Step one. Tell us about the business.
A short form: what the business does, which bank and card accounts it uses, how it gets paid, and the year the return is for. Five minutes. It is enough for the books to know what they are looking at.
Step two. Upload the statements you have.
Several at a time, any order, however many years. OFX or QFX if the bank offers them; otherwise the PDF or CSV the bank already gives you. Every statement is sealed the moment it lands and only the bookkeeping engine opens it again.
Each line is read, matched against what the business told us and against what the same payee has done before, and posted to a double-entry ledger. Transfers between your own accounts are paired rather than counted twice. Card payments are matched to the card statement. Owner draws are draws, not expenses.
Step three. Answer the questions only you can answer.
Some lines cannot be decided from a bank descriptor. A $4,000 payment to a person could be a contractor, a loan repayment or a refund. Those come back as multiple-choice questions in plain words, on a phone if that is where you are. Nothing is guessed and then hidden; a line we are not sure about stays open until you close it.
Step four. Get the books back.
Profit and loss, balance sheet, cash by account, the biggest suppliers, who paid you and what is still outstanding, all on one dashboard. Behind every figure is the detail that makes it up, so a number is never a dead end.
For whoever files the return: a trial balance cut at the year end, a general ledger with running balances, a journal, and a QuickBooks import file, as one workbook or as separate files. The figures in the files are the figures on the screen. There is one set of books.
Then it stays done.
Once the books are current, a bank connection takes over. Transactions arrive on their own, get posted the same way, and the only thing that reaches you is the occasional question. Next year's return starts from books that are already there.
Questions people ask
- Do I need QuickBooks or any accounting software?
- No. The books are built here, from the statements. If your accountant wants them in QuickBooks, the import file is one click.
- How far back can it go?
- As far as you have statements. Multi-year cleanups are the normal case, not the exception.
- Cash or accrual?
- Either. The books carry receivables, payables, prepayments and depreciation when the business has them, and the basis is a setting your accountant chooses, not a question the owner is made to answer.
- What if a statement is a scanned PDF?
- It is read. A page the reader cannot make out is flagged for you rather than silently skipped.
- Who sees my statements?
- Your bookkeeping engine, and the people you invite. Statements are encrypted on disk and every business is kept separate from every other. See security.