Sarah Korhnak | Small Business Sarah

Sarah Korhnak helps remove the mystery – and misery – of running a small business

Explore how US bookkeeper Sarah Korhnak integrates A2X with her business, not only saving her time and giving her clients access to accurate financial data in real-time but making training new hires easy too.

Alongside QuickBooks Online, Dropbox, Google Drive, Loom and Process Kit, A2X is the cherry on top of a simple digital setup, making it easy for Sarah’s business to grow so she can service more clients and spend more time at home with her kids.

Passion for bookkeeping and small business

Sarah Korhnak has a soft spot for small business owners. After working as a qualified CPA for seven years and co-running an eCommerce venture, she started her bookkeeping business, Small Business Sarah.

For this busy mum of three, running her own bookkeeping practice gives Sarah the best of both worlds. Most of her clients are eCommerce sellers, which means she can work from her home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while taking care of her children.

It also means she gets to work with a range of different businesses and help remove the mystery – and misery – that can all too often consume small business owners.

Increased demand for bookkeeping services

When the business was in its infancy, Sarah’s focus was on providing bookkeeping training for small business owners. Gradually she found people wanted more – they wanted her to do their bookkeeping.

“A lot of mothers like me were trying to make some money on the side for their families, and just weren’t sure what to do,” Sarah says.

So, she pivoted and signed on her first client (an Etsy seller). And as they say, the rest is history. Since then, she’s hired three additional bookkeepers to help meet the demand and works with eCommerce sellers across multiple platforms including Amazon, Shopify, eBay and Etsy.

Before: manual workaround costing clients’ time

Having been an eCommerce seller herself, Sarah knew what she was in for.

“A lot of people think they can record their deposit as their revenue and then be done with it,” she explains. “But what they don’t realise is that mixed up within that deposit are refunds, sales tax and fees that need to be accounted for.”

While she’d come up with a workaround for most of her clients, every month “eBay was just kicking my butt,” Sarah laughs.

“I feel like I’m pretty good at figuring out the numbers with various platforms, but every month was such a struggle with eBay. It was not working easily, and I was spending way too much time on my client’s books.”

She also found she was having similar issues with some of her more complicated Shopify clients, who either had increasing transaction volumes or were adding extra payment methods.

“A2X solved all my eBay problems, and I would go as far as saying that I would never attempt to do eBay bookkeeping again without it.”

After: saves time, accurate financials, added value

Sarah doesn’t deny that A2X has cut down her time significantly, which for any business owner is a win. But she’s also seeing the benefits right across her practice.

Her clients now have access to financial information in real-time “instead of having them updated monthly.” It’s also very easy for her clients to approve the integration, so any downtime getting set up is kept to a minimum, she adds.

A2X has also become an integral part of training her bookkeepers, giving her and her team the capacity to work with even more clients.

“Using A2X, it’s a much more simplified process so that has allowed me to more confidently take on bookkeepers to work for me – and more easily train them.”

A2X becomes critical part of digital operations

Sarah keeps her digital setup fairly simple: QuickBooks Online (accounting software), Dropbox or Google Drive (for file sharing), Loom (for recording training videos) and Process Kit (a job management tool). As well as her other bookkeepers, Sarah also works with a virtual assistant.

After a few bad experiences with some not-so-good integrations, Sarah says she can understand why people might be hesitant to try new digital tools. What she loved about the onboarding process with A2X is she could customise it to suit her business.

“It didn’t feel like this big leap of faith to test out A2X, and nothing was ever irreversible. You could take it in stages to make sure everything was happening the way you wanted it to, and you have the freedom to create your own accounts too.”

Sarah believes A2X is a real asset to her business and encourages other eCommerce sellers and bookkeepers to at least give it a trial.

“You can trust the tool to do what it’s supposed to do, and then you don’t have to worry about the behind-the-scenes. For bookkeepers, it saves time, is efficient and it doesn’t clog up your accounts with single transactions.”