How I’m Prepping My Firm for 2026
It’s Wednesday, so I would normally be off from accounting firm work today, but I shifted my week a little due to the holiday. My parents were in town until yesterday, so I took most of Monday off to hang with them.
Today, I’ve blocked the whole day (after writing this and yoga, of course) for my 2026 planning session.
Each year, I take a day or two to ignore my emails, and focus just on my firm and what direction I want it to go in the new year. Sometimes it works out the way I plan, but oftentimes it doesn’t.
Either way, it feels good to walk into January with direction and some solid, actionable goals.
Interestingly, each year, I also have to fight the mindset to grow for growth’s sake. Or grow at a speed than is more that actually necessary for our family’s financial need.
To ground myself yesterday, I looked through our family’s long-term budget (there’s a detailed version that goes out 2 years and a high-level version that goes out 60 years…I’m not joking). Today I’ll probably start my planning with flipping through Ecclesiastes to ground myself in the cynicism of chasing wealth from the richest guy of his time. (If you’re not normally into 3,000 year old texts, it’s still an interesting read.)
And then I’ll kick off my thought process with this question:
What are my life (non-work related) priorities in 2026?
Once I have a solid answer to that question (maybe teaching our teenager to drive, continuing to lean into my health, going on dates with my husband, etc), I’ll build my business(es) direction around that.
It’s funny that after so many years, I still need to ground myself in a reminder of what’s priority in my life. Shouldn’t this come naturally by now?
Or maybe I need the constant reminder to combat the constant noise of “lead gen” DMs on LinkedIn or “how to grow” posts or “reaching 7-figures” podcast episodes.
For your sake, I hope you don’t need the reminder of what’s priority too, but if you do, no judgement here. I invite you to ask yourself the same question:
What are my life (non-work related) priorities in 2026?
Here are some other (more tactical) things I’ll cover in my planning session:
Review all my transactions from the past 12 months to see if I’m paying for anything I can cut or downgrade
Review my QBO invoice for the clients I pay for to see if I can downgrade anyone without losing features we use
Start to finalize my firm’s financial budget for 2026 (rev, exp, owner salary/distr); I’ll lock this into Fathom before Jan 1
Map out my Q1 goals based on the direction I come up with during planning
If business planning is part of your December, I wish you all the clarity. If you’re in Aligned, be sure to grab the planning guide we have in the Templates space.
Happy Planning,
Erica
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