Accounting & Payroll
QuickBooks Services
QuickBooks is only as good as the way it was set up. Most of them were set up in an afternoon.
Almost every business we meet is already on QuickBooks. Very few are on a version of it that was configured with any thought.
The typical history: someone set the file up quickly at formation, accepted the default chart of accounts, connected the bank feed, and started accepting whatever categorisation the software suggested. Years later the file contains a great deal of data and very little information.
Setting it up properly
A good setup starts with the chart of accounts, because that determines what the reports can eventually tell you. From there it is the item list, the classes or locations that give you segmentation, the bank feed rules that keep ongoing categorisation cheap, and the integrations that stop you entering the same data twice.
Done properly this takes a few days. Done poorly it costs a few thousand dollars a year indefinitely in cleanup and in decisions made on bad information.
Cleaning up what exists
Most of our QuickBooks work is remedial, and the patterns repeat.
Transactions categorised to Ask My Accountant and never revisited. Owner draws booked as expenses. Loan payments expensed in full rather than split between principal and interest. Undeposited Funds accumulating a balance that has never been cleared. Reconciliations that were forced to balance with an adjusting entry.
None of these are unusual and all of them are fixable. We work backward through the file, correct the underlying entries rather than papering over them with journal adjustments, and get to a point where the reconciliations genuinely tie.
Migrating from Desktop
Desktop-to-Online migration is well-trodden but has real failure modes — inventory valuation, historical payroll, and job costing all translate imperfectly.
We plan the migration around what you actually need to preserve, run it, and then verify that the balances agree before you rely on the new file. The verification step is the one most commonly skipped and the one that causes trouble later.
Training
Most owners use perhaps fifteen percent of QuickBooks, which is a reasonable proportion — but it should be the right fifteen percent.
We train on the parts relevant to your role: how to read the reports that matter, how to handle the transactions you personally touch, and how to avoid the specific mistakes that cause the most rework. Not a general tour of the software.
Common questions
Online or Desktop?
Online for most businesses now — the integrations, remote access and bank feeds are decisive advantages. Desktop still wins for some inventory-heavy and job-costing workflows. We will give you a straight recommendation for your situation.
Our file is a mess. Rebuild or repair?
Usually repair. A rebuild loses history, and history is what makes comparatives possible. We can generally clean even quite badly damaged files, and we will tell you if yours is the exception.
Can you just fix it and leave us to run it?
Yes. Plenty of clients want the setup done properly and the training to run it themselves. That is a Foundation engagement and it ends when you are comfortable.
Do you support the bank feed rules?
Yes, and getting the rules right is most of what makes ongoing bookkeeping cheap. Badly configured feeds create more cleanup than they save.
Often paired with
Start the conversation
Tell us what the business is trying to do next.
An introductory call is thirty minutes and costs nothing. If we are not the right firm for what you need, we will say so and point you somewhere better.