Sal Rezai built a bookkeeping practice around an unusual proposition: many clients would rather learn to do the work themselves, and she will teach them.
Selling the Thing Most Firms Withhold
The conventional bookkeeping business model depends on the client not learning. The work is handed over, an invoice arrives monthly, and the owner remains at arm’s length from her own numbers.
Accounting By Sal Corp. offers that service, but it also offers the opposite, and prominently. Alongside done-for-you accounting and bookkeeping, it sells do-it-yourself bookkeeping support, training in QuickBooks Online, FreshBooks and Xero, and a Bookkeeping Academy with certificate programs.
That is a genuinely different proposition. The firm’s stated mission is to help owners strategize their financial systems through training and business mentorship, and its founder is described as getting clients excited about the thing they are least excited about, which is their numbers.
The Founder and the Credentials
Sal Rezai founded the practice and remains its public face. She is a QuickBooks Training Advisor and a FreshBooks partner, and the firm displays advanced QuickBooks Online certification alongside partner badges from FreshBooks and a payment processing provider.
The practice has received the Top Choice Award for accounting services in Edmonton in consecutive years and maintains a Better Business Bureau profile. Rezai is an active speaker, having appeared on accounting industry podcasts, joined an international panel on women in accounting, and presented to a Mississauga women in business audience on year-end preparation for small business owners.
The training covers both Canadian and United States versions of the major platforms, which suits Canadian businesses with cross-border operations and bookkeepers serving clients on both sides.
Two Audiences, One Practice
The business serves two distinct groups, and the structure reflects it.
For business owners, the offering ranges from full outsourced bookkeeping through monthly and quarterly cloud accounting support to training that lets an owner run the books herself with periodic review. Migration and application setup services move a business between platforms, which is frequently where small businesses lose data and confidence.
For accounting professionals, the Bookkeeping Academy runs a certificate program in bookkeeping for small business and an entrepreneurship program aimed at accountants launching and growing their own firms. That second group is notable. A practice that trains its potential competitors is betting that the market is larger than its own capacity, which is almost certainly correct given the shortage of qualified bookkeepers in Canada.
Why Financial Literacy Is the Real Product
The argument underneath the business is worth taking seriously. A business owner who cannot read her own financial statements is dependent on whoever can, cannot spot a problem between reporting periods, and cannot make a pricing or hiring decision with confidence.
Outsourcing the bookkeeping is often the right operational choice. Outsourcing the understanding is not. The useful middle position, and the one this practice is built around, is that the work can be delegated while the comprehension stays with the owner.
The firm frames this through four principles it asks clients to adopt: innovative, adaptable, proactive and practical. Stripped of the alliteration, the substance is that financial systems should be revisited as a business grows rather than set once and left.
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Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available information intended only for informational purposes. CanadianSME Small Business Magazine does not endorse or guarantee any products or services mentioned. Readers are advised to conduct their research and due diligence before making business decisions.
