What we do

Bookkeeping runs in two phases. Cleanup first, then ongoing bookkeeping every month. Here's how we run both.

Tire kicking. No charge

Twenty minutes on the phone. You kick the tires and decide whether we're worth hiring.

What we ask about:

• What broke, and when it broke.
• Who has been doing the books and what happened to them.
• What your CPA has been asking you for.
• How many bank accounts, credit cards, and loans are in the file.
• When each one was last reconciled.
• What you need to know that the books aren't telling you.

What you get off the call: a straight answer on whether we can help, and what the inspection is likely to run. No deck, no proposal.

Inspection. $85 an hour

We open the file and find out what we're walking into. A day if the books are in decent shape, longer if they aren't. We give you the estimate before we start and we tell you if it's going to run over.

What we inspect:

• Every bank account, credit card, and loan, and the date each was last reconciled.
• Whether the balance sheet ties to your last filed tax return.
• The chart of accounts, and whether somebody built it for a contractor or left it set up for a gift shop.
• Undeposited Funds, negative accounts payable, and any balance nobody can explain.
• Your accounts receivable aging, and how much of it you'd actually collect.
• Job costing. Whether costs land on jobs or in one bucket, and whether labor carries burden.
• Payroll. Who runs it, on what platform, and how it posts into QuickBooks.
• Progress billing and retainage, and how both get tracked.
• Sales tax, where you owe it and whether it's been filed.
• Personal spend running through the business account.
• Whether your field software talks to QuickBooks or somebody types everything twice.
• Who approves, who pays, and who reconciles, and whether that's all one person.

What we document and hand you:

• A written punch list. What's wrong, in the order to fix it.
• A flat quote for the fixes, or an hourly estimate if the work is open ended.
• The monthly number for core bookkeeping once the file is clean.
• A written note if the file comes back clean, which is what a bank or a bonding company asks for and what most owners can't produce.

Interim. $85 an hour

The books don't stop while we inspect. If your bookkeeper already walked out, this starts the same week and holds the line until the punch list is done.

What we do in the meantime:

• Categorize the transactions coming in now.
• Enter your bills, record your invoices, and keep both agings current.
• Run payroll and post the entries, on whatever platform you're on.
• Reconcile the current month so you don't fall further behind.
• Close the month on time while the older months are still a mess.
• Answer your CPA when they call.

What we hold off on: rebuilding the chart of accounts, reworking old months, and anything else that belongs on the punch list. We don't restructure a file we haven't finished reading.

Fixes. $85 an hour, or a flat quote after the inspection

The punch list, worked in order. Most of this gets quoted as a flat project once we know the size of it.

What a fix looks like:

• Past books brought up to date, however many months that runs.
• Every account reconciled back to the last month somebody got right.
• Your chart of accounts set up for a contractor, with cost of goods sold split the way a job cost report needs it.
• Undeposited Funds cleared so deposits match what hit the bank.
• The balance sheet tied to your last filed return, with the adjusting entries your CPA made that nobody ever entered.
• Payroll that posted as one lump sum broken out, so wages, taxes, and burden land in the right accounts.
• Personal spend separated from business spend and put where your CPA can work with it.
• Duplicate vendors and customers untangled.
• Negative accounts payable corrected, from payments recorded without a bill behind them.
• Job costing set up on a file that never had it, and historical costs moved onto the right jobs.
• A year rebuilt from bank and credit card statements when the file is past saving.
• W-9s and 1099s backfilled.
• A sales tax liability account cleaned up when it hasn't matched a filing in years.

Core. $55 an hour

The monthly work, once the file is clean and we know your company. This is what most of our clients are buying and it's the rate they stay on.

Every month:

• Transactions categorized weekly, not in a scramble on the last day.
• Every bank account, credit card, and loan reconciled to what actually cleared.
• Bills entered, invoices recorded, and both agings kept honest.
• Payroll run and posted, on QuickBooks Payroll or your outside provider.
• Job costs landing on the right job so your margin report is real.
• Your books closed and locked by the tenth.
• A trial balance, a profit and loss statement, and a balance sheet, plus one page in plain English telling you what you made, what you're owed, what you owe, and what each job did.
• W-9s and 1099s tracked through the year.
• A clean file handed to your CPA, and we'll get on the phone with them when they want one.

Most contractors we work with land around fifteen hundred a month. Some pay a few hundred. Take one piece or take the whole thing. Monthly reconciliations only is a real answer.

Specialized. $85 an hour

Contractor work that sits outside the monthly close. We tell you it's specialized before we do it, so it never shows up as a surprise on an invoice.

Examples:

• AIA G702 and G703 progress billing off your schedule of values.
• Retainage tracked by job, so you know what's held and what's collectible at closeout.
• Change orders posted against the job budget so the margin report stays true.
• Lien waiver tracking, conditional and unconditional, by job and by sub.
• Certificate of insurance tracking, so a lapsed sub doesn't stop a draw.
• Workers comp and general liability audit support.
• A financial package built for a bank or a bonding company.
• Multiple entities kept clean and reported separately.
• A QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online migration, scoped and quoted as a project.
• Sales tax cleanup across more than one state.

What's not included.

• No tax advice.
• No filing income tax returns.
• No financial advice, forecasting, or modeling.
• No HR. We run payroll and post the entries. Withholding calculations and the 940s, 941s, and state payroll filings sit with your payroll provider.
• No authorizing or signing payments.
• No collections.
• No audits.

We record what happened. Your CPA handles what you owe. We hand them a clean file so they aren't billing you three hundred an hour to build one.

What you're responsible for.

• You approve the payments. We stage the bills, give you the payables run so you can cut checks or send ACHs, and record all of it. We can sit as a second approver.
• Approve the hours. We run the payroll and post the entries.
• Connect your bank and credit card accounts to QuickBooks, or give us read-only access and we'll connect them.
• Give us accountant access to QuickBooks Online.
• Tell us when a job closes out and what the final number was.

That takes an owner about thirty minutes a month.

Who does the work.

You get a dedicated bookkeeper on your account. Heather oversees every account behind that bookkeeper, so the work gets reviewed and the books don't stop when one person is out.

Firm credentials

• QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor certification.
• Thirty years managing the books.
• Hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions.
• Work in all fifty states.
• Trade contractors. That's what we specialize in.

• Heather Lloyd

  CEO

  Thirty years managing the books. Hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions. Work in all fifty states. QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor certified. Trade contractors are the specialty, and that career has been spent inside contractor files: job costing, progress billing, retainage, payroll, and the cleanups that come before any of it works.

• Jackson Ramsey

  Business development

  Ten years in construction project management and business development. Knows the jobsite side of the numbers and how a contractor actually runs work.

Two things most bookkeeping services leave out

I already have a bookkeeper

Keep them. Plenty of our clients do. We take the pieces they don't have time for.