Accounting & Assurance

Client Accounting Services books your bank actually reads.

Monthly close, payroll, and financial statements that hold up under a lender review, an audit, or a buyer’s diligence. A real person on the account, not a portal and a ticket queue.

Overview

Books clean enough for a bank, an audit, or a buyer.

Most owner-operated businesses run on bookkeeping that’s good enough to file a return and not much more. That works until a lender wants year-over-year comparatives, an auditor asks for the reconciliation between the general ledger and the sales-tax return, or a buyer’s diligence team asks why cost-of-goods swings eight points in Q3.

Our monthly close discipline produces books that answer those questions on the first ask. Reconciliations are done, accruals are booked, inventory is tied to the physical count, and the financials for the month land within ten business days of month-end.

None of that is glamorous. It just quietly changes what your business is worth when a real number is required.

What’s Included

Six areas the practice covers.

Monthly close

Bank and credit-card reconciliations, accruals, prepaid amortization, and the journal entries that turn cash-basis noise into an accrual-basis picture.

Payroll

Payroll runs, tax deposits, quarterly 941s, annual 940 and W-2s, 1099-NECs for contractors, and multi-state withholding when your team lives across state lines.

Financial statements

Monthly P&L, balance sheet, and cash-flow. Comparatives against prior year and budget when a budget exists. Written in the format your lender expects.

Bank & audit-ready books

Trial balance tied to source documents, schedules for the fixed-asset ledger, and the working papers a reviewer needs. When diligence comes, we hand over a folder, not a scramble.

QuickBooks setup and cleanup

Chart of accounts that fits your industry, class or location tracking when it’s useful, and cleanup of the mess a bookkeeper who left three years ago put in the file.

Outsourced controller

For businesses past bookkeeping but short of a full-time hire: cash-flow forecasting, budget versus actual review, lender and board reporting, and someone accountable for the close calendar.

A Decision You Face

Bookkeeper, outsourced controller, or a finance hire.

Every growing business hits the point where the person entering transactions is no longer the person who can answer questions about them. The usual instinct is to hire. Often that is the expensive answer to the wrong question.

What each level actually does

  • Bookkeeping records what happened: transactions categorised, bank feeds cleared, payroll run. It is backward-looking and largely mechanical.
  • Controller work makes the record trustworthy and then interprets it: the close calendar, the reconciliations that prove the numbers, budget versus actual, cash-flow forecasting, and the reporting package a lender or a board reads.
  • A CFO is a capital and strategy role — financing structure, M&A, long-range modelling. Most businesses under roughly $20M of revenue do not need one on payroll.

The signals that you have outgrown bookkeeping

  • You are making decisions on the bank balance because the statements arrive too late to use.
  • A lender has asked for something — a covenant calculation, a rolling forecast — that nobody in the business can produce.
  • Month-end close takes longer than ten business days, or the number moves after you have already acted on it.
  • You are the only person who understands why the numbers are what they are.

The outsourced route is usually right while the need is real but part-time. A controller-level hire is a full salary plus benefits and management overhead. Outsourced, you buy the specific hours the work takes, and the person doing it already knows your file because they are closing your books and filing your return.

The point at which an internal hire wins is when the work becomes genuinely daily — enough transaction volume, enough staff, enough operational involvement that responsiveness beats depth. We will tell you when you have reached it rather than keeping the engagement past its usefulness.

Who Runs This

Questions about your books?

Questions about anything on this page go straight to the person who runs this work — not a contact form queue.

Yolanda Prieto, EA

Senior Accountant

Turn your books into a lender-ready file.

Book a Consultation