Getting started

What Does a Bookkeeper Do for a Small Business?

New clients ask me this all the time, usually with a little apology attached, as if they should already know. There’s nothing to apologize for. Bookkeeping is recording what comes in and what goes out, keeping it organized, and turning it into reports that are current enough to use.

The core of the job

In a given week I’m recording income and expenses, categorizing transactions, reconciling bank and credit card accounts against the actual statements, looking at balances for anything that seems off, and keeping the whole file organized inside QuickBooks Online.

That list sounds tidy on paper. In a real business it also means fixing old miscategorizations, straightening out a chart of accounts that grew wild over the years, making sure owner draws are recorded as draws and not expenses, and splitting loan payments between principal and interest so the reports show what really happened.

Where my job ends and your CPA’s begins

Bookkeeping and accounting work together, but they’re different jobs. I keep the records clean and current. Your accountant or CPA steps in for tax strategy, the return itself, and higher-level analysis. I walk through the differences in bookkeeping vs. accounting, but the short version is that my work feeds theirs. Your CPA files the return, and I hand them a reconciled, tax-ready file to work from. No CPA yet? I work with a few firms that send me bookkeeping and get tax work back, and I’m glad to make the introduction.

Messy books cost you at tax time, because your CPA bills for the hours it takes to sort them. And you can’t tell which job or which property made money.

Why monthly beats once a year

Waiting until year-end lets problems stack up. Missing receipts, unreconciled accounts, duplicate bank feed entries, and unanswered questions all get harder to sort out as the months go by, mostly because nobody remembers what that $412 charge back in March was for.

A monthly routine catches errors while they’re still small and cheap to fix. My monthly bookkeeping service is built around that rhythm: every transaction entered and categorized, every account reconciled, and your financial package in a shared folder by the 15th.

What owners usually hand off

Most of my clients hand me some mix of the following:

• Bank and credit card reconciliations
• Transaction entry and categorization
• Cleanup of old errors and catch-up on months that never got done
• Payroll runs from your payroll provider, recorded and reconciled in QuickBooks
• Basic accounts payable and receivable tracking
• Monthly Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow reports
• 1099 preparation and e-filing at year-end, billed separately

A good bookkeeper makes your numbers easier to read and explains them in plain English when something looks odd. The full rundown of what I take on is on my services page.

When it makes sense to get help

If your books are behind, if the bank balance doesn’t match QuickBooks, if tax time is a scramble every spring, or if you’re making decisions without current reports, it’s a good time to talk with a bookkeeper. None of that’s unusual, and I’m not going to fuss at you about it. We’ll work out a plan to get things straightened out. I work with clients all over the country on Zoom and the phone, and I’ll sit down in person around Springfield when that helps.

I’m a bookkeeper, not a tax preparer or attorney. For tax and legal questions, confirm the details with your CPA. I keep the books that make their job easier.