dancing Accountant 
Nancy’s favorite tool in her tech stack 
Three things employees want from work 
The non-traditional structure of Nancy’s team
https://youtu.be/IigWdOH5G6M
