Shore Thing

When you first open QuickBooks Online, it hands you a default chart of accounts — a pre-built list of categories for your income and expenses — and it’s tempting to just accept it and move on. It’s already there. It looks official. Why mess with it? Because a generic template built for every possible business is rarely the right fit for your specific one, and a chart of accounts that doesn’t match how your business actually works quietly makes every report you pull less usefu

“Monthly close” sounds like something a large company’s accounting department does with a lot of ceremony. For a small business, it’s a much smaller thing — but skipping it is exactly how books quietly drift from accurate to fictional over the course of a year. What it actually is. At the end of each month, you (or your bookkeeper) confirm that every transaction has been recorded, everything is categorized correctly, and your accounts have been reconciled against your actual

Getting your bank account connected directly to QuickBooks Online feels like a small technical step, but it’s the difference between bookkeeping that stays current automatically and bookkeeping that depends on you remembering to do something manually every month. What the bank feed actually does. Once connected, transactions flow into QuickBooks automatically as they happen in your actual bank account — no manual download, no CSV import, no risk of forgetting to do it for thr

Ask most small business owners about their profit and loss statement and you’ll get at least a vague sense of recognition — it shows whether you made money, roughly, sure. Ask about the balance sheet and you’re more likely to get a blank look. It’s the report that gets generated, filed away, and never actually read. That’s a shame, because your balance sheet answers a question your P&L can’t: not how did you do this period, but what is your business actually worth right now.

Let’s talk about the clients who come to me not because their books are a little behind, but because their books don’t exist. Or they existed in 2023 and then life happened. Or there’s a QuickBooks account somewhere that nobody has opened in fourteen months and the password is a mystery. If that’s you, I want to say two things clearly. First: this is incredibly common. Second: it is completely fixable. There is even a name for the fix — catch-up bookkeeping — because so many

I hear this one a lot, and I understand why. Your bank app shows every transaction. It even sorts them into little categories with pie charts. It feels like the work is already being done for you. So why pay for QuickBooks Online and a bookkeeper on top of that? Fair question. Here’s the honest answer. Your bank app is a record of what moved through one account. Bookkeeping is the story of your whole business. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where pe

At some point in setting up your books, you’ll run into a question that sounds far scarier than it is: do you keep your books on a cash basis or an accrual basis? People tend to nod, pick whichever word they heard last, and move on terrified. Let’s actually understand it, because for some of you — travel agents especially — it genuinely matters. The whole difference comes down to one thing: when you count the money. Cash basis: you count it when it actually moves. Income coun

Let me save you some time: if you want to work with me, you’re going to be in QuickBooks Online. That’s not negotiable, and I want to explain why — because “my bookkeeper requires it” is not a great reason to pay a monthly subscription fee, and you deserve an actual answer. First, what it is. QuickBooks Online is cloud-based accounting software. It connects to your bank accounts, tracks your income and expenses, generates reports, and keeps everything in one place. Your bookk