Bookkeeping

For many small businesses, entering the financial data into your accounting program is the chore no one wants to do. We, on the other hand, love to do it! We also care about getting it right. Do you often find that you are asking yourself “Is that an expense or COGS,” or “How do I record this asset that I just purchased,” or “How do I handle a trade of services where the customer is also the vendor?” We can help you with all those questions and so many more. Whether you choose to continue to enter the transactions yourself, to hire an employee to do it for you, or hire us to do it all, we are ready to help you get it right and stop spending your time on things that frankly we can do better, faster, and more cost-effectively.

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Whether you choose Windows or Macintosh, and desktop software from QuickBooks, Sage, AccountEdge, or online offerings from Xero, Wave, QuickBooks Online, or one of many others, we are ready to help you.

We have extensive knowledge and experience with both Windows and Macintosh computers. They can both work very well in a small-business environment, including a mixture of both. Whichever you choose to have in your business, we can handle it.

We are Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors, Certified QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions ProAdvisors, and Certified QuickBooks Online ProAdvisors. There is no QuickBooks for Mac ProAdvisor certification, but if there were, we would have it! We are also Certified Partners for Xero and are Wave partners. We are also well-versed in many other offerings and can help you whatever program you have chosen to use. As an example, a client recently asked us to set up his company on Easy Books, a program available for the iPad and Mac. We quickly got up to speed and set it up for him (see Rex’s review in the testimonials.)

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Are you starting a new company? It is so important to set up the financial books correctly from the beginning. The accounting software usually has templates for common types of businesses, but the programs do little to tell you how to use them properly. We have experience in a variety of business sectors to help you get it set up right.

Setting your company up right from the start is key to getting the information you need to run it. How do you want your profit and expense reports broken down to help you know how the business is doing and what needs to be changed? Will there be inventory and how should it be set up to avoid future problems? How does the business structure (e.g. LLC vs. C-Corp) change the setup? How are capital purchases like equipment and start-up costs handled? How are loans and owner contributions entered? What expenses go under COGS and which under overhead expenses? How should I word and group income and expense account names to make tax preparation clear and easier (and thus less costly and more accurate). What are items and how do I set them up so that everything works right, especially in QuickBooks?

These are but a few of the questions that need to be addressed and understood in order to set up your company properly. Some programs do it better than others, but none do it perfectly, largely because there is a certain amount of knowledge needed in order to understand the questions and how to answer them and what the implications of those answers are. Leave it to the experts! No matter what software you have chosen, we can make it work better for you and your company from the outset.

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Do you have a financial file that is a mess, with hundreds of unused accounts, items, jobs, customers, or vendors, many of them duplicates? Are there transactions that you know aren’t entered correctly, but you don’t know how to fix them? We can help!

To you, this is an overwhelming problem that keeps you up at night. To us it is an interesting and refreshing new challenge that we are aching to fix! Really! We know all the common mistakes and how to find the problems, and we have all the special tools to get the job done right.

Some of the common ones we see often are:
•An undeposited funds account that keeps getting larger and larger, even though you are entering all the deposits regularly.
•An accounts payable or accounts receivable report that is a mile long, even though for most customers or vendors, no money is owed.
•Loan balances on the books that are way off from what the lender says you owe.
•Equity accounts that don’t match what owners or shareholders have contributed to the company.
•Asset and depreciation values that don’t match what they should be.
•Balances on the books in old accounts or clearing accounts that you know should be zero.
•Customers who are also vendors and you have large amounts showing owed to them and also owed to you from them.
•Bank accounts that won’t balance.

Does any of that sound familiar? We want to help!

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At tax time, do you get a hundred questions from the tax preparer because things aren’t clear on the books? Ever wonder how much that is costing you, both in their time and also in incorrect tax filings for the things they don’t find? We can help make sure everything goes where it should.

A survey of accountants and tax preparers showed that they estimate spending 40% of their time correcting errors and assembling missing information in what is send to them by their clients. Wow! Leaving that to the most expensive person of all those dealing with your financial information costs us all a lot of money. It also undoubtedly leads to a lot of missed information and incorrect tax returns. Not to mention a lot of torn out hair!

We don’t do taxes and we don’t want to. But we do love to work with CPAs and tax preparers to make sure that they get the information on your company in the format they want it, both well-organized and reflecting accurately the business done during the year, providing all the information necessary to prepare the tax returns. We get profuse thanks from both clients and those CPAs and tax preparers for making tax time so much less painful. Nobody likes taxes, so why make it worse by having to deal with them more and for longer than necessary each year?