Webinars

One-Third of B2B Payments Still Arrive by Check. Here’s the Hidden Cost

Earmark Team · July 1, 2026 ·

A $20 million windows business was doing what countless companies do every day: attaching their bank account information to invoices they emailed out. A bad actor intercepted one of those emails, swapped the bank details for an offshore account, hacked into the company’s system, and accessed their entire customer base. Then they blasted fake invoices to every client on the list. In just one month, they stole nearly $100,000.

What makes this story unsettling isn’t that it was sophisticated — it wasn’t. It was a predictable result of manual accounts receivable (AR) processes that millions of businesses still use today.

That story came from a recent webinar presented by Baxter Lanius, CEO and founder of Alternative Payments — a company focused on accounts receivable automation that has processed over $1 billion in payments and works with more than 1,000 customers, including around 100 accountants, bookkeepers, and controllers.

The session, hosted in partnership with Earmark, exposed something most of us know but rarely measure: the manual AR processes most businesses still rely on drain thousands of dollars from your clients’ bottom lines. Check processing, email-based invoice chasing, and hand-done reconciliation all add up. And with interest rates rising and margins getting squeezed, fixing these hidden payment costs through AR automation might be one of the best services you can offer clients right now.

The true cost of manual AR

Before you can fix a problem, you need to see it clearly. Most firms haven’t done the math on what manual payment processes actually cost their clients.

Let’s start with checks. Thirty-three percent of all B2B payments are still check-based. And each check costs between $10 and $15 to process when you factor in the time and manual labor needed to handle it. Think about a client processing a few hundred checks monthly. That’s thousands of dollars in hidden costs that never show up on the P&L, but they’re eating profits all the same.

Then there’s the security risk. As Baxter put it, “When you hand somebody a check, you hand them your bank account number and routing number.” It’s printed right there on the bottom of every check, and it’s a security hole hiding in plain sight. The $20 million windows company is an extreme case, but the risk exists every time a check changes hands. Add in lost packages and stolen mail, and checks become what Baxter called “a very inconsistent way to get paid.”

Another problem that compounds over time is days’ sales outstanding (DSO). When clients don’t pay for 30, 40, or 60 days, working capital gets locked up. And if your client pays their vendors quickly but waits forever to get paid themselves, they can wind up in a cash flow crunch.

“If clients aren’t paying you after 30 days or 40 days, don’t you think there’s a higher probability of bad debt expense or potential write-offs?” Baxter asked. When does a $50,000 receivable become a write-off? Day 60? Day 90? Every day increases the risk.

Manual reconciliation deserves its own spotlight. Baxter shared an example from a real Alternative Payments customer during the webinar. Before automation, the company had three people whose job was basically opening the bank account and refresh, refresh, refresh. If a customer paid, they’d try to match a $1,500 or $2,500 deposit to the right invoice. Then tie that to cash in the bank. All done by hand.

Then there’s the risk of human error. He admitted to fat-fingering bill payments himself and spent time chasing down overpayments. Some businesses still record credit card numbers on paper or store them in Excel files. That’s a PCI compliance violation waiting to happen.

Here’s what manual AR really costs your clients:

$10–$15 per check in processing labor
Locked-up working capital from long DSO
Fraud and compliance risks from exposed bank information
Hours of manual reconciliation every week
Higher bad debt risk on old receivables

The industry-wide context makes this worse. Only about 30% of B2B invoices get paid online today. Even among Alternative Payments’ established customers who’ve been on the platform for six months, only 70% of revenue flows online. The other 30% still moves offline, mostly through checks. The gap between where businesses are and where they could be is huge.

The macro environment makes this problem urgent now

These inefficiencies have been around forever. But today’s economic environment makes every one of them more expensive and more dangerous.

Start with the cost of capital. Everyone expected interest rates to fall, but that hasn’t happened. At the time of the webinar, Baxter estimated there was over a 50% chance rates would rise another 25 to 50 basis points in the year ahead. That changes everything about dollars sitting idle in your client’s AR pipeline. Money locked in unpaid receivables is expensive. Companies can’t reinvest it, use it to reduce debt, or earn returns elsewhere. What was a minor issue two years ago is now a real drag on profits.

Meanwhile, margins are getting squeezed everywhere. Minimum wages are climbing across the country. Hard goods costs are up. Revenue that can’t keep up with rising expenses magnifies every inefficiency. A manual AR process that was just annoying when margins were fat becomes truly threatening when they’re thin.

Small businesses are also failing faster. They’ve always been risky, but AI and automation, he noted, accelerate how fast weak businesses fail. Companies that don’t adopt efficient processes fall behind competitors who do. For accountants, this matters in two ways. First, your clients need help staying competitive. Second, if clients go under, you lose revenue. Helping them automate AR protects your own business.

Tying it all together, financial processes are, as he put it, “one of the last remaining components of our businesses that remain really manual.” We’ve automated marketing, sales, and big chunks of tax prep and bookkeeping. But actually moving and matching money still runs on manual effort in most firms.

AI is advancing rapidly as a tool for closing books and running operations. But Baxter made the point that it’s not about AI for AI’s sake. It’s about results. Whether automation comes from AI, workflow rules, or both, the goal is eliminating manual steps that waste time, create errors, and lock up capital. When all those costs are rising, there’s a clear return on automation.

The bottom line is, if your clients have capital tied up in inefficient AR, they’re paying more for that inefficiency than they were two years ago. If you’re not helping them fix it, someone else will.

Automation features that deliver measurable results

So the problem is real, and timing is urgent. What actually works, and by how much?

The webinar laid out specific features with hard numbers. This is the kind of data you can use to convince clients who are still on the fence.

Autopay is the biggest game-changer. When clients set up autopay, where a saved card or bank account gets charged automatically when invoices come due, their time-to-payment drops by 80% to 90%. That’s transformational. It kills the entire waiting-and-hoping cycle that makes DSO unpredictable. And it removes manual work on both sides. Customers don’t have to remember to pay, and your client doesn’t have to chase them.
Automated reminders are the second-most powerful tool. Alternative Payments’ data shows clients who get automated invoice reminders pay 66% faster than those who don’t. It makes sense. When reminders keep invoices top of mind, they never become those forgotten 120-day outliers that drag up average DSO. Modern platforms let you customize tone based on how overdue invoices are. A friendly nudge at five days. Firmer at 30. More edge at 45. They’re even launching an AI agent that can automatically customize these sequences.
Credit card surcharging saves money. About 80% of Alternative Payments’ clients pass credit card fees on to their customers, and it’s becoming the norm everywhere. Baxter shared a personal example from his insurance company, Chubb. The company told all policyholders they’d start charging 2.99% for credit card payments. So Baxter switched to ACH autopay. Problem solved. When 20% of payments are by credit card, 3% on that volume adds up fast.
Automated reconciliation eliminates the worst work. The platform handles daily payouts with full invoice-to-cash matching built in. When payments come through, it automatically matches them to invoices in QBO, Xero, NetSuite, or whatever system your client uses. No more marking invoices paid by hand. No more refreshing bank accounts, trying to match deposits. For audit prep, this automated documentation saves serious time.

Baxter shared a case study that put real numbers behind these features. S1 Technology was getting paid 30 days after due dates. Only 15% of clients paid electronically, and the other 85% wrote checks. They stored credit card numbers in Excel. After implementation, they cut collection times by 70% and drove major online adoption.

Two other features deserve attention because they solve common problems:

Multi-tenancy lets you manage AR for all clients from a single dashboard. You can click between client accounts, adjust automations, check what’s outstanding, and run reports, all without logging in and out of different systems. For accountants managing 10, 50, or 100 clients, this makes AR management scalable instead of a bottleneck.
Simple onboarding removes adoption friction. Many platforms require clients to fill out applications or create accounts before paying, and that’s where adoption stalls. The better approach is automatic. Alternative Payments creates accounts from integration data, ports over invoice history, and migrates payment methods so they’re ready when clients pay. The portal is white-labeled with your client’s brand, URL, and email, so it feels like their business rather than a third-party tool.

What this means for your practice—and your clients

Let’s bring this back to the numbers, the opportunity, and your next move.

Manual AR imposes a hidden tax that never shows up on financial statements — paper check processing, trapped working capital, fraud exposure, lost reconciliation hours, and growing bad debt risk. Each one is more expensive in today’s environment than it was two years ago.

Against that backdrop, the automation results speak for themselves. Autopay cuts payment time by 80% to 90%. Automated reminders speed collections by 66%. Firms using these workflows reduce overall collection times by up to 70%. Credit card surcharging is now standard for 80% of businesses on the platform, recovering about 3% on every card transaction. And automated reconciliation eliminates the most mind-numbing task in accounting.

For accountants, AR automation is a legitimate service line that delivers measurable value to clients while freeing your team from work that AI and automation are making obsolete. As traditional accounting services become increasingly commoditized, the ability to identify hidden financial drains and address them distinguishes advisory practices from commodity bookkeeping.

Alternative Payments also offers a referral program for accountants, with 10% lifetime commissions on referred clients, paid quarterly and managed directly through the platform. It’s another way AR automation can become a revenue stream, not just a cost-saver.

The full webinar goes deeper, including platform demos, workflow examples, and details on how multi-tenancy and integration with QBO, Xero, NetSuite, and other systems work in practice. If you want to see exactly what manual AR costs your clients and understand how to fix it, it’s worth watching.

The Month-End Close Is Accounting’s Biggest Bottleneck. Here’s How AI Is Dismantling It

Earmark Team · May 7, 2026 ·

The day before a tax deadline, and accountants from Miami to Vancouver, Portland to New York, logged into a CPE-eligible webinar to learn something that could fundamentally change how they work. The webinar showed how these professionals can shrink the most time-consuming part of their month-end close, like reconciliations, transaction coding, and bank statement chasing, from days to minutes.

Megan Reid, product specialist at Digits, led the session, and she brings a unique perspective. She’s an accountant with 15 years in the trenches, starting at a Big Four firm, moving through banking and construction, and now helping firms build what she calls an “AI-native” practice. As she put it to the audience, “As accountants, we want to be able to serve more clients, provide better service, and do so quickly and efficiently.”

The traditional month-end close is accounting’s biggest bottleneck. It’s that manual grind through booking transactions, reconciling statements, updating schedules, reviewing anomalies, and (if there’s time left) analyzing the numbers and creating the reports clients care about. “It’s a manual, tedious, time-consuming process that honestly leaves a lot to be desired for both the business owners and the accountants,” Megan said bluntly.

But what if you could flip that entire workflow? What if instead of reviewing every transaction, you only touched the ones AI couldn’t confidently handle? That’s exactly what Megan demonstrated live, showing how AI-native platforms transform the close from a compliance chore into an opportunity for real advisory work.

The bottlenecks killing your efficiency

Before diving into solutions, Megan mapped out where the traditional close breaks down. You start in QuickBooks or your ledger of choice, but quickly find yourself bouncing between Excel, browser tabs for vendor research, your close management tool, and who knows what else. “Not only are you managing the work across all these multiple platforms,” she explained, “you’re also spending time validating sync accuracy, troubleshooting issues, and making sure the data moves seamlessly throughout the various systems.”

Each phase has its own special frustrations:

Manual data entry and rule management introduce human error
Fighting with bank access and chasing clients for statements
Disconnected tools for AP, credit cards, and close management
Team members use different processes, causing rework and confusion
Manual journal entries pile up at period-end

As a result, most of your time goes to necessary but low-value tasks, leaving little room for the analysis and insights your clients actually hired you to provide.

How AI learns your way of doing things

The shift to AI-native platforms involves intelligence that learns and adapts. When Megan pulled up the demo client in Digits, she showed hundreds of transactions the AI automatically categorized. Only eight were flagged for review.

“How does it know how to categorize transactions?” she asked, anticipating the obvious question. The answer lies in three layers of learning.

First, there’s client-level learning. When you correct a categorization for a specific client, the system learns instantly. “If you review something for a brand new client and you say, ‘nope, you categorized this to software, but I actually want it to be cost of revenue,’ Digits learns from that instantly,” Megan explained.

Second, there’s firm-level learning. The system recognizes patterns across your entire client base. If the system does not have the client-level layer of knowledge, it falls to the firm-level. “How has my firm done this across all of my clients? It automatically applies your firm’s unique value to your client base.”

Third, when a transaction is entirely new, proprietary models trained on billions of dollars’ worth of transactions make the call.

During the live demo, Megan reviewed a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office transaction the AI thought might be taxes. She looked at the suggestions (taxes, legal, or a new intangibles account), selected “Legal,” and clicked save. The system immediately found two similar transactions and updated them automatically. The review queue dropped from eight to five in seconds.

But what really eliminates busywork is the AI agents run 24/7 in the background, researching vendors and populating details. “None of this has been populated manually,” Megan showed, clicking through a vendor profile complete with name, logo, description, and related websites. “We’re essentially researching them and populating all of the data for you.”

Bank reconciliation without the chase

If transaction categorization is tedious, reconciliation might be even worse. You know the drill: fighting for bank access, emailing clients for statements, then manually comparing the ledger to the statement line by line.

Megan demonstrated the “happy path” first. Digits pulled a Mercury bank statement via an API, automatically kicked off reconciliation, matched every transaction with pixel-level precision on the PDF, confirmed the ending balance, and finalized everything. Zero human touches required.

“Some firms we work with actually say, ‘I uploaded six months of bank statements and just watched them finalize one by one. And I didn’t do anything,'” Megan shared.

When auto-reconciliation can’t finalize completely, it doesn’t leave you guessing. The system flags specific issues, such as:

Missing transactions that exist on the statement but not in the ledger (one click to create)
Date mismatches where something cleared May 31 but hit the ledger June 1 (one click to adjust)
Unsettled items like checks that haven’t cleared yet

For banks without API access, such as small credit unions, you simply drag and drop a PDF statement. During the demo, Megan dragged a statement into the system and watched it extract data and start reconciling in seconds.

She took it further with a cleanup scenario. Starting with a brand-new bank account, she imported a PDF statement. Within moments, 14 transactions appeared as uncategorized. Seconds later, the AI had populated every vendor name and category without a single manual input.

Turning saved time into client value

Speed alone isn’t the point. As Megan emphasized, “the compliance and the month-end close is really just a means to an end,” the end being insights and value for clients.

The dashboards in Digits default to the current month because, as Megan noted, “knowing something two months late doesn’t usually help.” Every metric is live and drillable. Click into gross income, and you see the definition, calculation, and every underlying transaction. Your clients finally understand how you arrived at the numbers.

Each client gets customized dashboards. “Maybe you have a client that’s like, ‘we’re spending so much money on travel,'” Megan explained, showing how to add customized metrics that are specific to each client. A profitable client with ten years of runway might swap that widget for gross profit or vendor analysis.

Collaboration happens right on the platform. On any transaction, category, or report, you can leave a question. The client receives a notification and can respond directly from email without logging in. “One of the biggest pain points is transfer of knowledge,” Megan said, “making sure that you have everything that you need from your clients and vice versa.”

Custom reports become interactive stories rather than black-and-white PDFs. The AI generates insights like “You earned 33% more in March compared to the prior month” with drill-down capability to see exactly why. Important insights can be pinned to the executive summary so they’re the first thing clients see.

What this means for your firm

During the Q&A, attendees asked practical questions. One wondered if this integrates with QuickBooks or replaces it entirely. “Digits is a complete ledger system. So it’s a complete replacement,” Megan answered. They can migrate QuickBooks data in about two minutes, but this is a ground-up rebuild, not a bolt-on tool.

Another attendee asked about company scale. The focus is on small and medium-sized businesses, which is the client base most firms serve.

The shift from reviewing everything to reviewing only exceptions makes the close faster and more consistent across your team, less error-prone, and it frees up capacity to serve more clients without hiring proportionally.

“It’s a very exciting time to be an accountant while also a little bit scary,” Megan acknowledged near the session’s end. “I think it’s a time to really lean in and be excited.”

She’s right. The firms embracing AI-native tools now will deliver premium advisory services while their competitors are reconciling bank statements at midnight.

To see these workflows in action, watch the full webinar. Every accountant who signs up gets access to a sandbox demo environment where you can test these workflows with real data. And if you attended live or watch the recording, you can earn CPE credit through the Earmark app. Just search for the course and complete the quiz.

The close is changing. Will you lead that change or follow it?

A $50 Billion Company Couldn’t Match a Wire Transfer to an Invoice—And Your Clients Probably Can’t Either

Earmark Team · May 4, 2026 ·

Three years ago, Baxter Lanius received an email from a large software vendor, a company worth close to $50 billion, telling him he hadn’t paid his invoice. The invoice was a year old. Baxter checked his records, found proof of payment, and sent it back. The vendor responded, “Can you send me the PDF proof from the bank?” They’d received two wire transfers on the same day for the same amount, and they couldn’t figure out which one was his.

“I was like, oh my God, this is crazy,” Baxter recalled during a recent Earmark webinar, Build Predictable Collection Workflows That Improve Client Cash Flow. “How is a company this large having such a difficult time reconciling the transaction?”

If a $50 billion company can’t match a wire to an invoice, imagine what’s happening inside your clients’ businesses (or your own firm).

Baxter, the CEO and founder of Alternative Payments, has spent the past decade working with service-based businesses, including accounting firms, business process outsourcing companies, IT services, and even fast-casual restaurants and logistics companies. They all share the same problem. They struggle to get paid. And the costs are far higher than most realize.

The reality is, service-based businesses leave tens of thousands of dollars on the table each year because their accounts receivable workflows remain stuck in a manual, check-driven era. But as Baxter demonstrates in the webinar, by using four specific automation levers—autopay enrollment, automated reminder sequences, dynamic customer segmentation, and integrated reconciliation—firms can cut average collection times from 35+ days to about five, boost online payment adoption from 30% to 70%, and transform cash flow from a headache into a competitive advantage.

Accounts receivable is broken, and it’s costing you

This number should stop you in your tracks: $25 trillion. That’s the annual volume of B2B payments in the United States alone. And about 40% of that money still moves by check.

You swipe your credit card at the drugstore and use Apple Pay to order dinner. Consumer payments have been frictionless for years. But when one business pays another, we still stuff paper into envelopes.

Baxter pointed out this isn’t universal. In Brazil and India, most B2B transactions happen fully online. The U.S. banking system was so advanced so early that it created inertia. Countries like Brazil and India skipped the desktop generation and went straight to mobile, which forced their technology to accelerate faster. Meanwhile, American businesses built their workflows around checks decades ago and never fully let go.

The fragmented software stack makes everything worse. Consider your typical services-based business. There’s practice management software, a CRM, billing platforms, accounting or ERP software, and maybe a point-of-sale system. Each one handles a different slice of the client relationship. Data ends up stuck in silos, and reconciliation becomes a nightmare.

Then there’s the actual cost of processing checks. On average, each one takes more than ten minutes to handle and costs between $7 and $10. But the real damage is the stretched-out cash flow cycle. Your client writes a check and mails it. It arrives days later. You open it, deposit it, and wait for the funds to clear. Every step adds days to your working capital cycle.

And then there’s the fraud risk. As Baxter put it, “Everybody’s focused on cybersecurity and compliance and risk, but when you actually fill out a check and mail it, your account number and routing number are on the check.” You’re basically handing anyone who touches that envelope the keys to your bank account.

So what does this actually cost? The industry average time-to-pay for service businesses is 35 to 40 days. If you carry $1 million in accounts receivable and get paid in 40 days, reducing that to zero would put the full million into your bank account immediately. Even cutting it by 50% makes a huge difference.

Invoices typically get pushed to collections agencies in the 90- to 120-day range, though nobody wants to send a client to collections. The estimated annual cost for a typical firm is about $35,000, split between manual billing time and the cost of delayed payments.

The current economy makes this more urgent. Rising bank fees, increasing debt defaults, and inflation-driven labor costs are squeezing margins. As Baxter framed it, “This is the time to ask what we’re doing as business owners, what we’re doing as operators, what we’re doing with our clients to help automate some of these workflows.”

Four levers cut collection times from 35 days to five

Alternative Payments has worked with over 1,000 customers, processing more than $1 billion in payments. Its team identified four specific strategies that produce real results.

Lever 1: Autopay enrollment

If you ask Baxter for the single most important thing you can do, his answer is immediate. “If anybody asks me, what’s the secret sauce, it’s autopay.”

Get a client’s credit card or bank account on file and get their permission to pull funds automatically when an invoice is due. You can set this up during contracting or offer a small incentive to encourage enrollment.

The numbers are clear. Manual online payers who receive a digital invoice and choose to pay it themselves still pay an average of 9.5 days after the due date. For autopay customers, it’s just 1.7 days. That’s about an 80% improvement from one workflow change.

Across Alternative Payments’ platform, 62% of all payments are now fully automated, meaning no human touches the transaction from invoice creation through bank reconciliation.

Lever 2: Automated email reminder sequences

This lever sounds simple, but the data tells the story. When companies enable automated reminders, payments arrive 1.8 days after the due date. Without automated reminders, payments arrive 6.1 days after the due date.

“It’s pretty intuitive,” Baxter said. “If you receive an email from your vendor that says, ‘Hey, you owe us money, obviously that makes it very top of mind.”

Think of it as Mailchimp for collections. The customized email sequence runs automatically. Different customer groups can receive different messaging. Reliable payers get gentle touches. Slow payers get more frequent follow-up. The system handles everything without your team drafting a single email.

Lever 3: Dynamic customer segmentation

Instead of treating every client the same, you tag customers into groups based on their payment behavior. Frequent, reliable payers get fewer reminders with lighter language. Clients trending toward collections get a weekly follow-up with customized messaging.

“Nobody wants to manage payments. I get it,” Baxter acknowledged. “But cash flow is the lifeblood of your business. And if you can take a data-driven approach to really target your customers and segment your customers, you can get paid much more quickly.”

You set the rules once, adjust as needed, and the system runs the campaigns automatically.

Lever 4: Integrated reconciliation

This lever eliminates the most tedious back-office work. Full-cycle reconciliation means marking invoices as paid while also matching bank deposits to specific invoices with supporting documentation.

Without this, a payment hits your bank, you pull it into QuickBooks or your ERP, and you manually match it to the right invoice. Multiply that by dozens or hundreds of transactions, and you’ve got a full-time job that adds zero value.

Baxter shared that earlier in his career, “Every single time we won a new deal, we would hire people offshore to do this manual reconciliation for us because we didn’t have a system that owned the process soup to nuts.”

The platform can pull accounts receivable data from multiple systems, including practice management, accounting, and ERP systems, into a single consolidated view. Automations then run against that complete picture.

These four levers together typically drive online payment adoption from 30% to about 70%. S1 Technology reduced its days’ sales outstanding by about 70% by increasing electronic payment adoption from 15% to 90% in three months. Triada, a company with no prior collection systems and 100% check payments, cut collection times in half.

The estimated time savings is about ten hours per week on billing alone.

What’s next: AI collections and beyond

During the Q&A, a participant asked, “Do you see AI eventually helping with things like predicting late payments or prioritizing collections?”

“A million percent,” Baxter answered.

Alternative Payments is deploying an AI collections agent that reads incoming client replies and drafts appropriate responses. Payment confirmations, scheduling conversations, and even basic dispute resolution can all be handled without a human drafting emails.

“Often, these emails that you get back are pretty monotonous,” Baxter said. “Hey, I’m going to pay my bill. Hey, thank you for the reminder. I’m paying in 15 days.”

The platform is also building predictive late-payment scoring using multiple data signals, including historical payment patterns, invoice characteristics, external news about clients, and even Dun & Bradstreet business data checks. You’ll know which clients need attention before invoices go overdue.

For the 30% of revenue that still arrives via direct wire or check, AI can now read bank feeds, identify deposits, and automatically match them to outstanding invoices. That last chunk of manual reconciliation work starts to disappear.

Looking ahead, Alternative Payments was preparing to launch accounts payable at the time of the webinar. The vision is a unified financial operating system with AR on one side, AP on the other, and reporting and analytics in the middle, all integrated into your existing software stack.

Many firms are discovering a new revenue stream. Those who previously avoided AR management because it was too painful now offer it as a service, charging clients hundreds to thousands of dollars per month for work that’s largely automated on the platform.

The company also offers a referral program with 10% revenue share for partners who bring in new customers, complete with a dashboard to track referrals and earnings.

Time to automate the monotony

Returning to the story that kicked off the webinar, if a $50 billion company can’t match a wire transfer to an invoice, it’s almost certainly happening inside your firm and your clients’ businesses, too.

As Baxter asked during the webinar, “Where do you want to focus your time? You want to focus your time on providing the best service to your clients. You don’t necessarily want to focus your time on the monotony of collecting, sending out emails, reconciling cash, and reconciling invoices.”

Watch the full on-demand webinar below to see exactly how these automation levers could transform cash flow for your firm and your clients.

Proactive Cash Flow Solutions for Small Business Clients

Earmark Team · March 7, 2025 ·

Millions of small business owners start every morning the same way—logging into their bank account to see their balance. While 95% of business owners perform this daily check, a recent Cash Flow Compass report from Relay reveals a startling insight: 91% of small businesses face ongoing cash flow challenges. Despite their vigilance, most owners still lack the structures and systems to plan effectively, leaving them vulnerable to late payments, insufficient reserves, and high stress.

Based on a recent webinar featuring Blake Oliver, CPA, and Relay’s own Deanna Zubrickas, this article explores how accountants and financial advisors can move beyond balance-check advising and guide clients toward proactive, data-driven cash flow strategies. By leveraging multiple bank accounts, automated transfers, and regular check-ins, accountants can deliver both financial clarity and much-needed peace of mind to overworked owners.

Let’s dive into some of the key points from the webinar and, more importantly, what you can learn from them.

1. The Universal Challenge: 91% Face Cash Flow Struggles

In Relay’s Cash Flow Compass survey of over 750 small businesses:

91% of respondents reported dealing with cash flow issues.
Common causes include rising labor costs, seasonal fluctuations, and late client payments.

With so many business owners feeling the pinch, accountants have an opportunity to provide high-value advisory services that go far beyond routine compliance work.

2. Overconfidence vs. Reality: The 42% Confidence Gap

One surprising finding is that many owners believe they have a solid handle on their finances—but the numbers tell a different story. On average, business owners are 42% more confident in their cash flow management than is justified by their actual data. This gap creates real risks.

Blake remarks, “Coming off of a busy season, business owners see a big bank balance and feel invincible. The challenge is helping them realize that money might need to stretch through slower months or seasonal dips.”

This mismatch between perception and reality underscores the need for deliberate systems that track not just daily balances but future obligations.

3. Missing Payments, Personal Stress, and Burnout

Cash flow struggles affect both the business and its people:

31% of respondents missed or were late on major payments, including rent and payroll.
71% reported experiencing significant stress or anxiety due to cash flow woes.
62% said they suffered negative outcomes like delayed projects or losing clients.

For many, delayed payments jeopardize vital relationships with landlords, suppliers, and staff. Even worse, it erodes personal well-being. As Blake noted in the webinar, accountants are uniquely positioned to help clients break this cycle, offering regular check-ins and proactive planning that reduce the risk of crisis—and the accompanying burnout.

4. The Single-Account Trap: Why 24% Use Multiple Accounts

Despite recognizing their vulnerabilities, most small businesses still rely on one operating account for everything. According to the survey:

95% check their balance daily,
but only 24% maintain multiple accounts to track and separate funds.

Without additional accounts, it’s easy to mix up funds earmarked for payroll, taxes, or profit distributions. That single lump-sum balance can create a false sense of security. This is where modern tools and advisory play a crucial role.

5. Structuring for Success: Multiple Accounts and Automated Transfers

Relay, the official banking partner of Profit First, offers a clear solution:

Create Multiple Accounts: At a minimum, split finances into an operating account, payroll account, and savings or tax account.
Automate Transfers: Relay lets you set rules so each payment received is split into designated buckets—e.g., 10% for taxes, 15% for profit, and the rest for operations.
Project-Based Accounts: For agencies or firms handling multiple projects, separate accounts for each project can clarify available budgets without waiting for monthly reconciliations.
Receipt Capture & Sync: Relay’s new receipt capture feature (in beta) automatically syncs to QuickBooks or Xero, streamlining bookkeeping and reducing administrative overhead.

By making these processes nearly automatic, business owners start building reserves without having to remember monthly or quarterly transfers. Even small percentage allocations can add up, bolstering that emergency fund. Meanwhile, accountants can monitor activity in real-time rather than sifting through backlogged statements.

6. Advisory in Action: Weekly 15-Minute Check-Ins

A critical element of success is consistent communication. Rather than waiting for quarterly reviews—or worse, an emergency—weekly 15-minute video calls can transform client relationships:

Forecast: Quickly update spreadsheets or dashboards, listing upcoming bills, expected deposits, and payroll cycles.
Allocate: Ensure auto-transfers are working as intended and address any shortfalls immediately.
Plan: Discuss hiring decisions or new projects that might affect cash flow in coming weeks.

This shift from reactive to proactive engagement positions accountants as strategic partners. As clients see their cash flow stabilize, trust builds, and deeper advisory conversations become routine.

7. The Bigger Picture: Reducing Stress and Enabling Growth

When small businesses move beyond bank-balance management, they gain more than just better books—they reduce anxiety, avoid late fees, and seize growth opportunities. With 43% of surveyed businesses having less than a month of reserves, even moderate savings can soften sudden revenue dips or unexpected expenses.

Most importantly, owners get back to focusing on what they do best—running and growing their companies—rather than obsessing over daily balances. It’s a win-win for both the client and the accountant.

Conclusion: Empower Your Clients to Thrive

For many entrepreneurs, the line between personal and business stress is razor-thin. By advocating structured cash flow management—multiple accounts, automated transfers, and regular advisory sessions—accountants can deliver peace of mind while ensuring clients have the resources to grow sustainably.

Ready to see these strategies in action? Watch the full webinar for in-depth conversations, real-world examples, and detailed demonstrations on how to implement a modern cash flow system. Equip your clients to move beyond the daily balance check and lay the groundwork for lasting success.

Finders, Minders, and Grinders: Unlocking Your Accounting Firm’s Potential

Earmark Team · January 27, 2025 ·

Every accounting professional knows the dilemma: you’re expected to handle complex client relationships, ensure top-notch technical work, and juggle operational tasks—all at once. This all-in-one approach often leads to burnout, stunted growth, and high turnover.

Enter the “Finders, Minders, and Grinders” framework, a well-known model in professional services.

During a recent webinar, Mark Ferris of Panalitix explained how aligning each person’s natural personality with the right role can transform your practice. Instead of forcing everyone to “do it all,” you identify and empower:

Finders (relationship builders who generate new business),
Minders (managers who oversee processes and teams),
Grinders (technical experts who dive into the detailed work).

By putting people where they naturally excel, you reduce inefficiency, nurture talent, and build a more resilient firm. Below, we’ll explore how to apply this framework to create an environment where team members thrive, clients receive the best service possible, and your business can scale sustainably.

Why Matching Personalities and Roles Matters

When people consistently act against their natural inclinations, they burn out quickly. “If we act contrary to our natural inclination—our personality—it takes quite a lot of effort,” Mark Ferris explains. “That is tiring, and it’s not something we can keep up forever.”

Many traditional accounting practices mistakenly assume everyone can (and should) wear multiple hats equally well—reviewing hundreds of returns, leading team meetings, chasing new clients, and more. While some staffers can manage briefly, over time, misalignment in roles leads to errors, missed deadlines, and unhappy team members.

Skills vs. Personality: It’s crucial to separate learned skills (e.g., mastering new accounting software) from the deeper personality traits (e.g., being comfortable with negotiation or thriving in a structured environment). People can gain new technical skills, but asking a naturally reserved, detail-oriented accountant to spend most of their time selling may not succeed in the long run.

The Three Roles: A Balanced Trio

Successfully running an accounting firm means tapping into three core roles, each with distinct personality traits that maximize productivity and satisfaction.

Grinders

Focus on technical tasks like preparing returns, bookkeeping, complex compliance, or advisory projects.
Excel with structure and detailed rules, working methodically to ensure accuracy and timeliness.
Often patient, diligent, and prefer minimal distractions when completing high-stakes work.

Minders

Oversee operations, manage workflow, and coach the team.
Share some qualities with Grinders—organized and detail-oriented—but also display strong people-management skills, diplomacy, and warmth.
Handle scheduling, capacity planning, and progress checks, ensuring that deadlines, quality standards, and budgets are met.

Finders

Excel at building relationships—both with current clients (for retention and upselling) and potential clients (for growth).
Socially confident, comfortable with change, and willing to engage in negotiations or tackle conflict head-on.
Key drivers of new business, strategic partnerships, and revenue expansion.

When these three roles blend smoothly, an accounting practice functions like a well-oiled machine: technical work is done right and on time, the team runs efficiently, and new business opportunities consistently flow in.

Putting the Framework into Practice: A Real-World Example

Mark Ferris illustrates how to structure an accounting firm around these roles, ensuring each group can handle about $1 million in annual fees before you replicate the model.

Production Team (Grinders)

Bookkeepers, accountants, or tax specialists focus on client work.
Supported by a Production Manager (Minder), who handles capacity planning, scheduling, and quality control.
A Senior Client Manager (Finder) focuses on nurturing client relationships, resolving issues, and spotting upsell opportunities.

Clear Role Distinctions

Administrative staff (e.g., office manager, client service coordinator) handles day-to-day tasks like data collection, engagement letters, or invoicing.
Each Production Team is shielded from distractions, so Grinders can do technical work, Minders can improve processes, and Finders can build strong client relationships.

Career Path Alignment

Team members see exactly how they could progress: a skilled Grinder with strong interpersonal skills might train to become a Finder; a Grinder who loves organizing and leading might transition into a Minder role.
Owners can also step into the role that suits them best—whether that’s business development (Finder) or operational leadership (Minder)—and delegate the rest.

With this structure, hitting $1 million in fees signals the formation of a second production group with its own Finder, Minder, and Grinders. This model avoids an unwieldy top-heavy partnership structure and instead grows in self-sufficient, scalable “pods.” As Mark notes, clearly showing these pathways and roles is critical for recruitment and retention—two huge pain points for many firms.

Taking a Business-Minded Approach

A crucial takeaway is to run your practice like a business:

Track Productivity: Understand how much of your Grinders’ time is billable, and ensure Minders have enough oversight bandwidth. Finders may have less billable work but drive overall firm revenue and strategic direction.
Measure Results: Regularly review profitability at the production-team level. Look for ways to optimize workflow, rebalance roles, or adjust pricing.
Plan for Growth: Once a team reaches capacity, replicate the structure. No need to weigh down the firm with too many partners at the top.

Self-Reflection for Leaders and Owners

Even if you’ve been “doing it all” for decades, it pays to pause and consider which responsibilities bring you the most satisfaction. You might discover you prefer Finder tasks—nurturing client relationships—while leaving day-to-day management to a dedicated Minder. Or maybe you truly enjoy the technical depth of the work (Grinder) but feel forced into too many sales meetings.

Realigning your own role can be transformational: you get to focus on what you do best, and you build a leadership team that covers every dimension of the business.

Additional Resources to Guide Your Transformation

Panalitix LearningHub: Mark Ferris’s organization offers a wide range of tools, templates, and short courses to help you implement the Finders, Minders, Grinders structure. You’ll find interview questions to hire the right personality type, training modules on capacity planning, and resources on workflow optimization.
Coaching & Mentoring: For firms wanting deeper guidance, Panalitix provides group coaching, one-on-one sessions, and specialized projects.
Free Webinar Replays: You can watch recordings (like the one linked above) for more detailed discussions of productivity tracking, org-chart design, and incentivizing your team.

The Path to a More Resilient Firm

Adopting the “Finders, Minders, and Grinders” model is about more than a neat organizational chart—it’s a mindset shift toward placing people where their talents shine. The result? More engaged employees, a better client experience, and an accounting practice that can grow without sacrificing service quality.

Whether you’re a solo practitioner looking to hire your first employee or a mid-sized firm aiming to double revenue, the framework helps you avoid the burnout trap and keeps your team energized. In an industry where talent is scarce and client expectations keep rising, this approach could be your edge.

Ready to dive deeper? Watch Mark Ferris’s full webinar replay to gain practical tips on structuring your teams, setting productivity targets, and charting clear career paths. Embrace this powerful framework, and set your accounting firm on a path to enduring success.