How Expert Bookkeeping Eliminated $40K+ in Outstanding AR and Cut Proposal Time from Hours to Minutes

01 · The Challenge

Jacob had been aware of Anchor for some time before making the move. His account team had been in contact for a while, and he had seen the product at industry conferences. When he finally sat through a full demo, he was ready to make the change.

Before Anchor, Jacob was carrying more than $40,000 in outstanding accounts receivable at any given time. Collecting that money required a mix of phone calls, emails, and, in some cases, meeting clients at coffee shops. The experience was uncomfortable for both parties in the relationship.

Jacob described the dynamic directly: some clients genuinely struggled to pay and chasing them felt awkward given how closely he worked inside their books. Others had more than enough money to pay and simply had not gotten around to it. Either way, the collections process created friction that Jacob did not want to manage.

Because collections felt uncomfortable, Jacob acknowledged that it often got pushed to the back burner. If he had been working the problem as actively as it warranted, he estimated he would have been spending four to five hours per week on follow-up calls and outreach alone.

Proposals were an equal source of friction. Jacob was custom-building every engagement document from scratch, working from memory to recall the terms and conditions from previous proposals and then deleting, editing, and rewriting each one. Without consistent templates, no two agreements looked the same. That inconsistency made things harder for his team as well: when a client file changed hands internally, team members had to reread every agreement from the beginning to understand exactly what had been promised. There were no standard packages they could rely on.

“It kind of puts you in an awkward position because you’re the one that’s in their books. The people that really couldn’t afford to pay, you felt bad arguing with them. And then the ones with plenty of money, you just wanted to shake them. Anchor has taken that burden off my shoulders.”
Jacob LaCour, Owner, Expert Bookkeeping

Jacob was sending somewhere between 15 and 20 proposals per month. At two to three hours each, the cumulative time cost was significant. And the result was a Word document, not a professional interactive proposal.

02 · The SolutionWhy Anchor

The decision came down to one question Jacob asked himself: did he want a business that could scale and eventually be passed down or sold, or did he want things to keep running the way they were? When he got honest about that answer, it was clear something had to change.

When Jacob finally sat through a full demo, the scope of what Anchor could do made the decision straightforward. He signed up during that same call. A short time later, during a follow-up session, Jacob and one of our advisors built a proposal together in real time and sent it to a waiting client. The client signed and paid before the meeting ended.

Pricing was nearly the last thing Jacob looked into. He had already decided Anchor was the right tool before he asked what it cost. When he was told the platform was free to use with a per-transaction fee on payments, his reaction was disbelief. He went looking for the catch. Two years later, he says he still has not found one.

“When I sat down and did a full demo and saw the power and the tools behind Anchor, it was a no-brainer. I think it was during that call — I said, sign me up.”
Jacob LaCour, Owner, Expert Bookkeeping

Implementation

Jacob migrated approximately 80 percent of his client base to Anchor. The remaining 20 percent were long-standing clients who had been on grandfathered arrangements and needed to be handled differently. For those clients, Jacob kept their existing agreements running through QuickBooks and worked through the transition one-on-one, in some cases walking them through the new process on his laptop during an in-person visit.

For the clients moving to Anchor, Jacob launched in the middle of a month and gave everyone a month and a half before their Anchor agreements went live. That lead time let clients review their proposals without pressure. From the first billing cycle under Anchor, all new invoices were collected automatically.

03 · The ResultsDirect Saving

Before Anchor, Jacob was carrying more than $40,000 in outstanding AR at any given time. Today, AR for the roughly 80 percent of clients on Anchor is zero. The remaining balance sits with the portion of his client base still on the older arrangement, which Jacob is continuing to manage directly. Clearing the initial $40,000 took approximately six months as old invoices cycled out and everything new collected automatically through Anchor.

The collections workload Jacob had been managing, or more often avoiding, is gone. Clients on autopay are charged automatically each billing cycle. When a payment method needs to be updated, clients handle that themselves through the Anchor client portal, without needing to call Jacob or fill out a new ACH form. Jacob noted that this came up more often than most people would expect, and having clients manage it directly saves meaningful time.

On the proposal side, Jacob went from two to three hours per proposal down to ten to twenty minutes. On a standard engagement, his process now runs from a discovery call directly into a proposal built from consistent templates, sent the same day. Clients receive a polished, professional multi-page document almost immediately after the discovery conversation ends. Jacob reports that multiple clients have commented on both the speed and the quality of the proposals compared to what he was sending before.

Jacob also set up automatic 3 percent annual price increases across his client base. Regardless of how many new clients he brings on, his revenue will grow by at least 3 percent per year through that mechanism alone.

“I was spending four hours on a Word document. Now I’m spending 15 to 20 minutes and it’s an official 15-page proposal. It makes my credibility a lot higher, from what clients have told me.”
Jacob LaCour, Owner, Expert Bookkeeping

The team benefits have been just as meaningful. Jacob now runs his practice on three standard packages. Every team member knows exactly what is included in Package A, Package B, and Package C. The days of rereading custom agreements to understand what had been promised to each client are over.