Ep 227: Profit Isn't an Accident Part 3 - You're Paying Someone to Do It Twice
Episode Summary
In this third episode of the Profit Isn’t an Accident series, Michelle Lynne dives into the hidden operational cost that many interior designers don’t realize is quietly draining their profits: double entry.
From project management platforms to accounting software, Michelle breaks down how disconnected systems create unnecessary labor, reconciliation headaches, bookkeeping expenses, and unreliable financial visibility. She shares real examples from her own firm, ML Interiors Group, and explains why so many design businesses are operating with what she calls a “Frankenstack” of disconnected tools.
This episode explores:
Why double entry is costing your firm more than you think
The operational risks of disconnected project and financial systems
Why bookkeeping alone does not equal real-time profitability visibility
How inaccurate or delayed financial data impacts decision-making
The difference between project health and financial reporting
What integrated systems actually look like in a design firm
How better operational infrastructure leads to better business decisions
Michelle also shares the story behind The Profit Mixer, the operational platform she uses and teaches through The Design Bakehouse, and how it was designed specifically to eliminate the double entry problem for interior designers.
Key Takeaways
Double entry creates hidden labor costs every single month
Separate systems inevitably drift out of sync over time
Reconciliation work is expensive and often avoidable
Clean bookkeeping does not automatically mean clear project profitability
Your accounting system should remain the source of truth for financial data
Better systems produce better data, and better data produces better decisions
Operational clarity reduces stress and improves confidence as a business owner
Action Steps from This Episode
Michelle encourages designers to:
Audit every operational and financial tool in their business
Identify where information is being manually duplicated
Trace a purchase order from placement to accounting reconciliation
Review bookkeeping invoices to uncover reconciliation-related labor costs
Evaluate whether their current systems are actually supporting profitability visibility
Resources Mentioned
Quotes from the Episode
“You’re paying somebody to do it twice.”
“The labor that double entry creates produces no value.”
“Better information produces better decisions.”
“Profitability is not an accident. It’s operational clarity.”
What’s Coming Next
In the next episode of Profit Isn’t an Accident, Michelle tackles what happens when untracked procurement turns into a true cash flow crisis — the small leak that eventually becomes a financial flood.
Transcript
Michelle Lynne (00:00)
Hey, hey, welcome back to Profit Isn't an Accident, the podcast series for interior designers who are done winging it on the business side and ready to actually understand what's happening inside their firm. I'm Michelle Lynne I run ML Interiors Group here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and I teach designers how to build profitable businesses through the Design Bakehouse. And I have a sales and marketing platform called SideMark specifically because I got tired of watching talented designers.
lose clients and revenue to systems that were never designed for the way we actually work. This series is called Profit Isn't an Accident because that's the truth. The designers who are genuinely profitable, the ones who have built something that sustains them, they got intentional about the business side. They got curious about their numbers and their systems. They stopped treating operations like a necessary evil and started treating them like infrastructure.
And that is the shift that changes everything. In this series, every episode goes deep into one piece of that puzzle. If you're new here, I'd encourage you to go back and listen. Each episode builds on the last. In the context, it matters. But if this is your first time joining us, welcome. Let's get into it. You can go back and listen to the other two at your convenience.
So today is the third episode of the series, and we're talking about you're paying somebody to do it twice. It's a double entry problem, and we're talking about what it's costing you every month and what can you do about it. So let's start with this. And I want you to tell me, honestly, just between us, okay, if this sounds familiar.
You have a project coordinator and she places an order. She records it in your project management software. So the project record is up to date. Or maybe you're doing this yourself. Either way. But then separately, your bookkeeper has to go in to that system, pull the information and enter it into your accounting software so that the financial record reflects what was just ordered. Same information, two different people, two different systems.
And while that sounds fine and it sounds kind of normal because that's just how it is. But here's the question. How much time does that take across both of them? OK, not per order, let's just say per month across all active projects, all the orders being placed, all the updates being made, all the freight invoices trickling in weeks later. Somebody has to match back to a purchase order that lives somewhere else. Like how many combined?
hours every single month are going into moving information from one box to another box. Because, babe, that's real time, real labor, real cost. And it's going into a task that, and I want to be precise here, it produces no value. It doesn't make your project better. It doesn't improve the client experience. It does not generate a nickel worth of revenue.
Okay, this is the price you pay, but you're running two systems that don't talk to each other. And so what that means is it's double entry. And that's kind of just the visible cost, right? The invisible cost is what happens when those two systems, the one your team is managing day to day, and the one your bookkeeper is working in, if they start to drift apart. Because, I mean, seriously, they will. They always do.
And it's not because anybody is doing anything wrong, it's just that data handled by multiple humans in multiple places will eventually diverge. And when it does, you're gonna have to spend time trying to figure it out, or more than likely, you're gonna be paying your bookkeeper to do that. So that's what I wanna talk to you about today. It's not just the time cost of the double entry, though that's real. I've done it myself, like that's how I discovered this.
But we're gonna get into the numbers of it. The deeper problem is that what it means to run your business on two sets of records that are perpetually trying to catch up with each other. What does that cost you in time, in money, in decision making capacity, and like stress, right? And running a business is already stressful enough. This is one of those things that I think as designers, we know it's a problem.
But I can say for myself, previously, I kind of accepted it as the cost of doing business. So I'm pushing back on that little bit today.
So.
Let me start with how this situation kind of starts or even happens, okay? Because it doesn't start as a problem. For me, and I've seen it with other designers, it starts as this like perfectly reasonable set of decisions. You get your first couple of projects, right? And you need to manage them and all the items that go with them. And so maybe you start with a spreadsheet. That's what we did. This was way back, way back in the day. But then you discover this project management tool. Maybe it's like,
Ivy or My Doma or Studio Designer. Like there's a whole bunch of them, right? So you sign up for that. Meanwhile, you've got finances to manage and your accountant tells you to get your books into a proper accounting system. So you set that up too. At first it's fine. You're small. The volume isn't that high. In fact, probably you've got most of it in your head, right? But then you grow and then you add team members and you add projects and
the volume goes up and now you've got this double entry thing that was previously a minor issue or maybe it's not even an issue. Maybe like I didn't even know what was going on in the background. Okay. But this is a consistent weekly obligation. So if you're if you're doing it internally in-house or if you're doing it internally and outsourcing your bookkeeping. Okay.
But then you're also adding tools. Like your project management software doesn't do the invoicing the way you need it. Okay, so you've got that hooked up to maybe QuickBooks or something. But then you need to track client communication. So maybe that's in a portal or maybe it's just in your email. Okay, but then your team needs a way to manage tasks. Like you've got the everything from when you've got the initial inquiry all the way through the punch list, right?
because every project is different, but the process needs to be the same. So you've got that tool set up. And then I call it the Frankenstack because it's like this collection of tools that were each, you know, great options, but together it's like you've got them all piecemeal together, maybe with some duct tape. So you've got this system where you've got information that lives in multiple places and nothing is really talking to each other.
So that works, right?
And then we go and we look for one system that handles the project side and the money side. Okay, but these platforms, they're not true accounting tools. They're designed primarily for project management and procurement workflows. Okay, the financial features are supplementary. There's glitches. It's not necessarily run by accountants. The data doesn't always sync cleanly with the proper accounting software.
Again, you're doing the double entry.
And then what happens, or what I found out, is that the numbers don't hold up the way I expected. So the Frankenstack, it requires maintenance, right? Someone has to keep all the systems updated and talking to each other, or we're just logging in and logging out. You've already got a million tabs open.
and you're touching information that lives in just too many places. And I have talked to so many designers who have had four, five, six tools running simultaneously. And when I ask them which one they actually trust when they need to know how a project is performing, I usually get this glazed look over their eyes. OK, and there's this pause and they're like, well, I kind of go to both and then I kind of, I don't know, triangulate or I just call my accountant.
because my bookkeeper has the real numbers but those are always a couple weeks behind.
And so that's the problem that I'm trying to address today. Hopefully a little bit of solution or nothing else just bringing it to your attention so that you know that there's something that needs to be addressed when you can get around to it. So let's talk numbers because this is where I think that the conversation like really puts rubber to the road.
So just do a quick mental estimate with me. Think about how many orders get placed across all of your active projects. Let's just say in a typical month. Okay. If you've got one project, you've got a couple depending on the size of them, you're have them in various stages. Who knows? Let's just round numbers, okay? 20 to 40 purchase orders going out. Some months are gonna be more, some months are gonna be less, some months are gonna be significantly more, but let's...
Think about the labor on both ends of these orders. On the project side, your coordinator is entering each order into your project management software. OK, maybe your designer is adding it in as she's making the selections. Maybe you're entering them in. You could be all of these people. You could be wearing all these hats. But let's just say you have somebody dedicated to doing the data entry into your project management software. OK, they have to find the project. They have to add the item. They have to record the vendor, the cost, the markup.
the status, okay, maybe it's three to five minutes per order if the system's cooperating and she's efficient. Sometimes it's more, especially when an order has multiple line items, okay, or maybe, yeah, so multiple items, or maybe it's a parent with children, like what I mean by that is like here's the pillow, but here's all of the ⁓ components that go into it.
Okay, or maybe there's an update just to the status when the freight arrives arrives separately and it needs to be tied back to that original purchase order.
So you have your.
coordinator doing that, let's just say internally, and then your external bookkeeper. She has to take the same information, getting it, get it into your accounting system. OK, and she's not just copying the item over. I get that. She's not going to be doing all of the components so that it looks like it's just a single pillow, but she's coding the expenses correctly, separating what's taxable from what isn't. OK, what I mean by that is like if you're paying labor directly to your workroom, but you're not
or if you're taxes on the labor that you're paying to your workroom, but you're not paying taxes on your purchases because you have your resale certificate. Okay, she's coding that accordingly. Categorizing freight as its own line, matching vendor invoices to purchase orders, reconciling what came in against what was ordered. I mean, I'm not a bookkeeper, but I know that that work takes real time and it requires judgment.
Okay, it's not mindless data entry. Like this is an expertise. This is the work that's happening entirely because the two systems are not connected. So what happens is, is you have multiple minutes per order on the project side and multiple minutes on the bookkeeper side. Let's just put that across 20 to 40 orders every month. Okay, you're easily looking at five to 10 hours of combined labor every month.
And that's just because of the gap between your operational software and your financial records. So attach a dollar amount. Okay, I'm just going to make these numbers up. Project coordinators, let's just say they run anywhere between, I don't know, 25, 50 bucks an hour. Bookkeepers who specialize in design firms, and you want one who does, okay, because the industry-specific details matter. Okay, they're going to be more expensive. You're talking...
50, 75, $100 an hour. Okay, so let's just, I don't know, let's just conservatively call the blended rate 50 bucks an hour across both people. Easy math, right? Five to 10 hours at 45 bucks an hour is 225 to $450 every single month in overhead. Just from double entry for what, 40 items?
And y'all, mean, 45 bucks an hour, like that's really low. So I'm just really playing it highly conservative here. Okay, that's just for the gap between two systems. Over a year, like that's like 5,000 bucks. Okay, and that's labor that produces nothing. Okay, and you might think, $5,000 isn't that much, or maybe you think $5,000 is a lot.
But here's the thing, like I didn't really, I didn't figure this out on my own. I actually hired a coach to help me get my arms around the financial side of my businesses. Okay, and one of the things that she looked at when she was looking at my interior design business was how high my bookkeeping costs were. Like they were shockingly high. Same bookkeeper doing my books for my other businesses.
said, okay, hold on, that does look a little bit weird. So when we dug into why, it came back because of the reconciliation work. The time my bookkeeper was spending going between the two systems, matching things up, cleaning up discrepancies that existed because information lived in two places and they got handled by two different people. So that time was showing up in my bookkeeping invoices every single month.
And I hadn't connected the dots until we looked at bookkeeping for one company, bookkeeping for another company, bookkeeping for a third company. And yeah, the work's actually different, but the discrepancies were bigger than bigger than big. OK, I just thought bookkeeping for interior design was expensive, but it was expensive because my systems were creating extra work. So that was a big aha moment for me. And I'm hoping that it's a clarifying moment for you as well.
Okay, that's just the cost of doing it incorrectly. Like when things go sideways, that's completely different. So here's what I mean by that. Two systems managed by humans, okay, they're eventually gonna get out of sync. It's not a question of whether it will happen. It's kind of a question of when and how bad does this discrepancy get before you find it. You have good bookkeepers. It shouldn't get to the point of being too bad, but.
Let me tell you about a situation that I ran into at ML Interiors Group that really made this clear for me. We were closing out a good sized project. Lots of line items. It took about a year from start to install. And we were doing our end of project reconciliation, the post mortem, which means sitting down with what was in our project management records and what was in our accounting systems and making sure they matched. Well, they didn't.
Dun dun dun. There were items tracked on the project side that had not made it through to the financial record at all. They'd been ordered, they'd been managed, they'd been installed, but they were not properly reflected on the accounting side. There were expenses coded to the wrong project because vendor invoices had come in without enough context for the bookkeeper to categorize them correctly. There were a handful of credits from vendor returns, damage claims.
Okay, they'd been received, but they had not been applied. So they weren't reconciled back to the proper project. So our project level view of profitability was off. And it wasn't anybody's fault, okay? It wasn't negligence. It was just like, I'm busy running an interior design business. My bookkeeper might've been asking for some of the information. My procurement person was giving her some information. Okay, but.
What it basically is, is it was kind of a predictable outcome of managing information across two different systems.
Things fall through the cracks and it's not because people aren't paying attention, but it's because no system exists to catch them when they do. So we put some systems in place, we put some processes in place internally. Okay, but that was after the fact. What it meant for then is that we spent hours reconciling, like my time, my team's time, my bookkeeper's time.
going line by line through two different records, trying to figure out which one was right and what had actually happened on each item. this was, I mean, think about it. It's a year long project. We probably didn't, we ordered things like months prior to when we actually got around to reconciliation. Nobody remembered anything. We'd moved on. Okay, now thankfully I knew the project had been profitable. Okay, that was in the broad sense because the revenue was there. I was tracking the hours of my team.
the margins were there, okay, but I couldn't tell you exactly how profitable. And at the time, this was quite a few years ago, okay, I couldn't tell you which categories drove the margin and which ones eroded it because my data, quite frankly, it was a mess.
Okay, so your project profitability data is supposed to inform your future decisions.
What project types are worth taking? What should your minimum markup be on custom work? Are you covering your overhead when you price at your current rates? Okay, these are the questions that drive your pricing increases, your growth strategy. And if you're answering them with data that you can't fully trust, that's when you lose sleep, right? That's when you know that something just isn't quite right and you were just making guesses.
Michelle Lynne (15:47)
If your design firm is running on spreadsheets, inbox flags, sticky notes, and pure adrenaline, listen up. The Profit Mixer was built specifically for interior designers and includes the same operational workflows that I've taught for years inside the Interior Design Business Bakery. Now, those features are built directly into the platform itself. Proposals, purchase orders, invoicing without double entry, procurement workflows, vendor communication, team collaboration, and
project organization all working together in one place. This isn't just software where you're left to figure it out on your own. With built-in workflows, AI support from GiGi, optional human help, and access to procurement support from a real team that understands the design industry, the Profit Mixer helps simplify the backend of your business so that you can focus on designing, not the operational chaos. Learn more at the Design Bakehouse
dot com.
Michelle Lynne (16:41)
So most designers at some point hire a bookkeeper. that, girl, that is absolutely the right move. You should not be doing your own bookkeeping. Period. End of story. Hard stop. Okay. Getting your financial records maintained by a professional is the foundation of understanding your business. And it's one of the very first hires that I recommend to anyone I work with.
But here's the thing that doesn't always get fully explained. Your bookkeeper works in your financial system. So I'm on QuickBooks. Okay, that is their domain. They are making sure your income and your expenses are categorized correctly, that your accounts reconcile, that you have clean records for your taxes and your financial reporting. And hopefully they specialize in design firms, okay, which again, you want them to. They're also handling the nuances that make our industry complicated.
Like I mentioned earlier, the differences between taxable goods, design services, the way freight gets coded, the way client deposits flow through, retainers work, et cetera, et cetera.
What your bookkeeper is not doing is managing your project level profitability in real time because that is not what they're there for. Bookkeepers and accountants basically look backwards. They're making sure the record of what happened is accurate. Okay, they're not set up mid project to tell you that your margins on the, I don't know, the Henderson project is eroding because freight charges have been getting absorbed for the last quarter.
So this is the gap that a lot of designers fall into and y'all guilty, guilty. I've been there, done that, got my t-shirt, my bruises, all the things, okay?
What I did and what I see designers doing is handing off the books to a bookkeeper and feeling the sense of relief. Okay, right? Like if I'm serious, I'm like, whew, I'm not responsible for that anymore because the financials are taken care of. But what we've actually done or what I did is I delegated the historical record. The real time visibility, the knowing while it's happening part, that's not being done by anybody.
So you end up in this situation where technically, yeah, your books are clean, but you don't actually know how your projects are performing in the middle of it. You might know after the fact, okay, at least you're figuring that out because you're getting a P &L statement at the end of the month that tells you something meaningful at the firm level, but at the project level in the middle of procurement, the information that I need to make decisions is not available in a form that I can act on.
Okay, and it's not because my bookkeeper sucks. I have the most fabulous firm. You've probably heard of them. They're the Dove Agency. Okay. But what's happened is...
when we were on these separate platforms, that there was no bridge between the operational side of the business where the orders and the clients and the project details live and the financial side where the money's being tracked. So that is the gap that the double entry problem lives in. It's the gap between your project management software and your accounting system. It's the gap between what's happening on the project and what the financial record shows.
And until you bridge that gap, you're going to keep doing reconciliations at the end and finding surprises and paying your bookkeeper to clean up those surprises. OK, it's the distance between two systems that should have been one.
down.
Like let's get, I'm trying to figure out how to circle back around. Like let's get practical here because this isn't a theoretical conversation about why the integration matters. What does it actually look like when your systems talk to each other?
Having spoken to hundreds of interior designers about this topic, the thing that designers often imagine when they hear integrated systems, okay, integrated systems, is something complex and expensive. Like an IT project, a consultant, a migration that takes six months and you don't have time for that, or the bandwidth, or the brain power. Okay, and so what happens is that there's this fear
of moving from one platform to another and it's completely understandable because a lot of business software is like is so painful to implement.
A lot of them are clunky, okay? But what integration looks like in practice for a design firm is actually fairly simple in concept. What it means is that when an order is entered into your project management software,
the financial side of that transaction.
is separate from your accounting system. So somebody doesn't have to go in and move it manually. But what happens is when the client is invoiced, it's tied to a specific project in your financial software, like QuickBooks. So a lot of times what systems say is that it takes the information and it pushes it into QuickBooks. That's backwards. Okay.
What it means is that you should keep track of all of the data in your financial project management system.
but your financial management system, your QuickBooks, is the holy grail. So that's where you're billing people from. So you're sending an invoice from QuickBooks that reconciles with the project management platform. So when a client is invoiced, it's tied to the specific project, but the specific items are not being entered twice.
When freight arrives, there's a system that connects it back to the PO rather than leaving it to somebody's memory that makes it match. And I know your eyes are probably glazing over right now, but let me just say that you need to be entering and billing your clients through your financial platform such as QuickBooks. It's not the only one. It's the only one that I know. Not billing them from your project management software.
OK, because then what you can do is you don't have to triangulate from multiple sources because your information lives for immediate reporting in your project management. Your financial reporting is in your. Wait, let me rephrase that. Your project. Health. Is immediate in your project management software. Your financial data is.
accurate although it might be running a little bit slower. Okay so you can look at your project right now and see where it stands. So I can I can remember what it felt like to have that kind of visibility for the very first time. Okay and it sounds like it should be a small thing but y'all it changed how I carried my business. Okay that low-grade awareness in the back of my mind
that I'm not sure exactly how things are going, like that quieted down. And it's not because the problems went away. Let's be frank, the problems did not go away, but I knew what they were. And now I can make decisions about them. So that's what I want for every designer that I work with. It's not perfection. I would be like lying to you if I said it was perfect, okay? But the clarity, the ability to know what's happening
financially in your business without that heroic effort to get that information. So let me tell you about something because I don't want to just describe the problem and tell you that there's a solution out there with actually sharing with you what I use and what I have available for you. It's called the profit mixer. Okay I offer it through the Design Bakehouse.
It was built specifically for interior design firms. was built by, in all transparency, was built by IDNest. I mean, it's called IDNest. It was built by the dev agency. I white label it. And then what I've done is I've added my processes and my procedures that I would teach in the interior design business bakery as features within the profit mixer. So it's different than IDNest. So it's not adapted from generic project management software. And it's not a general business tool with a design label on it.
It's built by accountants, which is how I understand now that you need to be putting your financials into QuickBooks and then you can put your project into your project management.
And then I've taken it and built it around the actual workflows of how my design firm operates and what I've taught to probably a thousand other designers. OK, so the reason why I'm bringing this up in this episode is because you all the double entry problem is right at the center of what it was designed to solve. So the profit mixer connects your project management, your proposals, your purchase orders and your invoicing. And it's integrated with.
QuickBooks, okay, your accounting software, so that the information flows up through QuickBooks and it talks to and it connects with the information in your project management software and you have that data at your fingers. Okay, your team enters the information once, you're not paying your bookkeeper to redo anything, you're getting the visibility that you need to know how your projects are actually performing while they're live, not just after the fact.
Y'all, we are not accountants. I'm a pretty damn good business person and my numbers still give me anxiety. Not because they suck, although sometimes admittedly they have. But not because they suck, but just because getting to them and understanding them and sorting through the mess is just exhausting. There's so many other things that I would rather be doing. Okay, but as a business owner, you have to be looking at the dashboards.
Okay, in the profit mixer, the dashboards translate your financial data into something that you can actually use. Margins by projects, budget versus actual, cash availability, vendor insights. Okay, this is the kind of clarity.
that business owners need to have at their fingertips, not be paying somebody to dig it out for them. I used to offer this just to the interior design business bakery, okay? But now I've opened it to any designer who wants it. I've had some people say, well, that's not fair. I didn't need your coaching program, but I do need this software. So why not, right?
It's 98 bucks a month for your entire team, like up to 10 people. So it's not gonna be like it's $59 for you and then it's $59 for every team member that you have on your team that needs to be able to put a project in. Okay, this is formatted specifically so that the math works out pretty quickly when you look at what you're currently spending across multiple tools and what you're paying for your bookkeeper for reconciliation time.
for your project management, not just the items and the procurement, but how you run your projects, research, development, procurement, and installation. So it's there. If you want to see exactly what's built and whether it fits where your firm is right now, you can go to thedesignbakehouse.com. You can find the profit mixer on the main menu, and I'll have it in the show notes too, okay? But before we wrap this up,
There's another angle that I want to cover before we get to the takeaways. Because this comes up every single time I have this conversation with designers. And it's at some point, probably around tax time, or when you're trying to understand whether you should hire or when a big financial decision is in front of you. You sit down with your accountant to your CPA and you have a conversation about how your business is performing. And that conversation...
is only as useful as the quality of your financial data going into it. So if your data is clean, if your finances are categorized correctly and it's tied back to your actual operations, if your accountant can look at your numbers and say, here's where your most profitable service line is, here's where your overhead is heaviest, here's what your margins look like on project work versus design fee work. Y'all, that conversation.
will change the trajectory of your success because you can make decisions from it. You're making decisions. My old boss, when I was in corporate, he used to tell me, the numbers will tell you what to do. It's not coming from emotion. It's not coming from desire or gut instinct.
So if your financial data is months and months behind and you're missing project level detail and it requires your accountant to ask clarifying questions about what certain transactions actually were. So imagine you've got your accountant and you have your bookkeeper. They're two separate people. Okay. If your accountant has to find out from your bookkeeper what's going on or you, all that conversation is a lot less useful.
OK, you get a general picture, maybe a tax liability, some high level guidance, but the strategic intelligence that you're looking for is not there because the underlying data isn't structured to support it. If this is just like I'm speaking gobbledygook to you, just let's bring it down. The double entry problem doesn't just cost you time in the day to day.
It costs you the quality of financial intelligence that you can get from the professionals, the experts that you're paying to advise you.
So that's how I've learned and I'm still learning, okay, it's ongoing, how you grow intentionally instead of just growing and hoping things work out. Trust me on that one, okay, because I've been there, done that, lost money and I'm trying to teach you what not to do at this point. So that's what I mean when I say that systems, okay, are an investment.
It's not an expense because the time you spend building operational infrastructure that works, it doesn't just save your labor hours. It produces better information. So is it a pain sometimes to swap over maybe from one program that you're in today into another one like the profit mixer? Yeah, it's a pain in the booty. OK. But it's going to produce better information and better information produces better decisions. And over time, these decisions compound into a
business that is that is profitable, sustainable, and quite quite honestly, y'all, it's more enjoyable to run because you're not just slapping things together and praying that they work.
So here's what I want you to look at this week. Because you know I'm not going to just leave without something concrete to do. First, go count your tools. OK, write down every piece of software that your firm manages, that your firm uses to manage the operational and financial side of the business. OK, not the design part. Like this is not going to replace Chief Architect. It's not going to replace Canva for you to present your presentations or your mood boards. OK.
But talk about project management, accounting, invoicing, client communication, task management, all of it. For each one, write down one or two things that have to be manually updated somewhere else when something changes in one. OK, so just map those manual bridges.
I would also say make a note of how much they cost you every month, too. OK, but this list is going to tell you a lot about where your time and your bookkeeper's time is actually going every month. Then. Look at your last month of P.O.s. OK, purchase orders, try to trace one of them from placement all the way through to your accounting system. OK, not the whole batch, just one.
Where is it recorded when it was placed? How did it get into your financial record? How was freight handled? Where does that live? If you can trace it cleanly and easily and under a couple of minutes, rock on, your system's working. Okay, but if it takes you 20 minutes in a conversation with your bookkeeper, that's your data. They're not talking to each other.
And finally, look at your bookkeeping bill. Okay, seriously, look at what you're paying and think about how much of that time is reconciliation work. If your bookkeeper is spending significant hours every month matching up what's in your project software to what's in your accounting system, you're paying for the gap between the two systems that should be one, and that's a pretty solvable problem.
So if what you find in any of these exercises is that your system has more scotch tape and safety pins than you'd like to admit, then the Profit Mixer is worth a real look because it was built to close exactly this gap.
Again, you can find everything that you need to know at thedesignbakehouse.com, slash profit mixer, okay? Link is in your show notes. Hopefully this just gets you thinking.
So, y'all, that's the episode, third session of Profit Isn't an Accident. And if this was useful to you, if you recognized your business in any part of what I described today.
Let me ask you to share it with another designer, please. The industry has so many talented people who are working incredibly hard and not seeing the financial return they deserve. And a lot of time, the reason isn't that they're not good at design or that they're not even adept at business, but it's that nobody handed them this operational knowledge. So you passing this along might be the thing that changes the conversation for somebody in your world. So you can follow along with the whole series wherever you listen to podcasts.
And you can always find me at thedesignbakehouse.com or at mysidemark.com. In our next episode, we're going to talk about what it looks like when untracked procurement becomes an actual cashflow problem, not just an inconvenience, but like a moment of financial reckoning. We're talking about the leak that becomes a flood. It's the episode I really wish someone would have handed me.
It's gonna be worth your time, okay? I might have a little bit of PTSD after I record it, but I'll see you there.
