What good books are for
Most owners think of bookkeeping as something that has to be done for the tax return. It is, but that is the least of it. Current, reconciled books tell you whether last month made money, which customers owe you, whether you can afford the second truck, and what the bank will say when you ask for the line of credit. They are also the difference between a fifteen-minute tax return and a three-week reconstruction, and between a routine IRS inquiry and a painful one. Every resolution case we have ever handled for a business started with books that were not being kept.
We keep books for small businesses across North Carolina, from a single-owner cleaning company to a multi-location restaurant group, on the accounting platform that fits your business. Transactions are categorized, bank and credit-card accounts are reconciled every month, and you receive a profit-and-loss statement and balance sheet with a short note, in English or Spanish, about what changed and why. When something in the numbers looks wrong, you hear about it before it becomes a problem.
Because the same firm prepares your tax return and runs your payroll, the books are built for those purposes from the start. Owner draws are tracked, payroll is posted correctly, sales tax is separated, and the year-end close is a formality rather than a project.
- Monthly reconciliation of every account. Bank, credit card, loan and merchant accounts tied to the statements.
- Financial statements with a note. Profit and loss, balance sheet, and what they mean this month.
- Accounts receivable and payable. Who owes you, whom you owe, and when.
- Sales tax tracked and filed. North Carolina sales and use tax handled on schedule.
- Catch-up and clean-up. Months or years reconstructed from statements, quoted as a fixed project.
- Built for the tax return. Year-end close is already done when tax season starts.
How monthly bookkeeping works
Setup
We connect your bank and card accounts, set up a chart of accounts that fits your industry, and bring the books current to the start of the engagement. If there is a backlog, that is a catch-up project quoted separately first.
Monthly cycle
Transactions are categorized as they come in. Once the month closes and statements are available, every account is reconciled, questions about unusual items go to you in a short message, and the financial statements are delivered within a set number of business days.
Quarterly and year-end
Each quarter we look at the trend with you and check estimated tax payments. At year-end the books are closed, fixed assets and depreciation are updated, and the tax return is prepared from the same file, by the same team.
Why owners hand us the books
You get your evenings back
The owner should be running the business, not categorizing receipts at 10 p.m.
Numbers you can act on
A P&L on the 10th of the month, not in April.
One firm, whole picture
Books, payroll and taxes from the same people, so nothing falls between vendors.
In Spanish or English
The monthly note and every question about a transaction, in your language.
Bookkeeping questions
It depends on transaction volume, the number of accounts and whether payroll and sales tax are included. Small businesses typically start in the low hundreds per month. We quote a fixed monthly fee after looking at a recent bank statement, and combined bookkeeping-plus-tax engagements are priced together.
With a catch-up project. We request the bank and card statements for the period, rebuild the books month by month, reconcile them and produce financials for each year. It is quoted as a fixed fee so you know the total, and the monthly service begins once you are current.
We work in the mainstream cloud accounting platforms and will recommend one based on your industry, your bank and whether you need invoicing or inventory. If you already have a file, we usually keep it and clean it up rather than starting over.
Yes, but not in a shoebox. A photo of the receipt attached to the transaction in the accounting system is what an auditor wants to see. We set up a simple way to capture them from your phone.
Yes. Accounts receivable and accounts payable management can be added to the monthly engagement: sending invoices, tracking what is owed, scheduling vendor payments for your approval and reporting cash position weekly.
We do that too, as a fixed-fee project before the return. Most clients who start there move to monthly service the following year, because the cost of the clean-up is usually close to what the monthly service would have been, without the benefit of seeing the numbers during the year.