Nobody Taught Us This: Managing Your Money as an RMT — with Heather Green

We learned how to help people physically. We learned technique, anatomy, and how to build a treatment plan. But managing our finances as self-employed practitioners? Nobody taught us that.

In this episode, Jamie sits down with friend and fellow RMT Heather Green — founder of The Proactive Practitioner — to talk about the financial systems she's built specifically for massage therapists. From tracking business expenses to navigating GST, setting aside the right amount for tax season, and actually knowing where your money is going each month — this one is for every practitioner who has ever dreaded the email from their accountant.

In this episode they cover:

• Why financial literacy is one of the biggest gaps in our training
• Heather's Financial Freedom Course — what it covers and who it's for
• The Tax Tracker vs the Financial Freedom Blueprint — which one is right for you
• GST quick method vs regular method — what the difference actually means for your practice
• How to do your own bookkeeping without it taking over your life
• Managing receipts and handing off to your accountant with ease
• Why manual entry often beats AI for small practice bookkeeping
• How both Heather and Jamie's ADHD brains shaped the way these tools were designed
• The community Heather is building for proactive practitioners

Whether you've been in practice for two years or twenty — if your finances aren't as organised as your treatment room, this episode is for you.

*Note: Heather's course and spreadsheets are primarily designed for BC-based practitioners, with most content applicable Canada-wide.*

🔗 Find Heather and The Proactive Practitioner:

 https://getbodywell.com/home/tppc/

https://www.facebook.com/proactivepractitioner

https://www.instagram.com/proactivepractitioner/

🔗 Sign up for the Mental Health and Psychological First Aid waitlist: https://go.themtdc.com/mhfa-waitlist

Transcript

Intro

0:00 – When I started this podcast, I wanted to dedicate a lot of it to things we were never taught in school that make a genuine difference in our practice.

0:09 – If you've been following along at all, you've heard us discuss things like communication, mental health, movement, and a host of other things that weren't really a major part of the curriculum in college.

0:20 – And we keep that going today as we talk about something that truly affects my mental health, as I'm sure it does for everyone listening.

0:27 – And as the old saying goes, there are only two guarantees in life: death and taxes.

0:33 – And I hate dealing with taxes. So, if you're in the same boat, because this is another thing we weren't taught in school, well, keep on listening.

Podcast Intro

0:44 – Hey there, I'm Jamie Johnston, and you're stepping into a new era of thriving as a massage therapist.

0:50 – We're embracing who you are, pursuing what you love, and confidently shaping your practice.

0:56 – We'll challenge industry norms, spark change, and discuss what truly matters—things like mental health, evidence-based practice, and some topics we've long avoided.

1:05 – Let's create better outcomes for our patients and happier, more fulfilling practices together. Welcome to the New Generation Massage Therapist Podcast.

Guest Introduction

1:16 – All right, welcome back to the next episode of the New Generation Massage Therapist Podcast.

1:21 – And this week, we are here with my friend, Heather Green.

1:28 – I've wanted to use that for a while. It's cheesy, but I still wanted to use the sound effect.

1:32 – Heather and I have known each other for what, probably 10 years now?

1:35 – [Heather Green]: Something like that.

1:36 – Something like that, yeah. Obviously both RMTs, but I'll let you take it away and introduce yourself and tell us about yourself and what we're going to talk about today.

1:45 – [Heather Green]: Okay, well I'm Heather, and I have been a massage therapist since 2009.

1:52 – [Heather Green]: And at the time, I was a bit of an anomaly. I was 18 when I went into the program, and so my life experience was pretty much non-existent as an independent adult coming out of college.

2:10 – [Heather Green]: And so I remember just in the earlier stages of my career kind of, sure, I can do the craft, but now I have to run a business.

2:18 – [Heather Green]: And I felt in, in my time in school, we barely touched on the actual running of the business.

2:26 – [Heather Green]: And so, you know, I like to try and make life as easy as possible for myself. I like to have stressors kind of reduced or whatever.

2:34 – [Heather Green]: And so I just started to slowly learn over time how to organize myself financially better, and be on the ball, and make sure that I didn't, you know, tumble into a bunch of debt or, you know, all that kind of stuff.

2:48 – [Heather Green]: And so a couple of years back, I decided with everything I've learned now, I could maybe start sharing that with my peers and trying to make it as accessible as possible.

3:00 – [Heather Green]: Anyone can benefit from it, even if they've been practicing for a long time. But in particular, I had that 21-year-old Heather in my head going, "What the human hell is this?"

3:12 – [Heather Green]: So, knowing people are coming out of school, they got a bunch of student loan debt, they're overwhelmed, they've got startup costs, I wanted to keep it as accessible and welcoming as possible.

3:24 – [Heather Green]: So, I've created a course, and I've created a couple of tools that people can choose between to keep themselves on track and get their business started on really solid footing, financially.

3:38 – Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, cuz I mean, there's certain things that I usually hate talking about, and I know that hate is a strong word, but I hate...

3:47 – [Heather Green]: Yes.

3:48 – I hate taxes.

3:49 – [Heather Green]: Yeah. No, it's not—it's not my favorite, but I've learned a lot and it makes a huge difference.

3:56 – [Heather Green]: Like, I don't go into tax season stressing out and dreading the email from my accountant to find out how much more I need to come up with.

4:04 – [Heather Green]: And it makes—it makes a huge, huge difference to just your quality of life. So, I kind of—I want more people to have that. You know?

4:16 – Awesome. It's amazing because we all got into this career because we wanted to help people, so now you find a new way to be able to help people, which is...

4:22 – [Heather Green]: Yeah.

4:23 – Yeah.

Course & Financial Tools Overview

4:25 – So, explain to me then, what does your course do for—for others that want to take it? I know that you've got like two tiers of how you're setting things up, but...

4:36 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, sort of. It's constantly evolving because I'm very much in the early stages of forming this little community that I'm starting to build.

4:43 – [Heather Green]: But the course, it's called the Financial Freedom Course, and it is a one-time evergreen purchase. There's a library of lessons.

4:54 – [Heather Green]: We do level the playing field. We do cover some basic things like budgeting and credit card hygiene and different things like that.

5:03 – [Heather Green]: But we also get into talking about business expenses—things we can and can't write off, tracking them.

5:10 – [Heather Green]: Like a lot of RMTs want to do their own bookkeeping. They want to save that overhead cost of hiring a bookkeeper.

5:15 – [Heather Green]: So what can we write off? How much of it can we write off, and what details do we need to capture? Right? So we talk about that.

5:23 – [Heather Green]: We get into GST—the quick method versus the regular method. If you're with one and you want to switch to the other, I've got a link to the form you fill out to do that.

5:32 – [Heather Green]: We talk about the benefits of—like pros and cons of both, the calculations each method goes through.

5:39 – [Heather Green]: We go through the form—the remittance form—which always looks so much more intimidating than it actually needs to be.

5:44 – [Heather Green]: So we go step-by-step: if you're using the quick method, this is what this line's for; if you're using the regular method, this is what this line's for.

5:51 – [Heather Green]: We talk about income taxes—the basics of how they're calculated. I'm not getting into every tax law, obviously. We're not talking about child support and other—we're kind of going, "Okay, here's your revenue, here's what happens to it, here's how CPP gets calculated, here's blah blah blah," so that people are not underestimating what they should set aside.

6:11 – [Heather Green]: And they're not also completely shocked when they hear from their accountant at the end of tax season.

6:17 – [Heather Green]: We talk about tax brackets because there's a lot of misconceptions around that. We talk about tax credits.

6:23 – [Heather Green]: We get into all sorts of stuff, and it's going to continue to grow. I've already got other lessons in mind that I want to add.

6:28 – [Heather Green]: Once you've purchased it, you will just have access to those as they get added. And so that's kind of an evergreen thing, the course. It's currently $80 for the course.

6:38 – Okay. Yeah, and we should just clarify a couple of things because we have people from all over the world that listen.

6:44 – [Heather Green]: Oh yes, we're in British Columbia.

6:46 – GST here is called Goods and Services Tax, and it's even applied to all of our massage treatments.

6:51 – [Heather Green]: Yes.

6:51 – So what happens is, is if you charge a certain amount of GST, but you only spend a certain amount of GST, then you can end up getting a rebate on your GST every quarter or at the end of the year.

7:00 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, you remit less than just giving them everything you collected. Yeah.

7:04 – So for people that are in other parts of the world, they may have a tax similar to that in their system, but just so we understand what we're talking about as we're going through.

7:13 – [Heather Green]: Yeah. And as far as across Canada goes, like in the course, I'm talking about BC numbers, but for the most part, it's the same.

7:25 – [Heather Green]: Quick method is interesting. Some provinces I think don't do it, other provinces do it, but they have different remittance rates, and some, yeah, some of them, there's a little bit of difference.

7:34 – [Heather Green]: But really, anyone could get a really good idea of how to get going with the course in Canada, because we're looking at Canada's system. But I am in BC, so it's a little more specifically BC, yeah.

7:46 – When you talk about the quick method, what exactly is the quick method?

7:50 – [Heather Green]: Quick method is a—basically the government said, "Hey, some businesses really do not have much overhead. So, we are going to decide on a percentage of the GST that you collect that you are going to give us each quarter."

8:08 – [Heather Green]: "We're going to pretend you had enough business expenses to only send us that much of the GST that you collected."

8:15 – [Heather Green]: Whereas the regular method, you're literally going every dollar of GST that I collected, minus every dollar of GST that I paid on business expenses, and that is whatever the difference is, that is what you would remit.

8:26 – [Heather Green]: So for me as a clinic owner, technically, I do have a little more overhead. I could use the regular method, it's about the same.

8:33 – [Heather Green]: But back in the day when I just paid my rent and occasionally bought some oil, quick method saved me some money because I didn't have much overhead to counter, you know, all that stuff. So.

8:48 – Yeah. And with your practice, I know you're a clinic owner, but you have other people renting space from you there as well?

8:54 – [Heather Green]: Mhm, mhm.

8:55 – And so does that—your system play into like from all the way from like a clinic owner that's got big overhead down to an RMT who's just renting a spot and doesn't have much?

9:05 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

9:08 – Okay. Cool. So, what are some of the tools that you made up? I know you talked a bit about like spreadsheets and stuff like that.

9:13 – [Heather Green]: So there's two spreadsheets to choose between. The first one is called the Tax Tracker.

9:20 – [Heather Green]: It's a smaller spreadsheet. It's $20. You get a new one each year—you pay $20 each year.

9:26 – [Heather Green]: It is focused on you getting your bookkeeping done and knowing what to set aside for tax prep every month.

9:35 – [Heather Green]: The idea is to be proactive: get those expenses logged, let it know what your revenue was for the month—which might include rental income from associates, or sales from online courses if you're like us—and it will give you an estimate of, "Hey, set this aside, you'll be well prepared."

9:53 – [Heather Green]: And that way each month you're just putting a little away, rather than every quarter trying to play catch up and come up with that amount you need for your quarterly installment. All that.

10:02 – [Heather Green]: So yeah, Tax Tracker, $20. You're entering your business expenses, your income, it's telling you what you should set aside.

10:08 – [Heather Green]: It is automatically going to create a summary of your bookkeeping according to expense category for the year, so bookkeeping's ready to give to your accountant.

10:19 – [Heather Green]: The Financial Freedom Blueprint, which I sometimes just call the Blueprint, is the bigger spreadsheet. It's $80 a year.

10:26 – [Heather Green]: It does everything I just talked about, but it also allows you to plan.

10:33 – [Heather Green]: So every month you'll go, "Okay, this is the money in my business checking account. I'm going to go through this budgeting table."

10:39 – [Heather Green]: It's going to prompt you the whole way through: these are your bills, these are your whatever.

10:43 – [Heather Green]: You're going to assign dollars to all of your bills, your savings goals, you'll have an idea of what's left over to move into your personal world.

10:48 – [Heather Green]: You'll go through all your bills, your savings goals, whatever, you'll have an idea of what's left, what you can afford to spend on whatever you want for the month.

10:56 – [Heather Green]: And then from there, you just have to make sure that you don't overspend and go, you know, like...

11:02 – [Heather Green]: So that's why also in the bigger spreadsheet, there is a personal spending tracker.

11:07 – [Heather Green]: So it will remind you, "This is the budget you gave yourself for groceries, gas, clothes, entertainment, pet food, whatever. This is what you spent so far. This is what you have left until the next time you sit down to make a plan." So it just kind of keeps you aware in real time. Yeah.

11:22 – And is it kind of like a daily reminder or a weekly reminder to sit down and enter those things in and stay on top of it?

11:30 – [Heather Green]: That's kind of on the user. Personally, I sit down once or twice a week. It takes me like 5 to 10 minutes, it's not a big deal.

11:38 – [Heather Green]: It's going to depend on how much spending you do. The more—the more spending you do, the more—more things you're going to have to enter.

11:43 – [Heather Green]: But it really doesn't take long, especially once you're—you're familiar with it.

11:48 – [Heather Green]: But yeah, most of the month, all I'm doing—because—because I use the Blueprint, I don't use the Tax Tracker, I use the big system—most of the month I'm sitting down once or twice a week to plug in my personal spending and any personal bills that got paid that I set money aside for.

12:02 – [Heather Green]: And then one day at the very end of the month, I sit down and I make sure everything's there, fill out my business expense tracker, plunk in my income, get my tax prep suggestion, and then I go to the next page and I do the plan for the next month.

12:17 – [Heather Green]: So when I wake up on the first of the month, every month, the previous month's bookkeeping is totally done.

12:24 – [Heather Green]: All the money I need where I need it to be in my bank accounts for different automatic payments and things that are going to happen for the next 30 days is already where it needs to be.

12:33 – [Heather Green]: I already know exactly how much I can afford to live off of this month when it comes to my day-to-day spending.

12:38 – [Heather Green]: All I need to do is carry on with my life and sit down once or twice a week and plunk in what I spent my money on that week.

12:46 – [Heather Green]: So, it's—it's really nice because there's kind of this automatic flow of how you're going to move through the spreadsheet each month.

12:52 – [Heather Green]: And there's lots of ways—like I have a couple hacks—for like even the business expense tracker, entering your business expenses, I've got a hack where you can have most of the year pre-filled in, and you just have to kind of confirm the date it actually went through, what you actually paid.

13:06 – [Heather Green]: And the only things you have to sit down and enter all the information about is like the random one-off purchase you made that month, like when you bought more oil. So it really speeds up the process.

13:16 – [Heather Green]: For the amount of information I get out of it, and control and awareness I get, and preparedness, and reduced stress, I do not spend a lot of time.

13:28 – [Heather Green]: I spend more time working on next year's version of the spreadsheet and marketing it than I actually spend on my own finances in the spreadsheet! So, you all get the benefit of just using it, I'm... yeah.

Managing Receipts & Digital Organization

13:46 – Okay, and I'm curious, does it go across like a Google Doc spreadsheet or an Excel spreadsheet, or...? Okay, so it would work with either.

13:53 – [Heather Green]: So it's—it's delivered as a Google Sheets link, so you would need to be able to log into Google to access it. You can continue to use it as a Google Sheets document.

14:03 – [Heather Green]: Or if you do have a relatively recent version of Excel on your computer, you can download it to Excel and use it like on your physical computer. So, just depending on your preference.

14:15 – [Heather Green]: But I personally like the Google Sheets. I have it bookmarked on my phone, so I can pop into it whenever.

14:22 – [Heather Green]: I've got—I set money aside for like splurge money for myself, and if there's something I really want to do, I can go and see how much money do I have in that splurge?

14:29 – [Heather Green]: How much money do I have tucked away for splurges? And so I can be at the store and look and go, "Oh, yeah, I've got the money. I can buy that. I'll put it on my credit card to get the points, but I can go home and I can pay it off in full right away."

14:39 – [Heather Green]: So, I personally like it as a Google Sheet, but to each their own.

14:43 – That's how I would use it, because I think I have everything in a Google Sheet.

14:47 – [Heather Green]: Mhm, mhm. Yeah.

14:48 – Have you figured out a way—we didn't really talk about this, but this is something that drives me bananas—is being able to save receipts?

14:55 – Like just say I'm going to teach a course in Vancouver and I got to take BC Ferries, to just take receipts and...

15:00 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, I'm a tactile girl. I like—I like paper. I am working up the nerve to go digital eventually.

15:06 – [Heather Green]: I'm going to be looking into apps where you can take a picture of a receipt and stuff, but yeah, it's just—you got to just stick the receipt in a specific spot of your wallet and set it aside.

15:19 – [Heather Green]: I do share in the course how I organize my papers for—for ease of my—just going back and looking at things if I need to find something, or if, God forbid, anyone were ever audited.

15:32 – [Heather Green]: To be like, "Here's this shoe box of papers, and I—I hope everything's still in here! And oh, you want this? Okay, let me..."

15:40 – [Heather Green]: I can go, "Okay, that was in January. I'm going to go to the January part of my binder," and I, you know, like, you know where everything is. So I do share how I organize that.

15:49 – [Heather Green]: As I figure out digital first-hand, I will share more in the course. That'll be something that comes down the road.

15:53 – I know there is a way to do it in Google Sheets, but I haven't mastered it yet.

15:57 – [Heather Green]: I think what I've heard of people doing is basically they take a picture or download the PDF if it's a PDF receipt, and they just kind of put it into a folder on a Google Drive.

16:08 – [Heather Green]: Right? But then you still have the tedious task of, "Okay, put them all in a January folder, and now you've got all these documents that just have these random letters and words."

16:17 – [Heather Green]: Probably should open them and go, "Okay, Walmart Jan 1," or, you know, like there's still some of that tedious admin stuff that you wind up doing that way, if you want it to be really organized and super easy to reference.

16:30 – [Heather Green]: Which, I prefer to put the time in ahead of time, because I know that if I am super stressed out and need to find something, I'm going to be flustered and all over the place, and I need it as clear as possible in the moment! So, yeah.

16:44 – Yeah. I'm curious, have you looked into like how to implement AI into this at all?

AI vs. Manual Entry & Bookkeeping

16:51 – [Heather Green]: Not really. I have some hesitations with AI. It's still pretty new. It can make mistakes.

16:58 – [Heather Green]: I know that a lot of people too are really wary about linking their banking up to, you know, things for security purposes.

17:08 – [Heather Green]: So, I personally like to stick to at least a certain amount of manual entry, but I'm making it less and less and less that's required for the spreadsheet to have the information it needs to do all the really tedious stuff—and the math and the sorting and the compiling.

17:21 – [Heather Green]: If you can sit down and enter in that on the first, my hydro bill was paid and that's a utility and I paid this much and these were the sales taxes applied, the spreadsheet's going to do the rest.

17:33 – [Heather Green]: So, it's not a lot of entry. Even if you used AI to pull from your banking and have the spreadsheet fill itself out, "These were the transactions," you still have to at the end of the month look at your bank statements and look at what the AI did, and compare each item and make sure that it is correct, or it did apply the correct sales taxes, or it did categorize it appropriately.

17:58 – [Heather Green]: So, I know that for me with my brain, if something looks like it's already done, I don't want to go back and do it again.

18:03 – Yeah.

18:04 – [Heather Green]: Right? I would rather just do it myself the one time and know that it's right, and not have to go back and look at it over again, personally.

18:13 – [Heather Green]: So, yeah, I haven't really looked too much into AI in that regard, but I have done my best—I have learned a lot about Excel and formulas. Holy crap.

18:23 – Oh yeah.

18:24 – [Heather Green]: It is kind of amazing. I used to hate it. I thought it was ugly, all these little boxes on the screen and... it's kind of cool.

18:31 – [Heather Green]: I'm over here nerding out! But yeah, I've learned a lot about formulas to make this thing...

18:38 – [Heather Green]: For example, you could say you paid X number of dollars for lotion, and you were charged GST and PST. The spreadsheet is going to go, "Okay, so this was the cost of the lotion, this was the GST you paid, and this was the PST you paid." You don't have to do that yourself.

18:52 – That's awesome.

18:53 – [Heather Green]: Which is really nice, right? So, yeah, I'm trying to make things as automatic as possible without literally using AI and avoiding...

19:04 – [Heather Green]: The other thing I hear is nightmares—people who do use, like, there are systems like QuickBooks, and they will do that. They will watch your banking for you.

19:12 – [Heather Green]: But again, you have to go through and double-check its work. And if you catch a mistake, sometimes it's hard to identify where the mistake happened and then trying to correct the mistake that the AI did.

19:20 – [Heather Green]: And from what I've heard, that winds up being more time-consuming and more frustrating than if they had just typed those five key details in themselves in the first place.

19:30 – [Heather Green]: So, you know, you pick your battles, right?

19:32 – For sure. For sure. I'm always just looking for ease of use, because I think... I know, because I just email everything. Every receipt I get, I just forward it to them.

19:40 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, yeah.

Working with Accountants & Financial Advisors

19:41 – So, to go with that, how do we segue using your platform to be able to hand things off to your accountant?

19:50 – You need lots—I would think lots of feedback from your accountant on what they want to see, as well as a financial planner, and like to have things working as an ecosystem together.

19:59 – [Heather Green]: Yeah. So for instance, like if we just think about the big spreadsheet where you can plan for your money, let's talk about working with a financial advisor first.

20:07 – [Heather Green]: You could go and meet with a financial advisor and say, "Okay, here's my situation, here are my goals, here are my numbers. Where should I be investing? How much should I be investing?"

20:17 – [Heather Green]: And they could help you figure that out. "Put this in a First Home, put this in a Tax-Free Savings, put this in a whatever."

20:23 – [Heather Green]: You could then come home, open your Financial Freedom Blueprint spreadsheet, go to the setup page. There's a section for other savings, and you can give it a name, and you can give it the amount.

20:34 – [Heather Green]: And so you can tell the spreadsheet, "Okay, my advisor and I decided I'm going to put—I'm going to have an RRSP," so you name it, "and this is how much I'm going to put each month."

20:42 – [Heather Green]: And you do that for the plans you made with your advisor. Now every month you're using your budget, those things are going to show up on the budget as line items to remind you, "Oh yeah, I need to set money aside for these things."

20:53 – [Heather Green]: So you can still use a professional to make the big decisions for really, really tailored things, but then you use the spreadsheet to remind you and keep you accountable to it and plan for it.

21:05 – [Heather Green]: As far as your accountant goes, I'm constantly going to be improving the spreadsheet.

21:10 – [Heather Green]: I already have it so that, you know, the summary page for the year will show the category, the grand total spent, the expense, the GST, the PST all broken down.

21:20 – [Heather Green]: I just made a tutorial yesterday that I'm going to share with people closer to the end of the year when they actually need to send things to their accountant, where it's like, "Okay, you've got this summary page, here's how you can take that one page and email it to your accountant."

21:33 – Beautiful.

21:34 – [Heather Green]: So that's not—that's not too hard. You could also literally print it, but they might appreciate it being in a spreadsheet form, because then they'll have their own formulas that maybe they want to add things together really easily for themselves.

21:44 – [Heather Green]: So, yeah. So there is a way to take like just that one summary page of the whole year and send it to your accountant. So, yeah.

21:52 – So do you have yours set up that you do like a quarterly submission to your accountant, or is it just like a year-end?

21:58 – [Heather Green]: Basically a year-end.

22:00 – Okay.

22:00 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, for me. Yeah, I've always just kind of taken my summary and then any other receipts they might need, because there's some things they want to see the receipts for, right?

22:11 – [Heather Green]: Or stuff from my personal world that doesn't have to do with my business, like medical expenses receipts.

22:16 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, and I just give those to her at the end of the year. Well, March, or whatever.

22:21 – [Heather Green]: And yeah, and then if she has questions, it's super easy for me to look back in my spreadsheet and go, "Oh yeah, in February that expense was for this thing," because it's right there. So, yeah.

ADHD, Task Initiation, & Systems

22:34 – Awesome. So, to get to the next thing that we had a little chat about, is in 2022 I got diagnosed with ADHD, and then all of a sudden I was like, "Oh, that makes so much more sense why I do this, X, Y, Z stuff."

22:50 – And when we were chatting back and forth, I think you said you've got a recent diagnosis as well.

22:54 – [Heather Green]: I recently was diagnosed!

22:56 – And did it do the same thing for you where you're like, "Oh, this makes sense!"

22:58 – [Heather Green]: Yeah! Yeah!

23:01 – So, for those of us with the ADHD brain, where we have difficulty remembering things or task initiation, and maybe procrastinating more than what we believe we should be, do you have any tools or anything worked into this to assist with that, or do you have some tips?

23:17 – [Heather Green]: Well, yeah, I do have some tips, and I share them in the tutorials for the spreadsheets.

23:22 – [Heather Green]: But like I said, like what I love about my big one, my big system, is after you've sat down on like Day 1 in the spreadsheet and filled in the setup page, where you're going to list all the bills you pay every month and what they typically cost you, all your savings goals and what you hope to put towards them each month, all your debts and the minimums or whatever, what you plan to put towards them each month...

23:44 – [Heather Green]: Once that setup page is filled in, every month's budget knows your bills, knows your savings goals, knows everything, and it's going to put the number right beside it to remind you, "These are things that you need to pay, and this is how much you usually need to pay."

23:59 – [Heather Green]: And all you're going to do is you're going to start the budget by going, "This is the balance in my business checking account," and then beside each line item, there's a box, and you can go, "Yep," you're going to retype the number that it showed you.

24:08 – [Heather Green]: You go, "Yep, I'm going to put this much aside for my rent. I'm going to put..." You don't have to cross-reference, check back, go back, look over, whatever. It's all right there in front of you.

24:16 – [Heather Green]: You get to the bottom of the budget section, you know what's left over, you move it into your personal—you know, you can say, "Okay, this is what was already in my personal account, now I'm adding this."

24:23 – [Heather Green]: And you go through the same process. All your bills are going to be there, you see everything.

24:26 – [Heather Green]: So, you're reminded every step of the way of where your money needs to go and how much, and you're just kind of confirming as you go, which makes it really fast, because you're just typing numbers. You're not writing it all out every single time. You're not reinventing the wheel every single time, right?

24:41 – [Heather Green]: So, there's just things like that in the spreadsheet where it's going to remind you of things, or the next step is really obvious, so there's no decision fatigue of, "Oh crap, what comes next after this?" Right?

24:52 – [Heather Green]: So, you know, for me and my neurospicy brain, that was a game changer for me. Less looking back and forth and "Oh, crap" moments, so.

25:03 – Yeah. Do you even have... because this is something that I do, I'll set like reminders on my calendar to pop up and remind me to be like, "Hey, today's the day to do accounting," or whatever.

25:12 – [Heather Green]: So, I mean, of course, a spreadsheet can't hound you and remind you to sit down and—I mean, we all eventually have to just make ourselves sit down and do the thing!

25:25 – [Heather Green]: But once you're in it, the actual use of it, once you're familiar with it... It can be, you know, it's a big spreadsheet, it can be a little overwhelming at first, but once you're like, "Oh yeah, this goes here, that's easy," it's really not that time-consuming.

25:36 – [Heather Green]: Which makes it easier to go, "Oh yeah, I need to sit down and do that tonight. It's not going to be two hours, it's going to be like 15 minutes, it's not that big of a deal."

25:42 – [Heather Green]: But also, another thing that I'm working on—and it's tricky, because our hours are kind of all over the place—but I'm trying to organize like monthly bookkeeping hangout calls, or other community calls, where it's like, "Okay, a group of us are going to be online at the same time for like two hours."

25:57 – [Heather Green]: "I'm here, we may sometimes be chatting, someone might have a question, I can explain something. But otherwise, we might all just be hanging out, doing a little homework club, getting our bookkeeping done for the end of the month."

26:08 – [Heather Green]: So if you just want to do it all in one sitting, the bookkeeping, and you go, "Okay, Heather said that she's going to be online at 6:30 on that Thursday, I'm going to make sure that my calendar's free."

26:17 – [Heather Green]: We're all just going to be here together, being nerds at the same time!

26:22 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, I mean, the reality is when you go into business for yourself, there's some things you just have to do that, you know?

26:29 – [Heather Green]: I mean, if you think about big companies, they have accounting departments that do those tedious things, and someone else does this, and someone else does that. We are it. We have to do all of it.

26:37 – [Heather Green]: And you can put it off, but the longer you wait, the more foggy the memory is of what you bought and therefore what category it should go in, or where did that receipt go, or, "Oh, that business meeting, I can't remember what we talked about," you're supposed to make note of that on your receipts.

26:52 – [Heather Green]: And, you know, and when you leave it to tax time, like, man, that's time-consuming! It's really time-consuming. So, yeah.

Comparing the Products

27:03 – Yeah, it sounds like an awesome time saver. So, just to kind of recap, what's the big difference between the two systems you have? Because I know you have one that's basically just a spreadsheet, and then the other one's a bit more of like a full business... did I get that right?

27:17 – [Heather Green]: Well, so just this month, I finally got everything onto Thinkific.

27:23 – [Heather Green]: And the way that Thinkific's course-selling payment structure works, what I wound up doing was: now, the course, you can just buy on its own for $80, one-time purchase.

27:35 – [Heather Green]: If someone is super not into spreadsheets, but they want to understand better, they can just buy the course.

27:42 – [Heather Green]: And then if they want to put their own management strategies on paper in their own way, cool, but at least they've got some really solid information to get going with.

27:49 – [Heather Green]: Then now that I'm on Thinkific, the two spreadsheets, they're actually set up as subscriptions now.

27:54 – [Heather Green]: So you would subscribe to the $20 Tax Tracker, or the $80 Financial Freedom Blueprint.

28:00 – [Heather Green]: The Tax Tracker is just, you could just do it once a month: sit down once a month and enter all your business expenses, your revenue, get your tax prep suggestion.

28:08 – [Heather Green]: The Financial Freedom Blueprint is where you're going to sit down, look at the money that came in, which is handy—we have variable incomes, that looks different every month.

28:16 – [Heather Green]: Look at the money that you have to work with, make sure everything you need to cover is going to be covered, track your spending throughout the month, and then at the end of the month, you can sit down and do your business expenses and your income and get your tax prep suggestion. So.

28:28 – [Heather Green]: Originally, the Tax Tracker was just sold on its own and it came with a simple tutorial with not a lot of extra context behind it. It was just, "Fill these in, this is what it's going to tell you, do that."

28:38 – [Heather Green]: The bigger spreadsheet was bundled with the course, because all the elements in the spreadsheet you learn about in the course, and it really gives more context behind why I put it together the way that I did.

28:50 – [Heather Green]: But now they're—they're all separate. So, the course I would still highly recommend to people that just want the smaller spreadsheet, too.

28:57 – I'd probably start with something like that.

28:58 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, like even though you're not going to be budgeting in the spreadsheet, you may want to do that in real life on paper anyway, or at least have it in the back of your mind, right?

29:08 – [Heather Green]: So, it's still really good information regardless of which spreadsheet you're going to choose to subscribe to.

29:14 – [Heather Green]: I tell people the Tax Tracker can be a really great intro.

29:17 – [Heather Green]: So maybe for the first year you use the Tax Tracker, subscribe to the Tax Tracker. You're going to get an email from Thinkific saying, "Hey, in 7 days your subscription's going to renew."

29:26 – [Heather Green]: So if at that point you're like, "You know what? That wasn't for me," you can cancel it. Or if you go, "Yeah, I liked that, I'm going to stick with the Tax Tracker," just let it bill you again in 7 days, you'll have access to the new and improved tweaked spreadsheet.

29:38 – [Heather Green]: Or if you're like, "Yeah, that was really good, I liked that, I think I'm ready to take it to the next level," cancel your Tax Tracker subscription and then go sign up for the Financial Freedom Blueprint subscription. That's kind of how it's laid out right now. Yeah.

29:50 – [Heather Green]: The whole back end of all this has been a real learning curve. We were talking about that before we got started, like, "Okay, I made this thing, but now I have to have a platform and help people find it." It's a lot! So, yeah.

Closing & Community Resources

30:08 – Very cool. There was one other thing I was going to ask you, and it slipped my mind, but I love the way that you went with that because it just sounds like it simplifies everything, and it's... this is one of those things that I am absolutely terrible with, where my accountant is always like, "Hey, you forgot to give us this thing, you forgot to give us this thing."

30:26 – [Heather Green]: Yeah.

30:26 – It sounds like it would be helpful for most of us, especially for so many of us that didn't learn anything about this in college. We learned how to help people physically and not take care of our finances.

30:37 – And so you said that you send your receipts to your accountant, are they kind of essentially doing your bookkeeping for you?

30:41 – Yeah.

30:42 – [Heather Green]: Yeah. And so would it be easier and more cost-effective for you to log it yourself, then you don't have to send them every single receipt, and they just kind of take the summaries and do your taxes?

30:50 – Yeah, it seems like it, but then the lazy side kicks in! It's like, I can just forward...

30:54 – [Heather Green]: I know! Which version of lazy do I want to be?

30:59 – It's really easy to just hit forward, and then...

31:01 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, yeah.

31:02 – Yeah. Appreciate you coming on. If people want to find you on social media or anything like that, where can they look and find you? Do you have a website?

31:10 – [Heather Green]: Yes. So this is all new evolution. I'm kind of trying to form a community.

31:16 – [Heather Green]: So I'm creating this like "Proactive Practitioner" community.

31:22 – [Heather Green]: So I'm on Instagram, and I'm on Facebook, and I'm very proud of myself: I finally figured out how to link the two so that I can post on one and share it to the other. Yay!

31:32 – [Heather Green]: So, yeah, you can find me, I think it's just "Proactive Practitioner" basically on either of those platforms.

31:38 – [Heather Green]: You'll get like little tidbits, reminders about installment dates coming up and things like that, you can follow along.

31:44 – [Heather Green]: On my web page—I have a page, it's kind of just my clinic web page, but I've got a page specifically for this Proactive Practitioner stuff.

31:51 – [Heather Green]: There's actually a bunch of freebies. So like, you could go to that website—can we put the link in the description?

31:55 – Yeah, I'll put it in the description.

31:56 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, so you could go to my web page, you can find my socials from there so you can follow along for free.

32:01 – [Heather Green]: I have some freebies, so I have a PDF called "Financial Safety for RMTs," so it's kind of just to start getting you thinking about an emergency fund.

32:10 – [Heather Green]: I just added one about getting a month ahead. If you're a month ahead on your bills, and you can just know that you have enough money in your account to cover the entire next 30 days, talk about being able to be lazy.

32:23 – [Heather Green]: You don't have to worry about what's coming out next week, it's just you know that the entire month's taken care of. So I have a freebie on that.

32:29 – [Heather Green]: You can also find the links to see the course, see the Tax Tracker, see the Financial Freedom Blueprint.

32:34 – [Heather Green]: I'm also—and this might also be interesting to you—I'm also a yoga therapist, just, you know, for funsies.

32:41 – [Heather Green]: And so I'm starting to create like little courses on like, "Hey, let's take this common stretch and let's break it down and make it accessible and find creative ways to apply graded exposure to it, and be able to meet your patients where they're at."

32:55 – [Heather Green]: Different ways to look at movement when you're assessing, different ways to approach home care with your patients.

32:59 – [Heather Green]: So I've got a couple freebies there already. They were from years ago, I made them for the general public, but I'm kind of just sharing to give you a taste. And I've got one that's actually available for purchase.

33:07 – [Heather Green]: And then I'm going to start some admin things, too. And right now the only one there is my—my first aid reference sheet that I made! Remember I sent you that?

33:16 – Yeah.

33:17 – [Heather Green]: So that's there if anybody wants like a little reference sheet in their staff room that people can read every once in a while and remember relevant details from their first aid training throughout the year.

33:28 – [Heather Green]: So that's there. So, yeah, it's just going to keep growing. There's things you can access for free, there's things you can pay for. Take what you want, leave what you don't. But, yeah, The Proactive Practitioner.

33:38 – Okay. Cool. I will put the links in the show notes and that.

33:40 – [Heather Green]: Because that's what I am!

33:41 – And I just thought of one thing is: what would you say to those folks that maybe don't live in British Columbia, and aren't worried about GST? Let's just say they're in Australia or down in the States or something. Is there still something they can be using in their practice?

33:55 – [Heather Green]: I would maybe stick more to Canada, at least right now. Right now, like I said, the course could be Canada-wide, within reason, just maybe look up a couple details when it comes to certain things within your province.

34:10 – [Heather Green]: The spreadsheets, one thing that will eventually be a tweak, an upgrade—in I'm hoping 2028—is I'm going to make it so that things can be... not changed, but you can let the spreadsheet know, "I'm in this province, and so this is the HST, or this is the GST, or this is the provincial tax rate."

34:30 – [Heather Green]: So that way other provinces could use it as well, like the auto-math that's going to happen would be accurate to their province.

34:36 – [Heather Green]: So right now, the spreadsheets: BC. The course: Canada. Eventually, the spreadsheets will be Canada, that's the goal. I'm working towards that, yeah.

34:49 – Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. You gave me some things to think about and probably going to make my accountant look at me and go, "Yeah, start doing that."

34:58 – [Heather Green]: I actually had one person use the Tax Tracker to retroactively do their bookkeeping for last year, and they just went to work with their—sat with their accountant and pulled up the spreadsheet, and their accountant was like, "Wow, that's a—that's a pretty good system." So that was a nice thing to hear!

35:16 – Nice little feather in your cap!

35:17 – [Heather Green]: Yeah, yeah!

35:19 – Awesome. Okay, well thanks again, buddy.

35:20 – [Heather Green]: Thanks!