Bumping back to the top

Sorry Amanda, wasn't ignoring you but I've never heard of Local Mole so was rather hoping that someone else who had heard of it would post.

I'm guessing however that others were thinking the same which isn't a good sign for any advertising mkedium.

What about the accountants that you've dealt wit in the past. Have you tried giving them a call to see if they need any help?

How about setting up a quickbooks training course?

I've noticed that Intuit is really trying to make a headway into the UK market as the US appears somewhat saturated by them so it might be a good time to think of that as a venture espeichally as the bookkeeping market seems to be getting quite saturated with newstart practices so having a second income stream would be good hedging.

Sorry, not answering your question and just giving you something else to think about.

kind regards,

Shaun.

Hi Amanda,
I would also suggest Free Index, there is also the 'Best Of ...' group, which should have a listing site for your local area (mine would be Best of Bristol). You can also add yourself on Yell and Local Thomson for free. You might also look around to see if there are any local business listings in your area, even a facebook page could be a good place to market your services... which is also free.
If you haven't yet started your website, many of my clients use Wordpress, which is pretty cheap to set up, and I would happily talk you through it if you needed a hand. Also, are you on Linkedin... that works pretty well for advertising bookkeeping services. You can also join groups on Linkedin which might help grow your network.

Most of my bookkeeping clients have come through networking though, I'm not a huge fan of 4Networking, but I know it has worked well for a lot of bookkeepers in my area, it's fairly affordable as networking goes... might be something to look into?

Hope that helps.
Alison

Confidence Amanda, of course you know more than sufficient about QB to run a course on it.  I find that lots of small charities use QB because it is so cheap and the ease with which it fits their need to keep accurate records for different funding streams.  However, many of these have volunteer treasurers doing the work and would benefit from training including a bit of basic book-keeping.

Call in phone your local CVS see if you can fix something up with them (incidentally most of them will undertake book-keeping and payroll for smaller orgs) they may even need some training themselves.  Look at local community centres - many have computer rooms for which they got funding via UK online etc when money was plentiful and these are now (due to lack of funding) laying empty - see if you can run a course there (you will find they will have up to 10 machines and printer and probably wi-fi facilities), you could probably get the use without paying because they need the footfall and they'd also put up posters etc advertising your course.

Go for it!!!

Sheila

Hi Amanda. I have a student who seems to be attracting clients very regularly. I asked her how she did it (after reading your other post) and she said she googles freelance bookkeeping and as job alerts on many websites. She gets all her work that way. Sonya.

I only have a couple of payroll clients and they are Directors with no employees so to be honest I haven't got round to reading to much about the RTI. I've been steering clear of taking on extra payroll as I don't really want to be tied to a large one if it came along. I don't think the RTI will affect me too much with the 2 small clients, and I use 12Pay so I am assuming that they will have it linking to HMRC just like they do for the P35's etc at the end of the year? Must admit I haven't been on the 12Pay website yet to have a look to see if they have put anything on there yet.

I am going to change the wording on my advert to include training its a good idea. I would be alright on a one to one, I trained someone on QB about 2 years ago, the person I trained had no bookkeeping experience, and she didn't do too bad on it in the end, I haven't trained anyone since then though, although I do use it on a daily basis.

Maybe I should offer payroll in my advert, although I wouldn't feel that confident if a big one came in. I use to work in an office and I did payroll for 15 people, it turned out to be a nightmare each month as I was never given the correct information at the right time. Once after I have ran the payroll and I was getting ready to leave to do the school run ( I only worked school hours), the manager from another department told me that one of his staff was leaving at the end of the week! The boss failed to tell me and because I wasn't going to be in until the following week I had to go in specially the following day and re-do the payroll. Then the following month they failed to tell me that someone was starting the following monday! They then expected me to start the payroll for the new person, without seeing his P45, and they had no details on him regarding date of birth, tax code etc. The boss said put them on a standard tax code, I said no, it may be wrong! As it was when I finally saw his P45 the tax code wasn't the standard one as they were collecting extra tax through his tax code from the previous year. And every month I did their payroll there was a problem! Luckily I never the the bank payments that was upto the boss.

Thanks Sheila, I think I will add it, like you say I can always turn it down. I am just about to ring them up to change the artwork, I am going to add in Training and Payroll, and see what happens. Out of interest do you charge more per hour for training than bookkeeping or is it on the same rate?

Most of mine are hourly (I know some people on here don't do hourly), and I have a couple that are on fixed rate.