Nick Pasquarosa started in business young, completing his first tax return at just sixteen. He founded Bookkeeper360 in 2010 while working as a local bookkeeper. But after getting sick of traveling to clients, and being stuck in traffic all day, he decided to partner with Xero in 2012.
He recognized the potential for a business that could connect his love for numbers and technology with the development of cloud accounting. Xero’s technology, and others in the ecosystem, helped him gain the ability to scale to a few hundred clients nationwide.
“Every business needs to do taxes. I figured assisting with taxes was the most help I could give to SMBs.” That’s what started Bookkeeper360, although most of their work has fluctuated away from taxes and into bookkeeping back-office and advisory services.
Bookkeeper360’s core service offerings include bookkeeping, back office support, CFO and HR advisory, and technology solutions for SMB clients.
Nick found there was a critical need for Bookkeeper360’s services for many reasons. “A lot of clients don’t have transparency in their financials. They don’t understand how an income statement and balance sheet reads. They don’t understand how to measure their businesses.”
“My AH-HA moment was when I got a phone call from a client in Brooklyn. They wanted the services but did not want to meet in person I realized that if I could provide this service from Woodbury, NY to Brooklyn, we could do it from New York to Los Angles.” That was what started the push to the cloud.
Many businesses are now operating purely online, and Bookkeeper360 has built an entirely mobile environment.
One of Bookkeeper360’s strongest qualities is their investment in technology. Nick realizes that “the way businesses operate is evolving drastically and it will continue to.” They take this foresight and continue to grow with the available technology, offering their clients the most efficient and scalable financial technology in the market.
As bookkeeping is moving in the direction of automation and AI, Bookkeeper360 leverages much of Xero’s technology. “We leverage the development and technical skill set of a lot of our partners. We’re not in the business of building our own bookkeeping software; although, we have built in a completely customized sales infrastructure.”
Great success doesn’t come without some challenges. Bookkeeper360 always needs qualified talent. As cloud computing is relatively new, finding talent who understands it can be challenging.
Being in such a demanding space, Nick found that “building and growing a team that is new to cloud accounting is challenging. It’s not exactly something you can go to school for. You go to school for accounting or technology. But not cloud accounting. We created our own internal process for training cloud accounting.”
A business is only as good as its employees. Finding talent can be difficult enough, especially for innovative companies like Bookkeeper306. One result of paving the way is having to create your own training process for the whole industry.
In terms of clientele, Bookkeeper360 can be described as a growth engine for small and medium sized businesses. “We have a good mix of clients. The commonality between them is that they’re looking to grow.”
All of their clients are located in the United States. They’re all domestic companies, but their clients’ clients are across the world. On average, Bookkeeper360 deals with one to ten-million dollar companies.
“Using the same technology that we’ve used since day one, we’ve been able to grow companies from the thousands to the millions. Helping promote businesses is very rewarding. We moderate our processes and engagement and complexity to help draw value and continue to support them.”
Bookkeeper360’s extension, CFO360, offers more advanced KPI reporting and advisory services. They become the virtual CFO for any of the companies looking for that type of guidance. In this way, Bookkeeper360 is a one-stop-shop for their clients, a role that many bookkeeping and cloud accounting firms don’t want to take on.
However, Nick explains that Bookkeeper360 offers services that any business can grow into. That’s what makes them so scalable. “It’s not enough to do a good job and let our clients outgrow us. We want to stay with them and help them continue to grow, whatever their strategies are. To do that, we need an all-encompassing product to help them.”
“That’s what brought us to Veem.”
Bookkeeper360 was in need of an affordable solution to help their clients work internationally. Veem came in and provided that solution. “We have a lot of clients with Veem now. That partnership is growing and growing.”
Bookkeeper360 is at the forefront of digital finance solutions. For this reason, they need innovative technology that can provide their clients with as much flexibility and scalability as they need.
“Veem has really helped with the need in the market in terms of bill pay and an electronic payments service. We use Veem on two fronts, both domestic and international. It’s affordable and easy to use. Our clients are very happy with it. Being a value-based company, it’s necessary to find the most cost-efficient solutions.”
“Our clients come to us for solutions that work and Veem works.”
“We’re using Veem to transfer money in different currencies, which has been a great alternative to using wire transfers and other costly ways of sending money. Some other solutions don’t even offer international or else only use paper checks. Those are really inefficient ways to pay bills in modern business. With only the conversion costs, Veem is very affordable.”
In the future, Bookkeeper360 plans to keep doing what they’re doing because they’re doing it well. They’ll continue expanding their client base and digging deeper into client relationships. “We’ll move forward by delivering other technology solutions, like our mobile app. We just want to reach more customers and help more people.”
“It’s all about passion. It’s not about what you do, but how you do it, how you embrace technology, and how you continuously educate yourself to become bigger and better than the competition. You can only do one thing at a time so have passion and focus on it.”
Veem is a global payments network built for businesses. We began in 2014 with the intention of making international money transfers as simple as purchasing a cup of coffee. Since then, we’ve revolutionized the way businesses pay and get paid around the world by empowering owners, accountants, and financial professionals to take control over their payment processes. We level the playing field by providing enterprise-level financial tools and negotiating power to the small businesses who need it most.