Sensible Business Management

If I could give Julie Vale and Sensible Business Management no stars I would!

Not only was she 300% more expensive when questioned her response is to avoid the issue, to demand further explanation has lead to bully tactics and attempted legal demands. Let me explain…

At our initial meeting Julie promised a concierge level of service, it sounded great and would remove my wife from the books (as she was presently doing a great deal of prep for our other bookkeeper) for our then 4 companies.

Being a former senior accounting technician for a major firm everything Julie was saying made sense to my wife; we had one concern, cost. Julie insisted that over time she would save us time, headache and ultimately money.

We expected a slight increase, but not 300%!

Obviously I confronted Julie on this. She indicated that at first it would be more as additional setup was required, I didn’t realize by additional setup she meant redundant work re-entering data from previous months that we were billed for.

They use Quickbooks, we came from Simply, never mind that we were a substantial client they still insisted on billing us for converting the data.

Over the coming months our bills never declined, via a phone call Julie and I discussed and she couldn’t give me any real explanation, other than that emailing them the receipts (as I was instructed to do) was taking a long time to sort.

No problem I pulled this back had my assistant print, sort, and provide all receipts.

Our bills still never decreased. We met with Julie in person, again with no real explanation as to why they were so much more, just that they provided more value, were better trained, perhaps were more expensive per hour and provided a template memo summary each month (that takes just a few minutes to prepare.)

At this point we were within a month of our financial year-ends. Against my better judgment we opted to finish the fiscal years in an effort to keep our information clean. Next we were billed for “year end prep” even though the work should have been nominal, this charge was never discussed, and we’ve still never received any kind of year-end package that would have been customary of this type of service.

If that wasn’t enough during my year end review meeting with my accountant they showed me a note from Julie instructing, “not to share this information with the client and that all entries were correct.” How is it ethical or appropriate to instruct an accountant (as a bookkeeper) not to show a client their own financial information? Furthermore the entries were not correct.

When I finally received my final invoices from Julie/Sensible Business Management (SBM) I had moved to another service charging the same rate per hour and once again my monthly fees dropped significantly (to about 40% of SBM.)

Naturally I pointed this out to Julie and indicated my frustration. I never said I would not pay my final invoices but I did say I was withholding payment until such time as she would explain the continually inflated charges to my satisfaction. That was Aug 10, 2017.

I recently received a threatening demand letter from a lawyer hired by Julie Vale/SBM stating that: “requests and demands for payment have been to no avail” and “I am, hereby formally demanding payment” or a “Civil Claim” will be filed.

This appears to be Julie Vale’s response to conflict and criticism. As someone that runs multiple service-based businesses it’s my opinion that Julie Vale/SBM are questionably ethical and have no regard for the concerns of their customers.

As a consumer/customer we each get to evaluate and decide the value and measure of the service we’re provided, we don’t always get positive feedback in my businesses but we don’t treat our customers this way.

As a consumer I have a right to share my opinion and this review is just that and it should not be interpreted any other way. Whether you choose to use Julie Vale/SBM is up to you, but I certainly don’t recommend them.