Bookkeeping Services
Monthly bookkeeping with review built in. The accounts reconcile to the statements, and the reports make sense when you read them.
Good bookkeeping is more than getting transactions into QuickBooks. Every account gets reconciled to a statement. Old items get looked into instead of carried forward. Someone reads the financial statements before they go to you.
An account can say “reconciled” in QuickBooks and still have a problem sitting in it. We provide small business bookkeeping in St. Augustine, Jacksonville, and across Northeast Florida, and we hold the monthly books to the same standard as a reconstruction: every balance supported, every change explained.
What This Typically Involves
- A chart of accounts that fits the business
- Bank, card, and loan reconciliations every month
- Every balance sheet account reconciled
- Month-end close on a set schedule
- Monthly statements with the changes explained
Signs This Is the Right Work
- The books are months behind, or current but nobody trusts the statements
- Accounts show as reconciled in the software, but no balance has been proven to a statement
- The CPA sends a list of questions every year that takes weeks to answer
- A bookkeeper records the transactions, but no accountant reviews the result
- The owner runs the business from the bank balance because the reports arrive late or do not make sense
What You End Up With
- Books closed on a set date each month, with every bank, credit card, and loan balance reconciled to a statement
- Monthly financial statements that describe the business, with the changes from last month explained
- A balance sheet with no unexplained amounts carried forward
- A year-end the CPA can work from without a cleanup first
- A record a lender, surety, or buyer can rely on
What Review Catches
Most bookkeeping problems don’t look like problems when they happen. A vendor payment lands in the wrong account, and one month of expenses is off. A loan payment gets recorded entirely as expense, and the loan balance stops matching the bank. Undeposited funds never get cleared, and the balance just keeps growing.
None of that shows up as an error in QuickBooks. It shows up later, usually when a lender, a CPA, or a buyer asks what a number is and nobody knows. That’s the balance nobody can explain.
Review catches it the month it happens instead of three years later. Here it’s part of the monthly work, not a cleanup project you pay for later.
Catch-Up and Cleanup Bookkeeping
Some businesses come to us months or years behind. Others are current, but the numbers are wrong. Those are two different jobs.
Catch-up bookkeeping fills in the months that never got entered, from bank and credit card statements, invoices, and payroll records, so there’s a complete record to work from.
Cleanup fixes what’s already there: miscoded transactions, duplicates, accounts that stopped getting reconciled, and balances carried forward from earlier errors.
If it goes deep enough that the records can’t be trusted at all, the work becomes accounting reconstruction, which rebuilds the history instead of patching it.
Where Bookkeeping Leads
Once the monthly books are reliable, the next problems are usually process problems. That can mean a better close and a few controls so the same errors stop coming back, automation for the steps that repeat every month, or controller-level review once the business has outgrown bookkeeping alone.
When This May Not Be Necessary
If your bookkeeper already reconciles and reviews the books every month, you don’t need more bookkeeping. What’s missing is usually review from someone above that level, which is the fractional controller role, or a one-time fix of the history, which is accounting reconstruction. The assessment will tell you which.