The Tin Shingle Blog

You may think I'm odd, but recently while acting as bookkeeper for Tin Shingle entering thousands of transactions into our newly created QuickBooks Online account, I joyously tweeted to QuickBooks that I was "high on QuickBooks". I was loving it and I had to share it with them!

Next thing I new, I got a lovely little tweet back from Intuit (Quickbook's parent company) saying that their SVP Caroline Donahue had a special video "Thank You" recorded just for me! When I shared this with our accountant, he nearly fell off his chair. I've included it here for your to see. But there's more. I've recorded a video back for her, plus, I'm sharing with you the specifics about why I had such a good time entering our transactions, and why our accountant gave our books an A+ at tax time.

My response video back to Intuit AKA Quickbooks:

And now, the details...

The beginning of 2014 brought me a new challenge: taking over the bookkeeping duties for all of our transactions at Tin Shingle. Our bookkeeper used to do this for us, but when she moved on, I decided to take it over - at least for a little while.

I'm no stranger to QuickBooks. I have used the software since I startd my own business in 2006, and still use it for my digital marketing consultancy. But QuickBooks version 2010 has been my main point of contact with the software in my service-based business, and I had a feeling I was missing out on a fresh interface and more modern features as QuickBooks improved and evolved over the years.

THE EXPERIMENT: "I CAN DO IT MYSELF!"
Confession: I put off doing our books for the entire year. This meant I had all of 2014 to enter at once. All sales. All credit card fees for each sale. All checks and credit card expenses. All before March 2015, which was my goal for getting it to our accountant. We had never filed late before, and I wasn't going to file late on my watch as bookkeeper.
 

THE RESULT
Because I am a Mac user, I never actually saw our QuickBooks because our bookkeeper was on a PC. Instead, we reviewed reports that had been pulled from QuickBooks into Excel. In terms of communicating with our bookeeper, I would log expenses or sales into a Google Doc. I wanted to start fresh with our books so that my business partner, our accountant and I could see our financials at all times. I also wanted to set things up a little differently than our bookkeeper had. 

On January 1, 2015, I respected one of my business resolutions to dive into QuickBooks Online and get fluent with it. I started an account, and carefully and methodically set up new bank accounts in our brand new fresh QuickBooks Online company account. For nearly six weekends in a row, I manually entered transactions, reconciling all of the way. You could find me at wine bars, coffee shops, even in the parked car while my family worked out at our gym. My accountant was in instant-reply to all of my tricky questions so that I entered them correctly in QuickBooks.
 

I CAN SEE!!!
Make that "We Can See!" Thanks to QuickBooks Online, Sabina and I can meet online and both look at our financials. Sure, we did this with Excel spreadsheets, and by me adding up numbers and presenting them in emails. But with QuickBooks, we could see monthly reports online for both income and expenses. And this is normal with accounting software, but because we did not have access to it, we never saw it in the interface. Like I mentioned earlier, I use QuickBooks for my consulting business, so I see it all the time over there and am used to running reports in a few clicks. But now...I can't believe we didn't do this sooner. The online version connected us.
 

FAVORITE FEATURES

• Multiple Logins
  When we do have a bookkeeper again, they can have a login at their own level. We can decide what of our company we want them to see. If we're hiring someone to enter data, or if we had an admin on staff, they can have a special login.
   
• Online Bank Accounts
  Whoa. What a game changer. There are two reasons I love this feature:

  1. The balances of our bank accounts and credit card are presented on the home page. At-a-glance, I can see what the true balances are, and what the QuickBook balances are (aka, transactions that have been entered into QuickBooks). Normally, I log into each bank account to look at bank and credit card balances. But with this interface, I am presented with all of them at once after logging in once to QuickBooks. Muahaha.

  2. Transactions made in real life can auto-sync over into QuickBooks! This is HUGE. When you auto-sync, the dollar amount, date, and reason for the expense is all typed up for you. You do nothing but review it and click "YES". If you paid your sub-contractor, BAM, it will be in your books when you go to suck it down from your bank. I used to log this into the Google Doc for our bookkeeper and I'd actually put off paying someone if I wasn't near my Google Doc to log it.

  This works if you're doing your books every month or two months, because QuickBooks only syncs for a limited number of past days. I was hesitant to connect our bank accounts to QuickBooks. I feared that transactions would be pulled over from the bank or credit card that would mess me up in some way.* (big * here! see * below) For instnace, if I manually entered a transaction, would an auto-sync transaction come over and duplicate? Actually yes it can, but there are ways to avoid this (see below). But it is very worth it to sync.
   

• Easier Navigation
  Switching systems is an uncomfortable thing. You know how something works in one world, and you don't have time to learn it in another world. Even though I'm used to a 2010 edition of QuickBooks, the online version of QuickBooks uses similar terms, so the learning curve of finding how to enter transactions was a little easier. The navigation, however, is totally different. All of the top navigation icon buttons that I actually stopped using because they overwhelmed me, are gone. There is a simple left navigation that operates like a simple menu in an app. There is a fly-out navigation at the top which took some getting used to, but I'm able to hop around in it now.
   
• Storage of Credit Card Details
  If you are billing a client, and the client gives you their credit card number, you can store it in QuickBooks for manually processing that payment. This is not something we use at Tin Shingle, but for consultants or agencies who bill clients for work, this is a very nice feature. I am an advocate of billing clients up front for certain types of jobs, and this makes doing that easy.
   
• Chase Paymentech to Replace PayPal for Sales and Reporting
  I love PayPal for many reasons, such as this one for easy payment button creation. But not for exporting data. Credit card sales do not play nice with QuickBooks because PayPal sends it over in way that is one number - the number you earned minus the credit card transaction fee. So for instance: If a membership due processes for $150, PayPal takes a cut for $4.05 (and if it's on an Amex card, it's $5.25). Both of these numbers need to be in QuickBooks. On the Sales side, the $150 needs to be represented as Membership Income. On the Expenses side, $4.05 needs to be represented as a Bank Fee. But PayPal sends the whole thing over as a sale for $145.95. Wah Wah. We are switching our merchant account to Chase Paymentech, but they promise me that I will love the reporting exports. Which means I just gained hours of time because I will not be manually entering sales and credit card fees.

*CONFESSION ABOUT RECONCILING
I never "reconciled" before. In my first business, I entered in months of transactions at one time. If balances didn't match up, I thought "Eh! The computer broke!" Then I would pay someone to fix it. I would pay someone to reconcile a year's worth of transactions, which can get really expensive because you're paying someone to search for a needle in a haystack so that your QuickBooks balance matches your actual bank balance.

For the first time, I "reconciled". I'd heard bookkeepers talk about this, and they'd moan "That was really hard to reconcile!" and I didn't know what they meant. Now I do. Reconciling means that if you're off a penny or more, you have to find the error that you made when typing in the amount. Or when accepting transactions from your connected bank. Maybe you typed in $75 instead of $74. I began checking my balance every 10 transactions or so. That way, I could spot a wrong number right away and correct it.

* The online banking in QuickBooks almost got in the way of this. Because you can sync transactions from your bank or credit card, if you paid your credit card from your bank, the transaction shows up in both places. I caught this right away because I was...reconciling!! So now I know which transactions to delete that have been brought over from the online banking. This part sounds scary, but trust me, it is worth the time you'll save. You will reconcile with any accounting software. QuickBook's presentation of the transactions made reconciling manageable and easy to correct.

THANK YOU!
Thanks QuickBooks for helping Tin Shingle meet the April 15th tax deadline, with an A+ from our accountant!

Moments after Sweet Briar College, the liberal arts college located on more than 3,000 acres of lush Virginia fields, posted to Facebook their announcement that they were closing, my phone blew up with texts from an acquaintance declaring that Sweet Briar had just committed a Facebook Fail and needed help. In the time it took me to finish what I was working on and head over to check it out, Sweet Briar's website server had crashed with the influx of irate and beyond disappointed parents, alumni, teachers, students, and passersby who were giving their two cents on Sweet Briar's Facebook wall. Everyone, including teachers, staff, students, parents and alumni, had just learned via 71 words of a Facebook message that this semester would be the last, and that the 2015 graduating class was the final one. You can imagine how they felt!

But was this a Facebook Fail (which translates into "a big mistake made on Facebook that will upset followers and most likely leave you filled with regret")? After all, the marketing department, if it indeed was a department and was perhaps a think tank of 1 or 3 staff or consultants, at Sweet Briar needed to get out a message far and wide, so they put it on Facebook to let everyone know at the same time. No personal phone calls or letters sent days or weeks in advance. The closest thing to a personal touch was a video and a special page dedicated to "transition" information to direct everyone to on their website. Seems an efficient and effective way to get the word out. But was it? How should a college let its core audience of staff, students, parents and alumni know that it is going out of business?

Being that Tin Shingle educates businesses small and large about ways to get the word out about all aspects of their business, we want to hear from you whether or not you think that announcing the closure at one unified time was the right decision. Letters were sent in the mail, and email was sent, but all happened at the same time as the Facebook update was published.

This article will explore the Facebook announcement tactic, and focuses only on the communications component of Sweet Briar's current situation. There is a huge movement to save the school, and lawsuit to block the closure, so there are some who may answer that the announcement never should have been made in the first place. But if a college had to close, would a single announcement timed at the same time, with Facebook inevitably reaching people the fastest, be the best method of delivery? Or would a tiered, more personal approach be better?

Sweet Briar College is in the national spotlight with national media stories on CBS, NPR, Business Insider, local media and more, and is the subject of a new lawsuit aimed at saving the college not only because it is a beloved college, but because it is making history as one of the first colleges to abruptly close due to "insurmountable financial challenges" during a known and much documented crisis in higher education. We are watching a communications precedent being set on many levels. It's not like colleges go out of business every day. Let's discuss:

HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED
On March 3rd, 2015, the communications people who run the Facebook page for Sweet Briar College announced that the school would be closing. Forever. This was the first piece of communication that most people received about their futures.

The communications folks made a video and a special "Transition" page on their website, which featured the college president and a few other notable people talking about the financial situation and how this was the hardest decision they have ever faced.

A VIDEO AND UPDATE TYPED WITH "A HEAVY HEART" ARE GOOD ENOUGH, RIGHT?
A video and a special page in and of themselves are a good strategy. The communications folks may have wanted to "control the conversation" by having one piece of communication go out at the same time, instead of several hundred or thousand letters to students, parents and alumni which would result in several thousand phone calls and emails coming at different times. Not to mention the teachers, who also learned via Facebook post that their jobs were soon ending.

What would you have done? Facebook post? Or something different, like a letter in the snail mail, or an email, or phone calls days before posting to Facebook? Or would you have feared that sending letters and calling people like newly enrolled students would have resulted in them hitting your Facebook page first before you made a proper announcement to it?

HERE'S WHERE THE PLAN GOES AWRY - THE WEBSITE CRASHED
The only mode of communicating the massive change crashed. Right away, people want answers and want to know what is happening next. Seventy-one words do not leave you with any directions on what to expect for the coming days or weeks, and a link at the end of it only leaves you with tepid hope. Snail mail (and letting people know it's coming), with a packet of information of next steps and options might have proved more efficient and effective, but that route wasn't taken.

A dependance on technology and the Internet - aka "the cloud" - was assumed, and the decision makers thought they had a well thought out campaign  getting this message out in a contained way that could control. But the flood of desperate people crashed the website. And crashed any emails that were being sent during that time. Any control of the conversation was lost moments after pressing "Post" as admin played catchup to commenters and tried to calm their audience. Which only inflamed the audience. As you can see below, "the biggest question" of where students were going next semester was reduced to coverage in rapid Facebook udpates.

HAS FACEBOOK NUMBED PEOPLE TO WHAT IS APPROPRIATE?
We have talked about this before at Tin Shingle in our weekly in-person TuneUps on Tin Shingle (specifically this one), where the ease in which Facebook can be updated can make a business owner forget about updating their own website. Or in this case, the way in which a college might best communicate with different types of very important people in their database.

LESSONS LEARNED IN HINDSIGHT
In hindsight, the value of someone's future is really important as is the way you handle and address it. The people didn't respond well to their futures being handled in the way Sweet Briar chose. As you can see in the screenshot of "the announcement" above, one parent lamented not having a letter or an email sent to them.

Speaking of email...the admin did defend themselves saying that an email was sent, but, the email wasn't delivered because the website crashed. Which is a perhaps unintended admission that the email was in fact sent at the same time as the Facebook update was published because email relies on a website server to be working. Therefore, this admission makes the email that they sent less personal, and less of an impactful communication with those immediately impacted.

An email sent days in advance would have been more of a signal of caring. If you get informed before the public of something, you feel special and taken care of. So the admin's statement of "we sent an email" is negated by the fact that they sent the email at the same time as they posted the Facebook message. Which lends credence to the theory that the marketing folks, President and Board of Directors wanted to keep the message contained and not email, call or snail mail anyone beforehand, so as not to let the cat out of the bag when people receive the letter and then post something in advance of a public message to the Facebook page.

SO ABOUT THAT CAT IN THE BAG...
It appears that the Board of Directors and the President let only a select few know of the situation, that a closure was apparently the only solution. The people in the know may have been marketing consultants hired to increase enrollments, other consultants hired to turn the ship around, and immediate staff, as indicated in this response letter (PDF) from the President defending himself against a new lawsuit from the State of Virginia, supported in part by a new league of Sweet Briar Super Heros called #SaveSweetBriar that was formed shortly after the Facebook announcement.

As for parents and alumni, it appears they were not kept abreast of the situation. Donation envelopes were sent out as usual, and solicitation calls were made by students from call centers asking alumni for donations. As recalled by Karen Jaffa McGoldrick on her website Dressage Daily: "My heart pounded later that March 3rd, as I listened to a one hour conference call, while staring at my annual fund drive envelope sitting on my desk. I realized at that moment, that if I had sent in my check it would have been used for the 'winding down' expenses. My money would have been used to help finance what felt like an assassination."

The 2015 graduation speaker, Sweet Briar College grad and mayor of Columbus, GA, Theresa Tomlinson, gave a legacy gift of $1 million shortly before the closure announcement. She was not informed of the decision to close, and instead received a letter, fifteen days before the closure announcement as she states in this interview, from the president of the college thanking her for the donation. The letter stated that the money would be used to help future generations of girls.

SWEET BRIAR LEAGUE OF SUPERHEROS IS FORMED
Due to the shock of the situation, people not informed of any background efforts to keep the school in business were very upset and thought they could fix the situation. A "war council" was convened and a new organization was created within days: #SaveSweetBriar. Within one month of the announcement, #SaveSweetBriar has raised $3.3 million from 4110 pledges and counting and explains how funds will be used if Sweet Briar cannot be saved. I don't think strategy meetings by marketing heads and the Board of Directors expected this type of response.

WHAT'S GOING ON NOW
It's business as usual on Sweet Briar's Facebook page, with highlights of the recent Creative Writing Conference and winners of the ODAC Equestrian title. The admin of the page announced the tone shift in a post, in keeping with their conversational style, saying they were going to focus on the students: past, present and future. The post was met with backlash, to which the admin did actually challenge.

Whenever there is drama preventing someone from doing their job, which in this case is to positively highlight the school in social media, the most enjoyable thing is to just...do their job. Keeping it positive is good for those being featured, but the elephant in the room is no longer an elephant. It's a real thing that is sitting on everyone. And it's getting bigger as people comment and link-photo bomb each post with links to recent news stories about the lawsuit and any hope of reversing the closure. I would agree that a silent page would be even more awkward, but it would be honest. Either way, it's just weird.

WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE?
Now, over to you, how would you have handled the situation? Please let us know in the comments below.

A sure sign of a PR pro is thoughtful and strategic future planning.  This April we're going to give you a taste of how good it can feel to plan that way via our "What to Pitch" list.

What you'll notice here is that half of the topics we're encouraging you to prepare pitches for and then reach out to the press about are in May.  Why is Sabina sharing short-lead May stories with us if we're talking about what to pitch in April?

I'm doing it because even short lead stories - especially those that are sure to have several other people pitching them - need to be acted on quickly! Early birds get worms, and there are a lot of birds out there preparing angles around these stories already, even though they're in May. 

Dive into the topics below, begin creating angles and story ideas that tie into your brand and business, and start pitching! Need some extra help creating the perfect pitch? You'll find it at the end of the list!

National Small Business Week (May 4-8)

This year the country is celebrating National Small Business Week in early May.  Though it's nearly a month away, if you're a small biz owner (and I'm guessing that most of you reading this are, or you know one or work with one) this is the time to find newsworthy angles of your own business story to share with your local TV news or newspapers.  You can also find angles that you can pitch to the online short lead media if you're feeling really charged up PR-wise.  The key here is to remember that just saying "I'm a small biz owner, let me know if you want to do a story about me" won't cut the mustard my friends. 

Instead, you're going to have to pull other interesting talking points and anecdotes to share.  Another way to get the attention of the media in terms of this week long celebration is to tie your business into hot topics relevant to the outlet you're pitching. This could mean finding a local angle to your story, tying it into a story the news is already buzzing about or even linking it to a celebrity that's in the news. 

One last tip for you: If you're trying to book a television news story about your business ask yourself, "how can I make this as visual as possible".  Whether that means inviting the crew to shoot footage at your office, having clients on camera talking about what you do or doing an in-studio demo, the more visual you can make it, the better!

Earth Day (April 22)  Earth Month (April)

What began as a cluster of articles here and there has become a major holiday that is celebrated across different mediums and niches of media all month long.  Fashion websites and blogs will be covering eco-fashion, some news outlets will be looking for eco-friendly products, others will be looking for brands that give back to eco-conscious charities. 

Experts and services who can share valuable "get more green" tips with viewers will also be popular during this time.  Like always, your job is to find a way to combine your expertise and knowledge with the earth loving celebration is as natural a way as possible.  Here's a great example of Alexis Wolfer, entrepreneur, founder of TheBeautyBean.com and author of The Recipe for Radiance, doing just that with Fashionista.com last year!

Take Your Daughter to Work Day (April 23)

Not all of us have an office or daughter to work with during this annual observance, but if you do, and you're feeling media savvy and in the mood to be authentic and public about both, this could be a great press opportunity for you!  In fact, even if your office is a home office, if you're planning on taking your daughter to your work space this April 23rd, be sure you tell the media. 

Now don't simply tell them, "My daughter is coming to work with me, please write about it!"  Instead, think about how you can turn that day into a news story.  Will they be able to come and speak to you both?  What will you be doing with or teaching your daughter that they can observe?  What other valuable sound bites can you share with their readers, viewers and listeners?  Spend a little bit of time planning this experience for both your daughter and the press, and you'll all reap the rewards!

Cinco de Mayo (Plan Ahead - it's May 5th!)

Again, we're planning ahead here folks. Cinco de Mayo is always a big hit in with the media: It's fun, it's full of food and fiestas and is a great place to mention anything from recipes you can make at home to celebrate the holiday to sharing different festivals and parties commemorating the day.  Is your business doing something to mark the Battle of Puebla? Plan ahead now and alert the press.  Bonus Idea: Even if you choose not to pitch a story to the press about Cinco de Mayo there's no reason you can't share what you're doing (whether it be a sale or tips) via your blog and social media feeds. Those places are also craving timely, contagious content!

Are you reading these story ideas and thinking, "I have the best idea but I'm not sure if my pitch or angle is on point."  If they answer is yes, here are a couple more ways we can help you out:

• Download this podcast:
  How to Write a Pitch that Gets Noticed by the Press. Bonus: It comes with a pitch example you can use as a template for your own PR outreach.

• Discuss your pitch, from angle to copywriting, in a supportive and private community of entrepreneurs and experts via the Tin Shingle Forum message boards!

Want to get inspiration from past What to Pitch columns?  Access them here!