Service
Small Business Accounting
A close on a set schedule, statements with the prior period beside them, and a chart of accounts built around the decisions you actually make.
Most of the books I take over are current. Every month is closed, the bank feed reconciles, the balance sheet balances. They also cannot tell you what you make on your largest service line, why March was bad, or whether the line labeled Owner Draw is a distribution, a loan repayment, or a personal charge that should never have touched the ledger. Books like that are good enough to file a return from. They are not good enough to decide anything with.
The gap is almost always the chart of accounts. When half the expenses land in Office Supplies or a bucket named Miscellaneous, the ledger records cash movement and describes nothing. Fixing it is not a heavier process. It is building categories around the decisions you actually make, then holding to them for four quarters so the comparison means something.
What organized books are actually for
Compliance is the floor. These are the things you get from books kept a step above it, and they are the reason the work is worth paying for.
- Margin by service line, job, or location, instead of one blended number in February
- A problem caught in month three, when it costs a conversation, instead of month eleven, when it costs the year
- Deductions you can defend, because the receipt, the vendor, and the account all agree
- Gross receipts that already tie to the 1099-NEC and 1099-K totals filed under your EIN
- A depreciation schedule and a shareholder basis record that survive a change of accountant, a lender, or a sale
- A year-end handoff measured in days instead of weeks of reconstruction
The cadence
The work runs on a set schedule, decided at intake from your transaction volume and what you have to report on. Most businesses land on monthly. A single-owner LLC with forty transactions a month, no payroll, and no inventory is usually fine quarterly, and I will say so rather than sell a monthly close nobody opens.
Every close is the same short list of steps, which is the point. Predictable work produces comparable numbers, and comparable numbers are what let you see a trend before it becomes a year.
What each close includes
- Every transaction categorized, and every bank, credit card, loan, and merchant account reconciled
- Profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statement, with the prior period sitting beside them
- Revenue recorded gross, before merchant fees, so it matches what the processors report to the IRS
- The fixed asset schedule kept current, with Section 179 and bonus depreciation decisions raised before December 31 rather than after
- Owner compensation, distributions, and shareholder loans recorded as what they are
- A short written note on what moved and what I would look at next
Where structure meets the ledger
An S corporation is a tax election, not a bookkeeping style, but the election changes what your books have to prove. Once you file Form 2553, your compensation has to run through payroll and land on a W-2, your health insurance premiums have to appear on that same W-2 to be deductible, and your distributions have to be tracked against basis on Form 7203. Books that record all of it as Owner Draw turn the 1120-S into a reconstruction project and leave the reasonable compensation position with nothing under it.
The payroll question has a ceiling worth knowing about. Self-employment tax is 15.3%, and the 12.4% Social Security piece stops at the annual wage base. Once your W-2 wages clear that base, the only thing a salary-versus-distribution split still moves is the 2.9% Medicare portion, plus the 0.9% additional Medicare tax above the statutory threshold. That is why the election is worth real money in one range of profit and close to a wash in another, and why the savings tables circulating online overstate it for high earners.
A CP2000 is not an audit. It is generated automatically when the gross receipts on your return do not match the 1099-NEC and 1099-K totals filed under your EIN, and the most common cause is revenue booked net of merchant fees while the processor reports it gross. Recording it gross heads off the letter entirely.
Year end, when the books and the return are one job
When I keep the books and prepare the return, there is no handoff. Nobody has to ask what a five-figure January entry was for, and the winter conversation is about decisions instead of archaeology. Depreciation elections, accrued compensation, retirement plan funding, and the S corporation wage number all get settled against a ledger I have been reading all year.
Some clients keep their own bookkeeper or in-house staff and hire me only for the return. That works fine. I do ask to review one quarter of the existing work before filing season, because an error upstream is cheap to fix in September and expensive to fix in March. If the review comes back clean, I will tell you so and stay out of it.
How this starts
Diagnostic
I look at your last full year and the current year to date, in whatever system your books already live in. You get a written summary of what is accurate, what is not, and what it would take to fix.
Written estimate
Cleanup, if you need it, is scoped and quoted separately from the ongoing work. Both numbers come off the same complexity scale, and both arrive before I start anything.
Cleanup
Prior periods get reconciled, the chart of accounts gets rebuilt around the decisions you actually make, and opening balances get proved out. This is a one-time engagement with an end date, not a permanent line item.
The close
Monthly or quarterly from there, on the schedule set at intake, with statements and a written note each period.
When you should not hire me for this
If you are a single-member LLC with one bank account, no payroll, no inventory, and a few dozen transactions a month, you do not need a monthly close. You need one card used for one purpose, a bank feed with rules on it, and someone to look at the year once. Paying for a monthly package in that situation buys you a PDF nobody opens.
If you already have a controller and a working close, bookkeeping from me is redundant, and the return and the planning are where I would earn the fee. And if what you need is your existing file repaired rather than an ongoing service, that is a QuickBooks cleanup, which is a different and usually cheaper engagement.
I came over to Nottingham after being with another CPA for many years. The transition was very smooth, and I love the personal attention I get from Hunter.
Start with a look at the books
The first conversation costs nothing and obligates you to nothing. Bring last year's return and access to wherever your books sit, and I will tell you what I see in it. Send me the details and you will get a written number, built the same way for every client, before any work begins. Here is how that number gets set.
Other services
Further reading
Questions, answered plainly.
We already have a bookkeeper. Do we need you for this?
Probably not for the bookkeeping itself. If your bookkeeper closes the month, reconciles every account, and hands you statements you can read, that arrangement is working, and I would rather do the return and the planning on top of it. I do ask to review one quarter of the work before filing season, because an error upstream costs more the longer it sits.
Do you run payroll?
No, I do not process payroll. I advise on the structure: whether you should be on payroll at all, what your compensation figure would have to support if the IRS asked, and how S corporation health insurance premiums have to appear on your W-2. Then I coordinate with whichever provider runs it. Structuring it wrong is a tax problem. Running it is a software problem.
My books are two years behind. Is that disqualifying?
No, and it is common. Cleanup gets scoped and quoted separately from the ongoing work, because reconstructing two years of unreconciled activity is a different job from maintaining a closed set of books. You see both numbers before anything starts, and cleanup ends when the balances are proved out.
Should I be on cash basis or accrual?
It turns on three things: whether you carry inventory, how long the gap runs between doing the work and getting paid, and whether a lender or a buyer will want accrual statements from you. A contractor who invoices in November and collects in February sees a badly distorted year on cash basis, and that distortion changes real decisions. I would rather look at a year of your actual activity and tell you than guess from your entity type.
The first conversation is free.
Tell me what's going on and I'll tell you plainly whether you need me.
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