# Interview 05: Kenji Freelance bookkeeper, 30 clients (online shops and small agencies), works alone, automates what he can Date: 28 October 2026 · Video call · 58 minutes · Invented example interview --- Interviewer: Thanks for doing this, Kenji. Tell me about your practice. Kenji: I'm a one-person practice. Thirty clients, mostly online shops and small agencies, design studios, that sort of thing. I've been doing it for six years. Before that I was in a corporate finance team, which is where I learned to hate doing anything twice. Interviewer: Let's take the last month you closed. Kenji: September. All thirty were done by the seventh of October. That's my target every month: books closed by the seventh, reports out by the eighth. Interviewer: How do you plan a month like that? Kenji: The plan is mostly the same every month, so I automated the boring part. Every client has a template close in my task manager, and on the first it creates the tasks for every client. Bank accounts, card accounts, payment processor, payroll, sales tax. I just work down the list. What I can't automate is the stuff that changes. A client starts selling on a new marketplace, and suddenly there's a new payout account nobody told me about. Interviewer: Has that happened? Kenji: In August. One of the shops started selling on a second platform, and the payouts started landing in the bank with a name I'd never seen. I only noticed because the sales were too high for the month. By then I'd recorded six weeks of payouts as the wrong thing. Interviewer: How do you collect documents? Kenji: Each client has a shared cloud folder with a sub-folder for every month. My reminders go out automatically on the first, the fourth and the eighth. The email has a link straight to that month's folder, so there's no logging in, no password, nothing. They just drop the files in. Interviewer: Does that work? Kenji: Better than anything else I've tried. But the folder is only as good as the client. Some of them drop everything in on time. Some of them drop in a zip file with three months of receipts in it in November. The reminders don't fix that. They just mean I don't have to remember to send them. Interviewer: What happens when someone's late? Kenji: I close without them if I have to, and the receipts get attached later. The bank side is always complete, because it comes in from the feed. The documents are what lag. The problem shows up at year-end, when the accountant wants a receipt for everything over a certain amount and I have twenty-something gaps for one client. Interviewer: Tell me about recording. Kenji: Xero, with a lot of bank rules. I've got about four hundred rules across all the clients. For the online shops, the payouts from the payment processor are the hard part, because one payout is a hundred sales minus fees minus refunds. I split them with a little spreadsheet I built. Recording a whole month for a normal client takes me under an hour now. Interviewer: And reconciliation? Kenji: That's the part I'm genuinely good at. Most of the time the feed and the statement agree, and reconciling is a click. When they don't, I can usually find a mismatch in five minutes now. I have a routine. First I look for a transaction with exactly that amount. Then half the amount, because that's usually something entered on the wrong side. Then I check if the difference divides by nine, because then it's two digits swapped. That catches nearly everything. Interviewer: Where did that routine come from? Kenji: My old finance manager taught me the nine trick in my first week. The rest I built up after losing whole evenings to differences of eleven dollars. Interviewer: What about the bank feed itself? Does it ever go wrong? Kenji: Yes, and that's the scary one. In September one bank's feed dropped two days of transactions for a client, and in another account it brought in the same week twice. The duplicates are easy to spot. The missing days aren't, because nothing looks wrong. I only caught it because the closing balance didn't match the statement. Interviewer: What's the end of the close for you? Kenji: I record a three-minute video for each client. I share my screen, open the profit and loss, and talk through what changed and why. Then I send the link. They actually watch them. They reply to them. Interviewer: What did you do before the videos? Kenji: I sent the reports as PDFs with a paragraph of text. Then I'd get the same question in six different emails over the next week. "Why is profit down?" "Is this fee right?" Explaining it once, out loud, with the numbers on screen, saves me a couple of hours a month per client. Interviewer: How long does a video take you? Kenji: The recording is three minutes. Working out what to say is the long part. I have to compare the month with the month before and find the two or three things that explain the change. That's maybe twenty minutes for a client with a lot going on. Interviewer: How do you want clients to see you? Kenji: As the person who explains their numbers. Not just the person who files them. When a client says "I finally get my profit and loss", that's the best part of the job. Interviewer: And how do you want to feel at the end of the month? Kenji: In control. Every client closed, nothing hanging. I hate the feeling of a loose end I can't see.