# Interview 02: Marcus

Owner of a four-person bookkeeping firm, about 70 small-business clients, still closes the largest ones himself

Date: 16 October 2026 · Video call · 47 minutes · Invented example interview

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Interviewer: Thanks for joining, Marcus. Tell me about your firm.

Marcus: We're four people. Me, two bookkeepers and an assistant who works part-time. About seventy clients, mostly trades and shops, a few restaurants. Our job is simple to say: every client's books closed every month, and the client gets their numbers by the fifteenth. I still close about fifteen of the clients myself, the bigger ones, and I review everybody else's.

Interviewer: Let's take the most recent month you closed. Which was it?

Marcus: September. We finished on the fourteenth, so just inside the line.

Interviewer: Where did September begin for you?

Marcus: With the board. We use a practice management tool, and every client is a card. The card moves from "waiting on client" to "in progress" to "review" to "sent". On the first working day of the month I go through the board and decide the order. Anyone with payroll or a sales tax return due goes first. Then the clients who always send on time, because those are quick wins. The slow senders go last, because there's no point starting them.

Interviewer: How long does that take?

Marcus: An hour, maybe. It used to take a whole morning when it was in my head. The hard part isn't the order, it's knowing what's different this month. A client who hired three people, a client who bought a van on finance. If nobody tells us, we find out when the reconciliation doesn't work.

Interviewer: And collecting the documents?

Marcus: That's our assistant's whole job the first week. She has a list per client of what we need, she sends the request on the first, and from the third she starts phoning. Phoning works better than email. People ignore an email, they don't ignore a person.

Interviewer: Was it always like that?

Marcus: No. Before we had her, the bookkeepers did the chasing, and they hated it. And they're expensive people to have chasing receipts. Hiring her was the best money I've spent. The bookkeepers start closing on day three instead of day eight.

Interviewer: Does she get everything?

Marcus: Most of it. There are always three or four clients who send the last receipts on the twelfth, and then the bookkeeper has to redo half the month. In September it was a restaurant. The receipts came in a shoebox, literally, through the door.

Interviewer: What happened with the shoebox?

Marcus: One of the bookkeepers spent a day sorting it. Half of it was personal. The owner's groceries, a birthday present, petrol for his wife's car. You have to decide for every single receipt whether it's the business or not, and you're guessing.

Interviewer: Then recording?

Marcus: Xero, with bank rules. The rules do most of the coding now. We record a few hundred transactions a month for a big client, and the bookkeeper only touches the ones the rules don't know.

Interviewer: And reconciliation?

Marcus: Reconciliation is where I spend my review time. The worst thing a junior can do is make it balance. There's an adjustment line, eighty dollars to "reconciliation difference", and the books balance, but the real problem is still in there. In September I found one of those. It turned out to be a supplier refund that was recorded twice.

Interviewer: How did you find it?

Marcus: I didn't trust the eighty dollars. I went through every transaction in that account for the month, one by one, against the statement. It took about an hour and a half. If we hadn't found it, it would have come back at year-end.

Interviewer: How often does that happen?

Marcus: Once or twice a month across the firm. And each time somebody senior loses an hour or two finding it. Finding the cause is always the slow part. Fixing it is two minutes.

Interviewer: What happens at the end?

Marcus: Each client gets their reports and, for the bigger ones, a call with me. We used to just email the standard reports out of the software. I checked once how many clients opened them. About a third. So we stopped sending reports on their own. Now the small clients get a short email with three numbers, cash, profit and what's coming, and the bigger ones get fifteen minutes on the phone with me.

Interviewer: What happens on those calls?

Marcus: Mostly I explain why a number moved. Cash is down but profit is up, that kind of thing. The numbers take me ten minutes. The why takes an hour, because I have to go dig. Which supplier, which month, which one-off. I'd love the why to be ready before the call.

Interviewer: What's the cost of not having the why ready?

Marcus: Clients lose trust. If I say "I'll get back to you on that", I've lost a bit of them. They think, he doesn't know my business.

Interviewer: How do you want clients to see the firm?

Marcus: As the people they call before they buy a van. Not the people who type in receipts. We are the people who type in receipts, too, but that's not why they should keep us.

Interviewer: And for yourself, what does a good close feel like?

Marcus: Quiet. Nothing went out with a mistake in it, and nobody's working at ten at night on the fourteenth. I want to sleep knowing nothing wrong went out under the firm's name.

Interviewer: Is there anything you'd change first?

Marcus: The tail. The first ten days are fine now. It's the last three or four clients every month who hold everything up. They're the same clients every month, too.

Interviewer: Have you tried anything for those clients?

Marcus: We charged a late fee for a while. It made them angry and it didn't make them faster. We dropped it after two months.

Interviewer: What did you try after that?

Marcus: Honestly, nothing clever. The assistant calls them earlier. She starts with the slow ones on the first instead of the third. It helps a little. But some of these owners are on a roof all day, and the receipts are the last thing on their mind.