We’re Hiring: Remote, Part-time Accounting / Client Care Specialist

Plucky provides simple bookkeeping services to life coaches, solo consultants and freelancers. We’re different (maybe even a little weird) because we’ve built our own platform (Plucky Accounting) to support our clients.

Our service is especially well-suited to clients whose businesses are very simple: they don’t have many employees, they don’t sell physical products or carry inventory, and they don’t have physical assets like fleets of trucks or widget-making machines. We provide a simple service to simple businesses, and we really enjoy it.

I’m Mark Butler, the founder of the business. I’ve been the “money guy” for life coaches and other online business owners since 2014, and I’ve supported businesses that generate up to $25,000,000+ per year. In the early years I worked closely with a small handful of clients in a Chief Financial Officer role. Around 2020/2021 I started moving the service toward providing simple bookkeeping to clients whose businesses I understood well, but who didn’t need an expensive CFO.

Plucky started life as Let’s Do the Books, which I officially launched as a stand-alone service in 2020. Since then, the number of bookkeeping clients has increased over 10x, and I look forward to continued growth. That’s why I’m hiring you.

How We Work

I’m busiest between 10am and 2pm, Monday through Thursday, so that’s when you’d be working (for the most part). Sure, we can answer client emails at any hour of the day or night, but I like to be able to close up shop in the late afternoons and evenings. 

Each month we do a bookkeeping “sprint” where we update all of our clients’ financials. These sprints happen during the first three business days of the month between 10am and 2pm.

Outside of our monthly bookkeeping sprints, we onboard new clients and answering our current clients’ questions. That’s why this is a “most weekdays” kind of job. 

That said, there won’t be a ton of work on any given day. I anticipate you’ll work 5-10 hours per week outside of the early-month bookkeeping sprint, during which you’ll work about four hours per day. 

In other words: you’ll work about four hours each of the first three business days of the month, and five to ten hours per week the rest of the month.

The work we do is highly-repetitive, so there’s not much to talk about in any given week. We keep in touch via text, and we’ll meet occasionally to talk about changes to processes, specific client issues, that sort of thing. When do we do have a meeting, we’ll schedule it mid-morning on a weekday, around 10am Mountain Time.

Plucky Accounting. This is the platform I (Mark) have built and tailored specifically to our workflows. It has many of the same features as other accounting platforms, with a special focus on efficiently supporting a big group of clients.

Gmail. We keep in touch with our clients using nothing but good ol’ Gmail. 

More about the job.

Depending on where you live, we may decide it’s more advantageous for you to be a contractor rather than an employee. You and I will make this decision together. I don’t anticipate any work-related travel.

Your hourly rate will depend on our budget, your experience, and your required compensation. Once you and I decide this is a fit, we’ll find a pay rate that works for both of us.

The bookkeeping part of the job looks something like this:

You’ll import transactions from the client’s bank accounts, credit cards, and payment processors into Plucky (our accounting platform), then you’ll give those those transactions a category. You’ll flag transactions whose category you’re not sure of, then you’ll make sure the account balances in Plucky match the banks’ online balances.

Depending on the client’s transaction volume and number of accounts, you might repeat this process as often as weekly or as little as monthly.

At the beginning of each month, you’ll run Plucky’s semi-automated review process. This means sending the client an email asking them to clarify transactions you’re not sure about. You’ll use their replies to finalize the client’s financial statements for the month, and then it all repeats.

If this sounds boring, please don’t apply. I’ve been categorizing transactions and reconciling accounts for over twelve years, and I still enjoy the meditative nature of the work. It also gives the same kind of satisfaction as vacuuming, mowing the lawn, or clicking the last piece of a puzzle into place. After you’re finished, you stand back and say “that’s just right.” You’ve brought a little more order to the world. Very satisfying.

Clients occasionally email with a special request or question. Your most important job will be to reply quickly, in a way that makes them feel cared for, so their confidence in our service increases, they stick with us for the long term, and they tell all their friends about us. 

Because nearly all our client communications are via email, strong written communication skills are a must. You have to be able to communicate with clarity, patience, and personality. We need to be accurate in our email responses, but it’s almost as important that we be bright and personable.

To thrive in this job you really need to have a basic love of people and an enjoyment of solving their problems.

I would strongly prefer to hire a person with an accounting or bookkeeping background. That would mean you understand debits and credits, you can read and repair a balance sheet and/or a chart of accounts, and you can make a manual journal entry when needed. We do simple, cash-basis accounting, and I’d really like to work with someone who already speaks that language.

Please write a short email explaining why you’re the right person for this job. If you address it “To whom it may concern,” I will know you’re not a good fit. Send it to team@markbutler.com and include the phrase “nerdy by nature” in the subject line. Thanks in advance for applying; I look forward to getting to know you.