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Who we serve

Four kinds of books, four different hard problems.

“Small business bookkeeping” is four or five different jobs wearing one name. A contractor’s hard problem and a Shopify seller’s hard problem share almost nothing except the software.

Here is what actually differs, and what we do about each.

Owner-run businesses

1–50 staff, one entity

Service businesses, retail, professional practices, clinics, studios. Usually one legal entity, a handful of accounts, and a chart of accounts inherited from whatever template the software offered on day one.

The books are often technically fine and practically useless — they will survive a tax filing and tell you nothing about how the business works.

What usually goes wrong

The template chart of accounts

  • Revenue is one line, so you cannot see which service earns
  • Owner draws sit inside payroll expense, overstating labor cost
  • Sales tax collected is booked as revenue, so profit looks better than it is
  • Every card charge lands in one “General expense” bucket

What we do about it

A chart built around your revenue

  • Revenue split by the lines you actually sell and price
  • Direct cost separated from overhead so gross margin is real
  • Owner compensation and draws separated and labelled
  • Sales tax tracked as the liability it is, reconciled monthly

Trades & contractors

Job costing that survives a bad month

Construction, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, specialty subs. High material spend, subcontractors, progress billing, and a bid process that only improves if last year’s jobs were costed honestly.

If labor, materials and subs are not landing against the job, your margin is a story you tell yourself.

What usually goes wrong

Costs that never reach the job

  • Material runs coded to a general supplies account, never to the job
  • Subcontractor payments untracked until 1099 season, then rebuilt from memory
  • Deposits and progress billings booked as revenue before the work is done
  • Retainage invisible, so receivables look healthier than they are
  • Equipment expensed instead of capitalized and depreciated

What we do about it

Cost coded where the work happened

  • Labor, materials and subs coded by job and, where useful, by phase
  • Customer deposits held as a liability until earned
  • Retainage tracked separately from ordinary receivables
  • 1099 contractor records kept current all year, not rebuilt in January
  • Equipment on a fixed-asset schedule with depreciation run monthly

E-commerce & digital

Settlements, not deposits

Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, Stripe, subscription and SaaS revenue, agencies on retainer. The defining problem is that the money that hits your bank is not your revenue.

A payout is gross sales minus platform fees, minus refunds, minus chargebacks, minus reserves, plus whatever timing offset the platform applied. Book it as one number and you understate sales, hide your cost of selling, and lose any ability to price properly.

What usually goes wrong

The deposit booked as revenue

  • Net payouts recorded as sales, so gross revenue and fees both disappear
  • Refunds and chargebacks never separated from sales
  • Inventory sitting on the balance sheet at a number nobody has verified
  • COGS booked at purchase instead of at sale, so monthly margin swings wildly
  • Multi-channel totals that agree with no single platform report

What we do about it

Settlements broken to their parts

  • Each payout decomposed to gross sales, platform fees, refunds and reserves
  • Sales reconciled per channel against the platform’s own settlement report
  • Inventory and COGS moving on sale, so margin is readable month to month
  • Merchant reserves tracked as an asset, not written off silently
  • Deferred revenue handled properly for subscriptions and prepaid retainers

Solo professionals & real estate

Low volume, high entanglement

Consultants, agents, brokers, therapists, coaches, freelancers, and owners holding a few rental properties. Transaction counts are small. The mess is structural.

Almost always the same root cause: one card, two lives.

What usually goes wrong

Business and personal sharing a wallet

  • Personal spending scattered through business expense accounts
  • Home office, mileage and phone claimed on guesswork with no support
  • Rental income and expenses pooled, so no property’s real return is visible
  • Quarterly estimates guessed from the bank balance
  • Nothing reconciled until the CPA asks in March

What we do about it

Clean lines and a real quarterly number

  • Personal activity separated and posted to owner equity, not expense
  • Per-property or per-client tracking so you can see what is actually earning
  • Support retained for the deductions your preparer will need to defend
  • Reconciled quarterly figures your preparer can estimate from
  • A year-end package that arrives before the deadline, not during it

If you are none of these

Say so, and we will tell you straight.

These four cover most of what we do, not all of it. If your business does not fit, the books review is still the right first step — and if we are the wrong firm for you, that is what the findings will say.

  • Multi-entity

    More than one company

    Holding structures, related-party rent, shared payroll and inter-company transfers. Workable, but it changes the scope and the price — so it gets priced as what it is.

  • Nonprofit

    Fund and grant accounting

    Restricted funds and grant reporting are a genuinely different discipline. We will tell you honestly whether your situation is inside our scope before quoting.

  • Regulated

    Trust or client-funds accounts

    Law firms, agencies and brokers holding client money have obligations that go beyond bookkeeping. We work alongside your compliance requirements rather than around them.

Books review No obligation · findings in writing

Tell us which one you are. We will tell you what your books need.

Request a books review Read the full scope

The books review looks at your actual file and reports what is reconciled, what is not, and what a clean month would cost. You keep the findings whether or not you hire us.