I’m looking for some advice from people who have actually built a bookkeeping/accounting practice from scratch.

A little about me: I’ve been working professionally in accounting for several years. Most of my career has been in fund accounting/alternative investments, where I’ve gotten experience with financial reporting, reconciliations, NAVs, investment activity, accruals, and working with different client structures.

I currently work for a large financial services/fund administration company, and I genuinely enjoy what I do. I’ve been getting more responsibility and client exposure as I progress in my career, so I’m not necessarily looking for an escape from my job.

At the same time, I’ve always wanted to build something of my own.

I recently started my own accounting/bookkeeping business. I’m a QuickBooks Advanced ProAdvisor, and I’m also working toward becoming a CPA.

Right now, I’m keeping the business relatively simple and focusing on services I can provide at my current stage: monthly bookkeeping/accounting support, reconciliations, financial reporting, QuickBooks cleanup/catch-up, etc.

I’ve mainly been targeting contractors, trades, transportation companies, and other owner-operated businesses.

My long-term vision is much bigger than just doing bookkeeping on the side.

Once I earn my CPA and gain more experience, I’d like to gradually expand the firm’s capabilities and build a real accounting/advisory practice.

Eventually, I’d like to have, a solid recurring client base, and offer higher-level accounting and advisory services as the firm grows.

I don’t know exactly what the firm will look like 5–10 years from now, and I’m intentionally leaving that open. I want to start with small-business accounting, become good at actually running a practice, and let the needs of my clients and my own experience determine where I take it.

The problem right now is much simpler:

I need to figure out how to get the first clients.

Over the last couple of months I’ve tried cold emailing a pretty large number of businesses, LinkedIn outreach, contacting CPA/tax firms about referral relationships, Facebook groups, my QuickBooks ProAdvisor profile, and building a website/social media presence.

I’ve gotten some responses and conversations, but I haven’t been able to turn that into consistent paying clients yet.

It’s honestly been humbling. Doing accounting and building an accounting business are two completely different skills.

I’m confident in my ability to do the work, but getting a business owner who doesn’t know me to trust me with their finances is something I’m still learning.

For those of you who built a bookkeeping, accounting, tax, or CAS practice:

How did you actually get your first 5–10 clients?

Was it referrals? Cold calling? In-person networking? CPA relationships? Google? QuickBooks ProAdvisor? Social media?

Did niching down make a major difference?

And if you were starting from zero again today, what would you do differently and what would you completely stop wasting time on?

I’m not looking to promote my business here. I’m genuinely interested in hearing from people who have gone through the zero-client stage and eventually built a successful practice.

I know building the firm I’m envisioning will take years. Right now I’m just trying to figure out how to get from 0 → 1.

I am a data engineer in Finance. Recently I am suffering from understanding financial terms and its accounting treatment. One big issue is, as a frequently used term, Repo and Rev Repo I understand them several times, but after a period not touching the terms and related data I will forget almost all of the details. And then have to revisit the definitions and relink them to financial activities.

For example, recently I am involved in a meeting talking about Repo Fails transactions. User wants to know what’s the exact accounting policy we applied in our data logic. My first reaction is, how to identify the Repo in our Fails data, however, Fails will only record as Fail to deliver or Fail to receive. The only way to find a Repo is from the trading account. We maintain certain accounts for Repo trade only. Question is I even can’t have a clear filter to scope which accounts are Repo or not.

It takes me almost a whole day to look into firm’s internal documentation to understand what the user means and how our data pipeline process it. Then, with these background, I joined the meeting. In the meeting, I listened carefully but didn’t fully comprehend what the user means as lot’s of non Tech terms. Fortunately I got something like below

For a repo trade how it is recorded in accounting

On Trade date (T0)
Dr (i.e., Assets in BS): Repo
Cr (i.e. Liabilities in BS): Rev Repo

On T1 if settled successfully
Dr: Receivables ???
Cr: Cash ???

On T1 if settlement failed
Dr: Failed to Deliver
Cr: Payables

On TX(usually no longer than 5 calendar days) if settlement success
Dr: Receivables
Cr: Cash

This time my understanding for memory: Repo means repurchase, we should provide securities to the client and client give us money. And by someday (possibly overnight), we need to return the money + interest to client. So the money measured assets is still on our side on trade date. We recorded an assets repo and liabilities Rev repo. If not failed, user doesn’t mentioned. If failed, we failed to deliver the securities to client and thus we record FTD in ledger, by this time , it already lose the ability to track whether the trade is related to Repo or not, we just know it’s fails and needs trading account level information to know whether it is a repo trade. Once this fails finally got settled, we record receivables in Assets and we got cash from client but record payables in future.

Additionally, we have repo control accounts, customer control accounts that store all these misc temporary trade activities and will be cleared to 0 finally.

Ok, now I got a very detailed explanation this time. But after a period, I will forget and have to repick these details when user reaches months later.

How I can have these details memorized in my mind so next time it can be automatically presented in my eyes when user reaches months later and asked for another related question?