Anybody in here have the LinkedIn premium and use their Request tab? Is that how people have been getting experience, or like small jobs? Im wondering if the premium is worth it!

I’ve been doing basic office bookkeeping for years now. Comfy with spreadsheets and basic bills and collecting and budgeting. But getting new jobs using QB online and want to update my skills, get clearly trained on double entry though I’ve been ok with it so far.

Looking into online certs it seems NACPB has reasonably prices training and a certification. Is it any good? Is the certification respected?

Thanks for any insight.

I am a bookkeeper who has been using Sage accounting and QuickBooks both for desktop.
QuickBooks has gone up $600 in one year for me. Does anybody have a good alternative to QuickBooks or should I just move everything back to Sage?
Thanking you in advance for any advice

A few days ago I made a post saying I was seriously considering walking away from a business I took over earlier this year. A lot of people asked for more details, so here they are.
I have an established location with sustainable revenue.
Earlier this year I took over a small bookkeeping/tax office about an hour away, because I saw an opportunity to preserve a local business, keep the employees working, and continue serving clients who had been with the firm for years. I knew it would be a challenge, but I honestly believed that with some changes I could make it work.
Now that I’ve been in it for several months, I’m struggling to see a path forward.
The office has about 15–18 recurring bookkeeping/payroll clients, along with seasonal tax work. I would say like 100-150 tax clients. Anywhere from $75-350 for a return.
Recurring monthly revenue is around $3,000.
Monthly payroll is approximately $5,000. Fixed overhead is relatively low—about $400/month for rent, plus QuickBooks Online subscriptions and payroll processing costs.
The biggest issue is pricing. The previous owner charged rates that simply don’t support the amount of work being done. I’ve started implementing increases, but the employees have built relationships with these clients over many years and genuinely believe that anything more than about a $25–50 monthly increase will cause many of them to leave.
I completely understand why they feel that way, and I don’t want to lose clients. At the same time, I also don’t see how the practice ever becomes financially sustainable if we continue charging what we are.
I’m torn because I feel responsible for the employees and the clients. I don’t want to be the reason people lose their jobs or have to find a new bookkeeper. But I also know continuing to lose money every month isn’t a long-term solution.
For those of you who have bought, inherited, or turned around a struggling bookkeeping, accounting, or tax practice:
Would you push through larger price increases and accept that some clients will leave?
Would you cut payroll?
Would you close the office and transition clients elsewhere?
Is there another option I’m not seeing?
I’m genuinely looking for perspectives from people who’ve been through something similar, because right now I feel like I’m too close to the situation to think objectively.

I've been running my own bookkeeping practice for a few years now. Almost all of my clients have come to me through my dad, who is a CPA.

When it comes to reaching out to new clients on my own, I don't have a lot of experience, and something I'm running into now is - how do you explain what you do to clients without making it sound so easy that they could do it themselves?

I know that bookkeeping is not as easy as it appears, and that given the chance, many business owners will make a mess of their own books. But when I am asked to explain what I do, I think I might make it sound easy. I also don't want to pitch myself as being smarter than a potential client by saying something like "if I don't do your books, you'll screw it up, and it will cost you more down the road to get someone to fix it".

I've had a couple experiences with people who were looking for a bookkeeper without knowing exactly what they needed, and that's where I feel I have to explain to them what it is I do (and how it differs from an accountant) and maybe put my foot in my mouth.

If anyone has advice (or resources) on how to handle finding new clients without undervaluing your work, I'd appreciate it!

Hi all - the Client is a small restaurant with very few administrative processes in place. I have been helping them sort out sales tax problems before we get to setting up bookkeeping officially. Anyway, there's a variance within their Clover POS reports that has befuddled me.

This POS was apparently sold to the Client secondhand and seems like a real piece of junk. It wouldn't allow us to configure mandatory service charges as taxable, as they should be under state law here. I suspect it was brought in from out of state and never reconfigured correctly. I even helped them discover that they hadn't been receiving their CC deposits for at least a month.

But here's the real issue: the Sales Summary report and Taxes report from the same POS ***do not agree.*** Moreover, the "Applicable Sales" total (comprising both taxed and untaxed sales) printed on the Taxes report somehow is *higher* than the Gross Sales on the Summary, as sent to me by the key employee/manager. There don't seem to be any missing returns, tips, fees, or obvious transactions which are not captured inside Gross Sales on the Sales Summary.

I pulled the Taxes report with my own hands, showing both 'Non-Taxable' party deposits and 'Taxable' normal sales, with the goal of backing out the sales tax not originally collected on party deposits in prior periods. I haven't pulled the Sales Summary report myself, but I will go back to check the reports soon. The way I see it, there are three options:

1. I'm missing something obvious under my nose. There's some transaction that *should* be excluded from the Gross Sales on the report but is tracked for sales tax purposes, and I just don't see it.

2. The POS is completely f'd up. Given all the problems we've had with it so far, this possibility seems more likely than one might initially think.

3. Red flag for employee theft, as the key employee could theoretically be moving orders into a different time period before sending the Sales Summary report to me, then pocketing the difference in cash. The employee does not appear to be very technical and did not even know there was a Taxes report they could have sent me. This seems possible but unlikely.

I would appreciate any ideas on how to reconcile these reports or what I'm missing here, since I'm hesitant to suggest the other possibilities, until I'm sure #1 does not apply. Thanks in advance!

I had a prospective client, a landscaping company with 4 subcontractors - 2 are paid in cash, $30k in net income/month. He wouldn’t provide other info like how many bank accounts he operates with or his transaction volume or if his books & tax filings were up to date.

I quoted him $1k/mo. for general bookkeeping (AP/AR, bank recs, JE’s, monthly financial reports, tax prep coordination with his tax preparer, etc.)

For context, I live in Orange County, California US - very HCOL. I have a few years experience working as an accountant in the construction/real estate development space - so I have quite a bit of knowledge in working with trades, job costing, and WIP schedules.
Should I be quoting lower??

EDIT: He declined and stated he currently pays $275/mo for bookkeeping

Please don't spam me with your apps or whatever you created, or didn't create. I'm not looking to sign up for some service.

I am genuinely asking how fellow bookkeepers and accountants check their work.

I am a solo bookkeeper, and I find myself missing coworkers whom I can bounce questions off of, or who can, on occasion, double-check my work.

I am very confident in my general ability to provide this service, so I am not looking for a mentor or training. But I do know that everyone makes the occasional mistake, or just has that brain-fart where you are not quite sure how to handle a specific situation, and it is great to be able to ask someone else to look over your work, like a co-worker.

But I don't have a co-worker.

How do you all handle this?

What are your most successful methods for acquiring contractor/construction clients? I’ve tried cold calling and networking. Networking seems to yield the best leads so far.

Do you guys have input or insights with acquiring this particular clientele? Anything would be helpful, I’m mostly seeking where and how to concentrate my efforts so I’m not wasting time on methods that don’t work well with this group.

I recently started working for a small business in California. I have noticed several issues with the book keeper.

First, I accept large deposits (usually in the form of personal check) for reservations. I send the payments and contract/invoice to the book keeper, but they will hold the checks for months. I have had clients ask me why their payments have not been processed.

On one occasion, it came right up to the actual reservation without having processed the deposit. I had asked several times and gotten no clarity in over almost 2 weeks. Eventually they just told me to advise the client it had been processed, despite the client saying it had not. Right now I have a several thousand dollar deposit that has been held for almost 2 months.

Additionally, I noticed paychecks reflect the pay period incorrectly. For example, instead of pay period 1st-15th with payday on 20th, it will say pay period 5th-20th, while we are still paid on 20th.

I have already reported all of this to my employer, but can anyone offer any insight into what might be going on here? Is it just negligence or does this point to a bigger issue?

I've been using spreadsheets to track both business and personal finances and it worked at first but now it's getting messy fast. too many categories too many updates and I don't fully trust it anymore.

Thanks for all the advice!

As of now, I haven't been able to do much work with the client. I met with her onthe 2nd of July. We agreed on 600 for the clean-up. She paid half upfront. I gave her a price of $180 for the monthly bookkeeping. Told her the cleanup is a separate project from the monthly stuff.

During our long meeting, she didn't bring her bank info or any statements as asked. It was hard to know what I was getting myself into. Will definitely do better with my 2nd client. The following week after our meetup, she sent loads of random documents (trucking company) but no settlements. It's been hard to know what I'm looking for. After many follow-ups, now she wants to meet up to help her connect her bank, and I'm sure she has other questions. I don't know what to do. Our first meeting was 2 hours and not very productive in getting her set up.

I want to meet local clients once if they want for the initial setup, but after that it would be too much. I haven't replied to her text about meeting in person yet.

How would you handle this situation? Consider that she's my first and only client, as I just started this month. She and her husband run a trucking company and have never done their books. They wanted to do better this year to "save move-on taxes".

Edit: Thank you for the advice. All has been helpful. I will read future responses, as all advice right now is helpful.

I want to read more business/bookkeeping related books. Does anyone have any recommendations?

I've been putting off my bookkeeping for almost a year, and it's become a mess.
I finally reached out to a bookkeeper, and they quoted me around $2,500 for the cleanup before they'd start monthly bookkeeping.

I honestly have no idea if that's a fair price or if I'm being overcharged.
For those who've hired a bookkeeper or do this kind of work, does that sound reasonable?
What factors usually affect the price?

Have any bookkeepers mailed flyers to CPA firms outlining their services and how they can help their existing clients with bookkeeping needs? If so, has it been successful at getting clients?

I’ve been handling the books myself since starting my business. At first, it was prety manageable: a few invoices, basic expenses, one bank account, and not much to reconcile.

But as the company has grown, it’s become noticeably harder to stay on top of everything. We now have more transactions, multiple payment platforms, contractors, subscriptions, sales tax, and expenses that are not always obvious to categorize.

Nothing is completely out of control, but bookkeeping is starting to take several hours every week, and I’m increasingly worried about mistakes showing up at tax time. I also find myself postponing reconciliations because there’s always something more urgent to work on....

So I’m wondering: is there a typical company size or level of complexity where outsourcing bookkeeping starts to make sense?

Is it based on Monthly revenue? Number of transactions? Number of employees or contractors? Hours spent doing the books?

For those who outsourced it, what was the actual breaking point? And looking back, did you wait too long, or was outsourcing earlier not worth the cost?

For now, the only thing I’ve changed is using a small extraction tool to pull all the data from my receipts and invoices into spreadsheets instead of entering everything manually. Extractify saves me a decent amount of time on data entry, but I still do all the bookkeeping and reconciliations myself. I’m mostly trying to figure out when it stops making sense to keep doing that.

An S corp provides invoice discounts for a few reasons. Negotiated reductions, marketing purposes, and donations to nonprofits.

Whether recorded to a single GL account, or broken out into three different accounts, these all go to a contra-revenue discounts account. Correct?

If the revenue is left at gross, and the credit is recorded further down as an expense, that overstates net revenue, implying income/receivable that will never be collected.

(Creation of a "donations" expense account also risks raising a red flag for tax purposes, since it might be mistaken for an actual cash donation).

Makes sense, but it is interesting how this is different than bad debt write-offs. Which are treated as an expense. The difference I suppose being that there is an expectation initially that the revenue will be collected.

When a client on QuickBooks asks who edited an invoice after reconciliation, I open the audit log and answer in a minute. When it's a Xero client I end up clicking through History and Notes one document at a time, because Xero has no org wide audit trail report. The feature request for one has sat on their idea board for years with almost 600 votes, marked not in pipeline.

I got annoyed enough that I'm building the report myself as a read only connected app.

But mostly I'm curious what everyone else does today. Is there a trick I'm missing, or is everyone just doing the document by document archaeology?

Retyping numbers off vendor PDFs east up the first week of my month. Landed here because the company needed someone to keep the books and nobody else would do it.

Pulling invoice totals and dates off a stack of PDFs into a spreadsheet holds everything else up as data has to be right before it reconciles, which means spot-checking everything anyway.

For people doing this day in day out how much is still going in by hand and has anything out there earned enough trust yet that you would let it near the raw data without checking every line?

I’m thinking about upgrading my current work laptop and I’ve been considering getting a touchscreen model. Most of my work involves spreadsheets, checking financial records, and managing different business documents, so I need something that can keep up with my daily tasks. I’m trying to find something that will work good for long hours.

What touch screen laptop would you recommend for this kind of bookkeeping work?

Do you have a questionnaire for new clients or do you just try to gather information at your initial client meeting?

I created a questionnaire, but I find I very rarely send it. Most clients don't want to fill it out, and it seems to be easier just to talk through things on out initial call. I may use it and fill it out while we're talking, but I haven't sent on to a client in a few years.

So I work for a city. I do the AR reconciliation. A lot of job tasks were put on the backburner due to the ACFR. So June is my first reconciliation. Hopping between tasks.

There are approximately 10 accounts I believe.

Animal (simple plug, looking at the subledger for Animal AR),BAE, BAES, Cobra, Construction, Fire (easy, just a single input), Lease General (pain in butt, 12-14 GL's), Transit, Street, Utilities (Pain in butt #2).

There are 42 GL's that currently have balances spread among these accounts.

The total amount amongst it all, 22 million dollars. Amounts can be as little as finance charges (.25 cents for example), small invoices (50 bucks), to as much as a large invoices (one is 705k, now paid down to 605, but this is accross multiple accounts).

If there is a variance between the Subledgers and the detail summary, I have to find where those variances are (duh). Sometimes there are incorrect entries, as I just discovered, which create weird transfer transactions that our system creates automatically. Sometimes even though there is an AR in a subledger, that won't split to the other subledgers even if it does have the correct GL split.

My boss says that it takes her 8 hours to do this. I have been on it for weeks. Keep in mind I also get pulled away to do other things and was just on a 6 day vacation. Additionally was able to complete other tasks as well, like council resolutions, Prl recons, and random entries.

So my ask is, does this sound like a one day thing. Keep in mind she has been with the city for 9 years. I started this last year and have been away from it for half a year for ACFR. I honestly can't for the life of me understand this thing. And I will admit, she is way smarter than I am. But I have been breaking this stupid stuff down piece by piece. It still blows my mind when she is like, here it is, this is how I did it...

Like the title says, however, I'm not so much looking to adjust my pricing accordingly and more looking for ways to counter my client's complaint about my rate.

The scenario:

Client's old bookkeeper finally quit to retire and has been handling their books for a long time (don't know how long exactly, 10+ years). Old bookkeeper is not a CPA. Old bookkeeper would submit payroll, payroll taxes and sales taxes. They used a different bookkeeping program, to which I never received access to.

Client has a credit card account, a checking account, a savings account, a few employees, no inventory. Transaction volume on the bank accounts is around 100/month. QBO is connected to the bank accounts, but not their CRM/POS. Square is also connected to QBO and has around 100 transactions per month. Square income and CRM income are for different income streams.

I believe the old bookkeeper just entered whatever numbers client gave them, or basically any deposit was "income" and any money out an expense. There was no review of undeposited funds for example. I already had a few instances where sales according to the CRM were higher than deposits, because the check was forgotten in the till. Same with cash.

Now please sit down for this one......the old bookkeeper charged $150/month for all of this.

I charge by the hour, and I am not looking to change that. For basic bookkeeping like this it's $45/h. I do not run payroll or submit payroll or sales tax. I do, however, provide a sales tax liability report for client to file with. I also do quarterly reviews where I find said undeposited funds, and other odds and ends. I also keep liabilities and income/expenses separate, and client doesn't quite grasp why there is a difference. Because they expressed concern in a rise in the bookkeeping cost, I said I will try to stay at or below 3h (yes, big mistake, I know).

It takes me 4h-5h each month and they are starting to complain.

At least 1h of it is creating sales receipts for each sale they make through the CRM. They did not want to spend the $30/m to connect the two.

How much time do you estimate this would take you? Am I really just too slow and need to up my game here?

I keep reading on here that they got the bulk of their clients though networking and word of mouth. How exactly do you meet CPAs and business owners in a way that eventually establishes trust?

Are you guys simply googling them in your area and cold calling them for a coffee or lunch?

I'm genuinely curious

I’m trying to understand the correct bookkeeping workflow for businesses that use a POS system like Shopify.

Let’s say Shopify generates a sales report showing all sales for a period (daily, weekly, or monthly), but the actual bank deposits are split into multiple payouts after Shopify deducts its fees.

How should this be recorded in the accounting software?

For example:
• Do you create a single invoice (or sales receipt/journal) for the total gross sales from the Shopify report?
• Then, when the three separate Shopify payouts hit the bank, do you match those deposits against that invoice using the bank feed?
• And are the Shopify processing fees and any other deductions recorded as journal entries (or expenses) to clear the remaining balance?

More generally, what’s the standard bookkeeping workflow for POS systems like Shopify, Square, or Stripe? I’m trying to understand the correct accounting process from the sales report through to the bank reconciliation.

The reason I’m asking is that I’ve inherited a client’s books where the previous accountant created a customer called “Shopify” and raised a monthly invoice for the total sales. However, it looks like they stopped there—the invoices were never properly cleared, and there’s now a large accounts receivable balance sitting against the Shopify customer