The Financial Blind Spots Costing Your Practice Money with Robert Freels

Most therapists can rattle off every diagnostic code without blinking, but ask about their break-even number and things get quiet. Those are exactly the financial blind spots we're unpacking in this episode of The Traveling Therapist Podcast. I sit down with Rob Freels, founder of FreeRivers CFO Advisory, who spent 25 years across banking, auditing, and 16 years as a CFO before turning his attention to healthcare and mental health practice owners.

Rob breaks down where money actually disappears before it ever hits your bank account, why those losses hit harder the bigger your practice gets, and the one number he says matters more than revenue or profit. If you've ever felt like your finances are a mystery you don't have time to solve, this conversation gives you a place to start.

PLEASE NOTE: In the episode, Rob mentions that contribution margin is revenue minus fixed costs, but he actually meant revenue minus variable costs.

In This Episode, We Explore…

The Financial Blind Spots Costing Your Practice Money with Robert Freels

Connect with Robert Freels:
Website: https://freeriverscfo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robfreels/
Free Break-even Calculator: https://freeriverscfo.com/tolson

Connect with me:

Instagram: @thetravelingtherapist_kym
The Traveling Therapist Facebook Group: www.facebook.com/groups/onlineandtraveling/
Signup to learn more about life as a Traveling Therapist: https://www.portablepracticemethod.com/free-training
Revolutionize Your Private Practice with AI Course: www.kymtolson.kartra.com/page/ai
Bill Like A Boss Insurance Billing Community: www.kymtolson.kartra.com/page/blab

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Transcript:

[00:00:00] Kym: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Traveling Therapist Podcast. We have Rob Friels with us. Rob didn't come to finance through a textbook.

[00:00:09] He came to it by watching his family navigate real financial hardship growing up and learning the hard way what happens when nobody's watching the numbers. I would love to hear about that, Rob, actually. That's super interesting to me. 25 years later, across banking, auditing, and 16 years as a CFO, he's built a career on one idea: catch the problem in the numbers early enough, and it doesn't have to become a crisis.

[00:00:34] Now, as founder of Free River CFO Advisory, he brings that same instinct to healthcare and mental health practice owners who are busy, profitable on paper, and one bad month from finding out the hard way.

[00:00:46] Oh, my gosh, we gotta talk about this. Now, normally I have therapists on here, but occasionally I do have guests like you, Rob, that can help the therapists that are listening, so let's get into this.

[00:00:57] I'd love to hear about your background first and how you got into this. So interesting

[00:01:01] Rob: So yeah, my grandfather we had like a hardware store, like I was born in '77, so like I grew up in the '80s, right? He had a hardware store. They had appliances and all that stuff. And then in the mid-'80s, Walmart came to town, and we watched the gradual decline.

[00:01:14] And by like 1990, like five or something like that, he had to declare bankruptcy, and my parents had to transition and shift. And they figured it out. They did a good job. And when I was in college, you know, I ha- it's hate to say this, but like my parents, I had to keep telling them, "Hey, you need to save some money, right?"

[00:01:29] You know, like that. And they, and they never did. They ended up burning through everything. So I've watched it happen like through two generations of my life. So I kinda take it very seriously. And that's kind of why I went, you know, I have an econ undergrad and then the MBA in finance and another master's in accounting. So just trying to make sure that I cover my butt, so to speak.

[00:01:49] Kym: That's so interesting. Now, I know you help a lot of different, like, industries, but how'd you get into therapy practices? That's so interesting that you're, like, specializing in that, 'cause I don't always see that when I interview, like, this type of professional, you know?

[00:02:02] Rob: Right. Sure. So, I mean, I didn't pick it out of like a, you know, market report. I was already working with a mental health group practice. When I got there, I kind of expected like to see a fairly simple set of books, and it wasn't, you know. M-multiple clinicians, like everyone on a different arrangement revenue that arrives in sessions in-instead of like invoices, you know.

[00:02:20] half of it was routed through like insurance that pays, you know, whenever we feel like it, and we won't go there. But it was actually a lot more interesting than most of like the manufacturing or the other stuff I had I'd done in the past. I'd spent 16 years also as a CFO for a four-provider podiatry practice.

[00:02:36] so I know exactly what it looks like when the money side starts eating at the owner's, you know, into the owner's week. Mental health, the therapy practices they kinda sit in like a gap. They're complicated enough to genuinely need like a CFO, but they're far too small to like hire one.

[00:02:51] So they end up with a bookkeeper, a tax person they see once or twice a year and nothing in between. And the owner ends up, you know, doing most of that CFO work at 10 o'clock at night on like a, on a spreadsheet that they built themselves.

[00:03:02] Kym: Yeah, I've been there.

[00:03:03] Rob: yeah, and you know, they don't go to graduate school for counseling just because they w- you know, they wanna learn how to run a business.

[00:03:08] They went 'cause they wanna help people, you know? One day a few years down the road, they've got six clinicians, and they got payer contracts and a payroll, and every hour they're spent working on that is not what they actually... An hour that they didn't actually get to do what they were trained for, and that's a bad trade, you know?

[00:03:22] And lastly, I'll say on this one, it's like it's one of the last corners of healthcare that's still mostly owned by the people that are doing the work, you know? Everything else is getting rolled up in private equity and hospital purchases. And I'm a huge proponent of small business ownership, so I mean, I'm gonna try to keep it that way, you know?

[00:03:38] When the owners get burned out, you know, and they, they don't even wanna read their own numbers anymore, that's when they sell. So, you know, the finance side isn't really about the money. It's just about staying independent long enough to choose.

[00:03:48] Kym: Absolutely. for people that are listening, what does a CFO do in case they're like, "I don't even know what that means"? How would you explain a CFO?

[00:03:57] Rob: CFOs normally have a, a pretty technical background in some sort of like, banking, auditing stuff that I've already done.

[00:04:03] So I'll say this, like the banking taught me like what a business does and what it looks like from the outside , especially when it's about to be in trouble. Auditing taught me where all the bodies are buried.

[00:04:13] Kym: Yeah.

[00:04:14] Rob: but as the CFO, and this is the part that matters like to your audience, is w- it's like running the finances of that, you know, the f- the four-provider practice, you know.

[00:04:22] You have to deal with like the payer mix, the denials, the provider productivity, receivables book that sits like 90 days out sometimes, you know. That's all... It's not theory. It's all stuff that has to be dealt with, and you need somebody who understands the numbers. And it's one thing to see them, and you learn them over time through, you know, school of hard knocks, kind of, as, you know, as a, as a provider or an owner.

[00:04:43] Like you didn't go to school for this stuff. But you need somebody that can help translate that. you know, bookkeepers, they'll, they'll give you like a P&L or a balance sheet, like a couple things, and you can look at, but you don't really know what it means if you're an owner 'cause you didn't go to school to know what that means.

[00:04:59] So m- my job is to help translate what it means like when you're reading. Like, "Hey, you know, your revenue is down 4% and if you look at..." And that makes me think, "Okay, this is without telling the owner first. I'm gonna go on my own, and I'm gonna look at the number of sessions. Okay, the number of sessions are down this month also.

[00:05:15] Or is the the AR, how long is the A, you know, the insurance AR come, you know, is it lagging?" And stuff like that. So I'm helping translate that variance a lot, and then giving advice on what to do

[00:05:24] Kym: that's super interesting. Yeah, because I mean, the w- the last thing that therapists ever do is look at their numbers. I mean, there's exceptions, but a lot of us are really bad with that, you know?

[00:05:34] Rob: It's intimidating, you know? It's like me trying to look at like the-- It's like me trying to f- look, look at the diagnostic codes. I don't know. You

[00:05:40] Kym: Exactly. Right. Exactly. Same thing. Yeah. That's a good point. So from your perspective in working with a lot of, like, practices, I know you work with solo and groups, but mostly group practices, what's the biggest financial blind spot that you see in therapy practice, especially those that are scaling from solo to group?

[00:06:00] Rob: Sure. Okay. Um, The blind spot, it's not really a number, it's more like a shape. Uh, money leaks as a percentage, and usually right off the top before it ever hits the bank. And nobody ever sees that scary line item. Like, they just see the revenue that hits, but they don't see what the revenue that never showed up.

[00:06:18] Like a, you know, the billers take a cut. You know, credit card processing is netted now. Like, you don't even see the credit card processing fee. You know, out of network platform, they're taking a slice. You know, all those are invisible but they're all compounding underneath. And to hit the group part, it's actually even worse when it goes to a group because the fee scales with your revenue, right?

[00:06:39] Most of those fees do. S- so the work behind it doesn't. You know, that's the interesting part. So you set a contract, and you only have 40 sessions a month, like a solo practice. And that fee is usually, you know, a few hundred bucks, and that's totally fine. But you hit 400 sessions in a group practice, that's a, that's one of your biggest vendor lines and the biggest checks you'll write all, you know, all year.

[00:06:57] And nobody ever went back and repriced it, you know? Like, those rates were built back when billers were, like, sending out paper claims, and, and all that labor collapsed in the digital age. And, but the rates never moved, 

[00:07:08] Kym: Yeah, that's a good point.

[00:07:10] Rob: Yeah. So there was actually a survey out, I think this month from Insura, you know, it's, that's an EHR and, you know, take your conclusions with a grain of salt with that, right?

[00:07:18] But the methodol- the methodology they used, like there's 1,100 plus therapists it was reviewed by clinical experts of the American Counseling Association. They asked practices to like rate themselves across like five areas, and the financial health came in dead last. Like only nine, only 9% said that it was a strength, like nine.

[00:07:36] So it's not really a blind spot that the owners, you know, they're not bad with money. It's that the money leaves in percentages and those percentages no one's looking at and no one's adding them up over time.

[00:07:47] Kym: interesting. Yeah.

[00:07:48] Rob: yeah.

[00:07:49] Kym: So how do you catch it? I mean, I guess you have a CFO to help you catch it, but i- anybody listening that maybe doesn't have, like, the capacity or the, or the ability to hire one, like, right now, how, where would they look for that? Like, how would they start to pay attention to something like that if there's, like, that invisible bleed that you're not really paying attention to?

[00:08:07] Rob: I mean, you can... Number one, like some of the deliverables I have use percentage of income on them, so you'll be able to tell. And it, and I have like, I say benchmarks in my, like program that tell me like, "Hey, this is above this percentage. It's, it's a red flag, so we need to look here, here, and here," that kind of stuff.

[00:08:24] But I think that the percentage is by itself is like the wrong question to ask. I mean, some of those things you need to convert to dollars when you're talking about volume. So, you know, 8%, like I said, 8% of the solo practice, then I'm just using a, a round number, like from a billing company, like a, on the Facebook forums, like you see 7, 8%.

[00:08:42] But their percentage, you know, like, like 8% of like a solo practice, you know, is a few hundred dollars a month. Completely fine and totally legit. Absolutely. And the 8% at 400 sessions, again, a lot different.

[00:08:53] You wanna look at the dollar amount on that and not the, the percentage, 'cause it's always gonna be percentage. But if you have, if you collect like $2 million a year, 8% of that, I mean, you can either bring that in-house or you can negotiate that down some, right? That's the big thing is nobody knows to negotiate those billing rates and also shop them.

[00:09:09] And that's another thing that people don't really do anymore. They don't shop around, and that should be like on everybody's radar once a year or twice a year to shop and get three other pricing models and just accept the fact that they're gonna flood your inbox, you know,

[00:09:22] Kym: Yeah, that's true. Once you do that, you're gonna get... Like me, I get, like, five texts a week just like, "Do you need billing services?" It's like, "No, I don't. Thank you. I don't know how you got my number."

[00:09:32] Rob: I

[00:09:33] Kym: Yeah, it's obnoxious.

[00:09:34] Rob: yeah, I'm, I'm not really a huge fan of sales. So it's kind of a... I don't really push my service onto anybody. I'm only here to help, right? That's just

[00:09:43] Kym: Yeah, yeah

[00:09:43] Rob: if you need it, I'm here for you. If you don't, that's cool. I'm good. I'll be here when you do need it.

[00:09:48] Kym: Yeah, no, that's, that's awesome. Yeah, absolutely. It's such an important thing because I think what happens with private practice owners is, like, you get a billing person, right? And then, like you're saying, you should be shopping, you should be comparing rates, you should be doing that.

[00:10:02] But then you get into this mindset of, like, you know, it's too complicated. This... I'm gonna have to bring a new person in to understand my systems and all of that, so it just gets maybe overwhelming, and you don't think about doing it because you don't wanna, like, have to, like, train somebody new or bring somebody in and have to go through that whole process, 'cause you're already burned out as running the practice, you know?

[00:10:22] so I think it's good to have people like you to say, "You know what? Why don't you at least look at some different prices here?" Because I think that kinda falls off our radar when we're running businesses as, like, small business owners.

[00:10:33] Rob: Absolutely. I mean, again, you only have so much, so many hours in the day that you can devote to it without just going completely frazzled. I've seen it.

[00:10:40] Kym: Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's like I just don't have the capacity to deal with it, so I'm not going to kind of thing.

[00:10:45] Rob: Right. It bleeds, like, you know. And plus it seems like a harder thing to do because it's not something most of them went to-- You know, they didn't, they didn't study this kind of stuff, so it seems like almost an insurmountable, like, goal. So most people, I think, at least I do anyway, I try to tackle easy tasks as much as possible and keep the, you know, the bigger tasks, I kind of let them sit there and linger, right? I'm like, "Oh, that's not a good idea either."

[00:11:08] Kym: Yeah. Yeah, right,

[00:11:09] Rob: Yeah, right.

[00:11:10] Kym: So what is the, like, telltale sign that a practice has outgrown, like, a bookkeeper and they actually need a CFO or, like, real financial guidance from somebody? Like, how do you know when to do that, when to shift into that?

[00:11:24] Rob: Sure. I think it's when you see the owners asking questions in public, on public forums and stuff. You know, when they start asking strangers to help you make five-figure decisions like, you know, for example, like, "Hey, should I bring billing in-house?" Or, you know, "Should I leave insurance?" Or, "Is my biller worth 8%?"

[00:11:42] All of those, posts will get, 30 comments but with zero numbers, like, every time. the question they're asking is really a substitution. What they really wanna know is, "How much is this costing me?" But that question really kinda feels unanswerable, so they ask something that feels answerable instead.

[00:12:00] like, "Oh, how hard is it?" Or, "How long does it take?" Or, "Who do you recommend?" They know what's wrong they just don't know how much it costs. So a bookkeeper answers what happened. A CFO answers what should I do? The moment you've got a decision with a comma in the dollar figure and nobody to ask, then you've outgrown the bookkeeper.

[00:12:21] Kym: Smart. Yeah, that's really smart.

[00:12:24] Rob: and, and it's nothing against bookkeepers. Look, I do it my... I do bookkeeping myself, you know. It's very necessary. It's just you wanna have somebody doing your bookkeeping who is, you know, trained to know what to look at and how to deliver

[00:12:39] Kym: Right

[00:12:41] Rob: deliver the why as well as the what, you know?

[00:12:45] Kym: That makes sense. Yeah. 'Cause I guess a bookkeeper, right,

[00:12:47] Rob: Yeah.

[00:12:48] Kym: they just, like, take the numbers from here, put the numbers here, and then pay the taxes or whatever, right? Or tell you how much to pay in taxes, that kind of thing. There's no, like, like, experienced financial advisor, like, decision-making that's going on in that process usually, right?

[00:13:04] Rob: Right, exactly. That's why I auto- that's why I automated my bookkeeping component. I know that you deal a lot with AI. I don't know which... I wa- I'm curious, what, what platform do you use most? Do you use ChatGPT or Claude or, or both?

[00:13:17] Kym: to be ChatGPT, like I was diehard ChatGPT, and then Claude got really good. So I've been using Claude, but then ChatGPT just, like, released a bunch of really good stuff. So

[00:13:26] Rob: I know. You know what? It's actually good what I-- Yeah. Right, yeah, I know, but it's usually good to have them, pit them against one another, if you ever thought about doing that. Like say, you know, you take, take your output from one and throw it in the other, and then they can like... You could see like the... And they're, they're so nice about it.

[00:13:41] But again, you gotta be c- conscious of the sycophant syndrome that they have. Like, they're always like complimentary of everything. It's like, "Okay, I need you to be tell me what's wrong," you know?

[00:13:52] Kym: Yeah, be a little critical here. Use some critical thinking, please.

[00:13:57] Rob: Exactly.

[00:13:59] Kym: Yeah, yeah. No, Claude, Claude's probably the one I go to now right now, and it's, you know, after you use one for a while, it just starts to get to know everything about you, so it's like, like I was saying before, the billers know everything about you.

[00:14:10] You don't wanna switch to a new biller.

[00:14:11] Rob: That's, no, that's true.

[00:14:13] Kym: Yeah. Mm-hmm

[00:14:14] Rob: Yeah, absolutely

[00:14:16] Kym: But yeah, I use all of them actually. Manus, Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT

[00:14:22] Rob: Okay, I've never used Manus or Perplexity, but I've used Groq and

[00:14:26] Kym: Mm-hmm

[00:14:28] Rob: Groq, ChatGPT, Claude, and oh, Gemini. Gemini, but, eh, Gemini is kinda, it lags still.

[00:14:34] Kym: good.

[00:14:35] Rob: I know.

[00:14:36] Kym: So, so you're using... Are you using AI then to automate your, what you're doing to help

[00:14:42] Rob: Oh, absolutely. That's what that's, that's how I'm able to do the CFO part of the work, is the only way I could do that is if I automated, if I learned how to automate the bookkeeping. And that's been a process too, by the way. You gotta build in, like... So this is where the auditing came in handy for me, is like I'm able to, to build controls around where it's sometimes if you're not ca- if you're not careful, AI will start pulling numbers from other things that it's pulled before that aren't tied to like a direct input from like the client.

[00:15:11] So, or like their books or like their bank statement or their payroll records. Like, when I was trying to develop this it w- I, I tried to get like a contribution margin on the clinicians that I was looking at. Contribution margin is basically your revenue minus your fixed cost, and that's the leftover.

[00:15:26] So I'm trying to figure out what that margin is. But when it looked at their pay rates, it pulled from some other file that we had done in the past, and it y- and it calculated them incorrectly. So I can't give that as a deliverable, you know, to a client that's like, "Hey, wait, you didn't even give me the right payroll numbers.

[00:15:40] How can I trust you for anything? How

[00:15:42] Kym: Yeah, exactly.

[00:15:44] Rob: So yeah, I, I automated it. It, it's taken a, it's taken a while, but again, Claude, you know, if you, if you build the guardrails, it actually, it does really well. And I'm, I still have the knowledge and the, and the, the background to be able to know what I'm looking at and to double check my, double check its work, which, you know, technically my work, I guess.

[00:16:02] You know, and I guess for bookkeepers, like they, you know, most practices they pay like between like $300 to $500 a month to categorize transactions, close the books, and, you know, it's, that's real money buying a record of what already happened. Very necessary, but it, it doesn't tell you anything, you

[00:16:17] Kym: Yeah

[00:16:18] Rob: S- so back in

[00:16:21] Kym: Mm-hmm

[00:16:21] Rob: the pre-AI days, like I, I was able to develop a process or system to take my close, which was like averaging 18 days down to like 12. That's again, without AI. And it... The difference wasn't effort, it was the I s- I s- you know, stopped depending on one person remembering the order of the things that happened.

[00:16:38] Like I was like, I had to, I had to set up a systematic process of how I'm going to run through the close. And when it runs on a process instead of a person, there's two things that happen. Like one, the books are done in days, not weeks, so that those numbers that you receive from me are gonna be relevant because you just finished up.

[00:16:55] And the second one is that the money that was buying data entry is now buying somebody who reads and interprets it. So

[00:17:03] like, one of the groups that I saw recently, like there was a practice owner, you know, 'cause August it's mid-year, they needed some reports and they were complaining that their bookkeeper had just gone silent.

[00:17:13] They couldn't get ahold of them. They weren't fired, they weren't fighting. Who knows if they were on vacation, they were just gone, non-responsive. And that's not quality problem, that's a single person dependency problem. So the automated month-end close it, that runs on a process that process, it doesn't go MIA, like at all.

[00:17:33] Kym: Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. So you can get real time numbers. 'Cause I, I mean, I have a bookkeeper, I guess she's a... Yeah, she's really a bookkeeper that I use, and I swear it'll be like four or five months before she goes in and reconcile stuff. And then it's like, wow, you know, I probably should have like, realized that I was spending this much on this and maybe, you know, had less money coming in here.

[00:17:53] And I'll go back and try to interpret it, but it's, it's really good to have like real time numbers almost, like pretty close to real time. That's

[00:18:00] Rob: Yeah, if you, if you-- I mean, and again, it also depends on how fast the, the client can get you, like, your bank statements and, you know, you know. Or essentially, if you can get, if I can get, like, read-only access to, like, the bank stuff and then the pay-- like the, if they use a payroll company, that stuff, then I can do it myself and I can have it done in, like, five days.

[00:18:18] So, yeah. And the reports I give out, they're not just, like, spitting out the P&L. It's gonna have, like, comment sections that say, "Hey, look, you were down from, you know, 2% this time last year, and your sessions were up 1%, so we need to look into this further," kind of thing, you know, to get direction. Yeah.

[00:18:36] Kym: And then what would, what would the clinician do for, with that? They would call you up and say like,

[00:18:41] Rob: Oh, yeah. We would have like a, we'd have like a once a month call, like 45, yeah, about an hour, 45 minutes, something like that. Or, or, or whatever it needs. If they need some more you know, specific help or like a special project kind of thing, it's absolutely, you know, I'm there to help. That's-- My goal is it's just like, you know, being a clinician.

[00:18:59] I'm here to help you.

[00:19:01] And, and my, and my performance is based on their success. So I wanna be, you know, as successful in my own right, which means it translates to their success

[00:19:12] Kym: Yeah, absolutely. So what what else could you, could you tell a clinician maybe that's listening that might just be struggling financially? Like, is there things that they should, that you could say, like, "You always should look at this number, this number, this number to get a good snapshot of it of the health of your practice"?

[00:19:31] So yeah, I just wonder, are there, like, some, like, red flags or something that, that people listening might be able to think through or,

[00:19:38] Rob: Hmm. Yeah there's one. It's the breakeven sessions per week. Breakeven sessions per week. Not revenue, not profit, not cash. The number of sessions that a practice, you know, has to deliver each week to cover everything before the owner makes a dollar. That's the one you really wanna know. So you look at the other ones like revenue, that tells you what happened.

[00:20:00] Cash, you know, tells you what you have, but even that's a kind of a lie because half of that money's already spoken for already, you know? The breakeven is the only one that actually is forward-looking. It's the line you're either above or below this week. And you can act on it on Monday or you, and s- and have it fixed by Friday, right?

[00:20:18] So you can fix your, your real time. That's the one you wanna follow. A- a- and honestly, the breakeven, like once you know it, every other decision gets easier. Like for example, can I hire? I mean, that's just does the new clinician cover their own breakeven, right? Or should I take that lower paying panel? Now you're working just from arithmetic and it's not a gut call.

[00:20:40] You're not just making it 'cause it sounds good. Or should I raise rates, you know? Like, well, you can see exactly how many clients you can afford to lose and offset it, right? But most owners, I d- I think at least, at least from what I've seen in the past, most owners never run that number because it, it, it looks harder than it actually is to calculate.

[00:20:59] Actually I built a free calculator that does it. All they would need to d- yeah, all they need to do is put in their sessions, their rate, and their fixed costs, and it'll tell you the number. That's available on my website freeriverscfo.com. That's free rivers, as in plural, more than one river.

[00:21:15] And and /tolson at the end there. That's your last name.

[00:21:18] Kym: Oh, nice

[00:21:19] Rob: yeah, and there's no sales pitch on the other end. It just gives you the numbers. So I'm not, you know, like I said, I'm not looking to... Yeah, I'm not trying to sell anybody anything.

[00:21:28] Kym: You don't have to opt into a sales call or anything like that with it. Yeah.

[00:21:31] Rob: Exactly right. No.

[00:21:32] Kym: cool. Yeah

[00:21:33] Rob: p- yeah, you want, I want people to reach out to me 'cause they need my help.

[00:21:36] I'm not gonna start proactively like knocking on doors and things like that

[00:21:40] Kym: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:21:41] Rob: So, but that's, that's the number. That's the one thing I would, I would definitely like look for. And I also think the other... If I had to choose something else that I don't think a lot of bookkeepers do, and it's a cash flow statement.

[00:21:53] 'Cause when you look at your P&L, like, you know, it gives you a paper number, right, as a profit. I-- number one, I don't like the name P&L 'cause profit and loss implies there's gonna be a loss. The o- the other version is called income statement. I like that one better 'cause at least it doesn't say anything negative.

[00:22:07] It just says income statement, right? But the cash flow stat- the fa- the cash flow statement is the most important of those statements because it reconciles that net income or loss to what your bank balance is. So you can, you can translate from one to the other and, and understand how... You know, 'cause sometimes there'll be months where you made money, but your cash goes down.

[00:22:26] Well, was there three payrolls, or did you put... You invest money somewhere? Did you take an owner's draw? Something like that, that doesn't actually hit the books directly in that way. So those are things also that I, I, I have comments on and reconcile in my deliverables.

[00:22:40] Kym: Yeah. Oh, that's really cool. Yeah. It sounds so helpful. So if people wanna work with you, you said your website, is that the best way to find you and work with you, is to go to your website?

[00:22:50] Rob: Yes, it's my website. Let me get to my... Oh, there we go. Yeah. Again, I'll say it again, it's freeriverscfo.com/tolson. Again, free-- yeah, freerivers, like free as in the first four letters of my last name, rivers as in plural, and then cfo.com and then slash your last name, Tolson

[00:23:07] Kym: Love it. That's amazing. Well, thank you for taking the time today to come talk to us. Super interesting, helpful.

[00:23:14] Rob: Yeah. Anybody has anything, just reach out

[00:23:16] Kym: Okay. Thanks a lot

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