Financial statement preparation

A complete monthly, quarterly or annual set: profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow statement, and notes on any balance that needs explaining rather than just stating. Statements are built from a reconciled general ledger, not a raw software export, and formatted specifically for the reader, whether that is a lender underwriting a loan, an investor doing diligence, or your own board reviewing performance against budget. We state clearly on the face of every statement which basis of accounting was used, cash, accrual, or a defined other comprehensive basis, so there is never ambiguity about what a reader is looking at.

Preparation begins only once the underlying ledger is reconciled: bank and card balances tied out, loans confirmed against amortization schedules, prepaids and accruals substantiated with a schedule. From that clean base we build the three primary statements under GAAP presentation conventions (or the basis the reader needs), draft supporting notes for any balance requiring explanation, and route the draft through an internal review before it reaches you. Where an independent firm will issue an attest report on top, we assemble the trial balance and supporting schedules that firm needs and coordinate the handoff directly with them.

Businesses being asked for real financial statements for the first time: a bank evaluating a loan or line of credit, an early-stage investor doing diligence before a seed or Series A round, or a board that has grown past accepting a bank-balance screenshot as a management report. It also fits businesses that already have statements but are not confident the numbers underneath them are right, since preparation work surfaces problems in the ledger that a raw software export would hide.

The most common issue is a balance sheet that technically balances but is substantively wrong: a loan balance that has not been tied to its amortization schedule in a year, an intercompany balance that does not agree on both sides, deferred revenue that was never actually deferred. The second most common is statements built on an undisclosed or inconsistent basis of accounting, cash one month, accrual the next, with no note explaining which. We correct both before a statement goes anywhere near a lender or investor, and flag anything that needs a business decision rather than fixing it silently.

We work directly inside QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite and Sage Intacct, building statements from the client's own file rather than a parallel system that can drift out of sync. For businesses running budgeting or FP&A tools like Fathom, Jirav or a spreadsheet-based model, we reconcile those outputs back to the general ledger so variance reporting reflects what actually happened, not what a separate model estimates happened.

Pricing depends on entity count, transaction complexity, and how often statements are needed: a single-entity business needing quarterly statements costs meaningfully less than a multi-entity group needing monthly statements formatted for an active investor syndicate. Ongoing accounting and financial statement work is generally scoped inside the Growth or Scale tier on the published US rate card at /pricing, with Scale covering multi-entity and controller-level oversight; a one-off statement set for a specific lender or diligence request can be scoped as a standalone engagement. Your exact fee is confirmed in writing before work starts.

Every statement set is reviewed internally before it reaches you, including a check that the balance sheet actually balances, that the cash flow statement reconciles to the change in cash on the balance sheet, and that every note ties to a real, substantiated balance. On top of that internal review, every deliverable is reviewed by a senior reviewer before delivery, a second layer of scrutiny most outsourced providers do not apply.

Onboarding starts with a review of your current books and the specific reader the statements need to satisfy, since a bank underwriter and a board member expect different things from the same underlying numbers. If the ledger is not yet reconciled, that work happens first; trying to prepare statements on top of an unreconciled ledger only produces a clean-looking document with a wrong number inside it. Most businesses see a first draft set within two to three weeks of engagement, faster once a standing monthly cadence is in place.