Somewhere between deciding you want help with your books and signing up, most owners hit the same worry: that handing this off turns into a new job of feeding information to somebody else. You end up chasing paperwork for the person you hired so you could stop chasing paperwork.
Fair worry. So here’s the whole list of what sits on your side, start to finish.
Setup week is the heaviest part
The most work you’ll do is at the beginning, and it is still short.
Your QuickBooks Online subscription is yours. You pay Intuit directly for it, and that’s deliberate. The file is in your name, so if we ever part ways, your records stay right where they are and nothing has to get handed back to you. If you’re not on QuickBooks yet, getting you moved over is part of onboarding.
Your bank and card accounts get connected by you. I can hop on Zoom and talk you through it while you click, and the clicking is yours. Connecting an account means typing your online banking login, and I do not enter anyone’s banking credentials, for any reason. Once those accounts are on, transactions start flowing in on their own, and you are done with that step unless a bank asks you to re-authorize the connection down the road.
You tell me how the business is put together. Entity type, the kinds of work you do, whether you use subcontractors, whether you charge sales tax. We just talk through it. There’s no form to fill out.
Month to month, it comes down to two things
Once it’s running, your side gets small.
Photograph receipts for the bigger purchases. Open the QuickBooks mobile app, take a picture, and it lands in your file. There’s no envelope to keep and no folder to assemble at the end of the month.
Answer a question when I ask one. Some transactions can’t be worked out from the bank feed on its own. A charge at a hardware store might be a job cost, or it might be a new grill for your deck. A deposit with no invoice behind it might be a customer paying cash, or it might be you moving your own money in. I ask about those close to when they happened, while you still remember, so you’re not staring at a charge from five weeks ago trying to reconstruct your week.
Answering quickly helps. Answering late means the month closes with a guess in it, and a guess is the thing I am trying to keep out of your books.
What I handle without coming to you
Everything else. Every transaction categorized as it comes in, your accounts reconciled against your actual statements from the bank and the card company, the month closed, and your report put together. On the packages that include invoicing and bill pay, that also covers sending your invoices, keeping track of who hasn’t paid, and keeping your bills scheduled.
You don’t review a categorization list. You don’t approve entries. If I run into something I can’t resolve on my own, it reaches you as a question, usually one you can answer in a sentence.
Two things that stay yours on purpose
These sit outside what I do, and the reason is worth saying.
Filing and paying your sales tax. Your monthly report tells you what you owe and which jurisdictions it goes to, down to the town. Submitting it and paying it is yours to do.
Your tax return. I’m a bookkeeper, not a tax preparer. I keep the books accurate through the year, which leaves less for your preparer to untangle, and at year end I deal with them directly.
If a month goes sideways
Sometimes you’re slammed, the receipts don’t get photographed, and my questions sit for two weeks. It happens, and the month still gets closed. What changes is how much of it is settled. Anything still unresolved goes into a holding account, where it sits until you and I clear it up together.
That’s the honest tradeoff. The less I hear from you in a month, the more of that month ends up as an open question.
So what is it, added up
One set of connections at setup. A receipt photo now and then. A reply when I ask you something. That’s the arrangement.
If you want to see how the same month looks from my side, I wrote that up separately. What it costs is its own question, and I put real numbers on that one too.
And if you’d rather see where your books stand before deciding anything, the free quiz runs about two minutes and gives you a score plus a copy in your inbox.
Take the free Books Health Quiz