Bookkeeping Best Practices to Follow in 2026: Insights from Rachel Barnett

Bookkeeping has become a core business priority for firms, not just a compliance task. As client expectations rise and workflows become more complex, bookkeepers must strengthen their systems, set clearer boundaries, and communicate more effectively to maintain accuracy and professionalism. 

Ace Cloud Hosting spoke with Rachel Barnett, Founder of Gentle Frog. Rachel has been a QuickBooks user since 1995 and has been a QuickBooks ProAdvisor since 2012. Rachel owned and operated Primarily Bookkeeping, d/b/a Your Bookkeeping Fairy Godmother, a Seattle-area bookkeeping firm, for six years, until selling the firm in 2018. She started Gentle Frog to support businesses that employed an in-house bookkeeper or owners who chose the DIY route for their bookkeeping. 

In this insightful video, Rachel shares practical strategies and best practices that help bookkeepers work more efficiently, communicate clearly, and manage clients with confidence heading into 2026. 

Transcript

“Hi there. My name is Rachel Barnett, the founder of Gentle Frog. This video is in collaboration with Ace Cloud Hosting. Ace Cloud Hosting, and I have been talking about just different things that bookkeepers need to know about and need to think about. And a lot of times, that really is the software.  

Like, if you’re using QuickBooks desktop, where are you going to host it? How are you going to manage it- But other times it’s more behind-the-scenes, like you’ve got the client, you’ve got the software.    

Now what? In this video, I’m just going to touch on a couple of things that I think might be helpful for you or maybe re-evaluate. I broke it into three categories in my notes to myself. The first is expectations and boundaries. The second is communication with ease. And the third is having a system.   

So, let’s start with expectations and boundaries. When you start to work with a client, you might go to the client and say, oh, for these dollars, I’ll do your bookkeeping, which could mean any variety of things. My strong recommendation for you is that the best practice is to identify what you will be doing for the dollars. Not only what are you doing? You’re tracking records after the fact. You’re creating invoices; you’re paying bills.    

But what date range are you doing it for? Let’s imagine that a client has come to you, and they say I have this whole shoebox, worth of records. I need you to organize it. You might say, sure, you may outline and say, I’m going to work on these different bank accounts and these credit cards, and I’m going to enter your stuff into QuickBooks. We are going to use a cash basis. You know, you have all the details.    

A thing to remember to add is the date range. I am guilty of being slow to turn in my documents as needed. I have had clients who are guilty of being slow to turn in their documents. So, let’s say they give you the whole shoebox, and they say we want you to do January through September, because here’s our shoebox of records, but they don’t finish answering questions until December. How are you going to manage it? Oh, could you just go ahead and do the rest of the year?   

You would say yes because you like the client and you want to keep working with them. When I think about boundaries, I think about, oh, wait; a boundary is that you paid me for January through September. You need to pay me for October through December. A different form that boundaries come into play is when a client hires you to do the bookkeeping, and then they want to have you do extra stuff. Maybe they want to get their business license in another state. Maybe they want to hop on a call to discuss their financials.    

These are things that you may or may not choose to do. But when you proposed that price, did you include that in the price? Maybe you’re hourly, and you’re like, well, the price is fine. I’m getting paid for everything. Think about it, okay. Well, great. I’m getting paid. Is this a service I offer? Is that a service I want to offer? When you become someone’s buddy, and you’re helping them, and they trust you, and they like you, it is common that they might ask more and more of you because they like you, and they might forget that your sweet spot is bookkeeping and you don’t really want to be their receptionist. So, boundaries. Okay.    

So, number two, communication. In my notes, I said to communicate with ease. What I mean by that is, how will you communicate with your client or clients? My clients and I communicate via email. If they have something, they need to send it over. They communicate via the portal.    

If their bookkeeping clients or we communicate via Zoom. The way my clients don’t communicate with me. They don’t call me without an appointment. It just goes to the answering service. They don’t text me. I don’t need or want extra text messages. They don’t message me on Facebook. Like you’re starting to get the idea for me. For my personality. This is what works for other bookkeepers. They’re fine with having text communication with their clients. They set up a portal that enables text, or they use an online service, for their phone, so they can get text messages back and forth.    

I would encourage you to have just a handful of standardized methods of communication. Not because I’m the fun police and I want to tell you what to do, but because I want you to think about it, I’m going to communicate with my client. They’re going to have questions. I’m going to have questions. I’m going to get an answer later.    

If it’s a month later or even a couple of weeks later when you finally get those answers, are you going to remember where the answers came from? You’re working on a thing. You get back to the client, you’re ready to work on their stuff, and you’re like, Oh, is the answer an email? Did it happen in a text message? Was it a Facebook Messenger? Where is that answer? I really like to consolidate.   

So again, for myself, for bookkeeping clients, I really try to push all of the questions and answers to go through the portal. But for training clients, it’s via email, or it’s on our call. So really, I just have very few places to look for stuff.  

Everything that I’ve just covered is communication, and making communication easier for you. I realize that sounds really selfish, but you need to have a way that’s easy for you to keep track of, so you can do the best job you can do. You do need to think about how you are going to make it easier for your clients.   

I’ve mentioned having a portal, and I’ve mentioned it a couple of times. What I like about the portal is that it gives the client a place to go to see my messages to them, their messages to me, in our back and forth on a particular topic. That sort of thing has been really handy. It gives the client one place to go. It saves them from looking in their email for the correspondence between us.    

My name is a fairly common name. So, if my clients were to search their email for Rachel, there may be lots of people they talk to named Rachel. Let’s say they search their email for QuickBooks because we were talking about QuickBooks. Not only do they have a lot of emails about QuickBooks, but you don’t know if you’re supposed to look for QuickBooks or QBO.    

If the client spaces it out and says QuickBooks. I strongly encourage you to think about what’s good for you so you can do the work efficiently and really look like a rock star to your clients. But what’s going to work for your clients so that when they go to look for that information, where you guys had the back and forth, and you gave them advice, how will they find it without pulling out their hair or worse? And I mean this kindly without calling you to get the information again.    

I know you want to be there for your clients. I want to be there for my clients. What I don’t want is to get bogged down in answering the same question over and over again, because we have too many channels of communication, and it gets lost. My third piece of advice is to have a system.    

So, in my notes, I wrote, have a system to know what you’re doing and when. It’s very simple. Have a system. I’m not talking about having SOPs and written documentation right down to how to process bank feeds. I’m talking about how you keep track of who you’re going to work on.  

What are you going to do for that person when it’s due? And I personally like, when did I last work on it? My weeks and your weeks are like this, too. They kind of fly by. I just wake up, and it’s Wednesday, and then in the next blink, it’s Friday, and then Monday happens, and the whole thing starts all over.    

I keep a dashboard which has a list of all my clients and their cadence, like weekly, monthly, all that good stuff. But also, I indicate when I last worked on their account. I need to do that because otherwise I’ll think about the last time I talked to them, or the last time you brainstormed a problem about them. Not anything specific, but oh, hey, I got a client with Stripe, and that’s where things are happening.    

You know how it is. You talk to your friends. I need to know when I last worked on their account so that it doesn’t get too far away from me. There are lots of different systems that you can use to keep track of who you’re working with and when you’re going to work on stuff.    

The key is just to find something that works for you. Gentle Frog is my second bookkeeping business. My first business was called Primarily Bookkeeping, d/b/a Your Bookkeeping Fairy Godmother. Love the name. Did not love how I set it up. I ended up selling it, so that part was great. What I did was primarily bookkeeping; I focused on micro-businesses, businesses that were really just too small for anybody.    

So, within that, what it meant was I would take on clients, charge them a low rate, and it would only work on their account once a month. That was pretty fantastic. But the downside is, what if I forget? Or what if I have questions I need the client to answer, and then they get the answers back to me? How do I work on it right away? Do I wait until the end of the month? I hope you’re able to take this video and all the other videos.  

You’re likely to watch it and just identify the things that are interesting and helpful. Don’t worry about what-so-and-so’s favorite software is and how so-and-so says you must do things. And this person is an expert in this area. No, just focus on when I look at this stuff and when I think about the stuff, what makes me happy?   

One of the things that I have done just over the years and continue to do, is that I have a giant sticky pad, but you go to the office supply store, you get these pads are like three feet across and four feet down, and I just use markers and I write down my ideas and I draw and I doodle and I diagram, and I think what I find and I would encourage you to do all these things. If there is anything in this video that was helpful. Write it down.   

But don’t put it in a Word doc that you’re not going to open again. Put it on a piece of paper, like get a really big piece of paper and write it down and then start building like a brainstorming word cloud. You know, the one where you have the word and the branch and then the words and the ideas. Let those things come to you.  

Once you know what you want, it’ll make it easier for you to put that together. In order for me to come up with my engagement letter, my description of service, what am I going to have on my client checklist? My internal checklist.   

I had to think about all the things I need to write down. All my crazy ideas, cross out the ones that I’m like, I don’t really need that. And then the double circle or heart, the ones that I’m like, yes, those are perfect for me.  

I want to thank you for watching this video. I really hope that some parts are even. Many parts are helpful to you. If I can help you in any way. Please don’t hesitate to reach out. If you’re looking for software. But in the cloud, so people can access it from anywhere, take a look at Ace Cloud Hosting. Thank you so much.” 

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