Monthly bookkeeping

A monthly bookkeeping engagement covers every transaction that moves through a connected bank account, credit card or payment processor such as Stripe or PayPal. Each one is coded against a chart of accounts built around your revenue streams and cost structure, not a generic template. Every account is then reconciled to its statement, so the balance in your books equals the balance at the institution down to the cent.

At close, you receive a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet for the period, plus an open-items list covering anything that could not be resolved from the records alone: an unmatched deposit, a new vendor, a receipt that never arrived. If you carry payroll, loan balances or fixed assets, those are tracked and rolled forward month to month rather than re-derived from scratch each period. The exact line items covered are set out in writing before work starts, so scope is never a surprise later.

Work starts once the prior month closes at the bank, typically a few business days into the new month once statements are available. Transactions are pulled from bank feeds and connected apps, matched against receipts and invoices already on file, and coded to the correct account. Anything that does not match cleanly, a transfer with no memo, a charge from an unfamiliar vendor, goes on the open-items list instead of being guessed at.

You answer the open items, usually in a few minutes over email or a shared board. Once they clear, accounts are reconciled and the period is locked. A senior reviewer reviews the file before the reports go out, checking for miscoded transactions, missed reconciling items and anything that looks off against the prior month's trend. The reports and open-items list are then delivered on the close date agreed during onboarding, and the cycle starts again for the next period.

Monthly bookkeeping fits any business past the point of tracking things in a spreadsheet or a shoebox of receipts: a service business with a handful of recurring clients, an e-commerce store with daily card and marketplace transactions, a SaaS company burning through a raise, or a professional practice billing hourly. The common thread is transaction volume that has outgrown one person's ability to track it accurately alongside running the business.

It also fits businesses that already have a bookkeeper or an in-house controller but need the monthly mechanics off their plate so that person can spend time on analysis instead of data entry. And it fits a business preparing for a sale, a raise or a loan application, where three to twelve months of clean, reconciled history is the difference between a fast process and a stalled one.

The most common issue we find in a first review is transactions coded to the wrong account, usually because a generic chart of accounts was set up years ago and never revisited as the business changed. The second is unreconciled accounts, where the books show a balance that has not matched the bank in months, sometimes because a duplicate transaction from a bank feed glitch was never caught.

We also regularly find personal expenses mixed into business accounts, contractor payments coded as regular expense instead of tracked for 1099 purposes, and sales tax collected on behalf of a state sitting inside revenue instead of its own liability line. Each of these gets corrected with a written note explaining what changed and why, so nothing silently shifts a number you have already reported somewhere else.

Work happens inside QuickBooks Online or Xero, under your own subscription, so you keep the login and the history if the engagement ever ends. Dext and Hubdoc handle receipt capture, pulling images from email or a mobile app and matching them to the transaction automatically where the data is clear enough. Payment processors like Stripe and PayPal connect directly so processor fees and payout timing are handled correctly instead of treated as a single lump deposit.

For businesses running payroll, Gusto or a similar provider's payroll journal entries are imported and reconciled against what actually hit the bank. We do not require you to adopt a proprietary platform: if you are already set up somewhere reasonable, we work inside it.

Monthly bookkeeping is priced by transaction volume and complexity, not a flat rate that ignores how big the business actually is. The published rate card on the pricing page lays out named tiers by monthly expense volume, from a solo founder under roughly fifty thousand dollars a month in expenses up through higher-volume businesses needing accounts payable and receivable support, contractor 1099 tracking and quarterly reporting packages.

If the books are behind when you start, that catch-up work is scoped and quoted separately from the ongoing monthly fee, so you always know what belongs to getting current and what belongs to staying current. Your exact fee and scope are confirmed in writing before anything begins.

The single biggest driver of a late close is not the bookkeeping itself, it is waiting on information: a bank statement that posts late, a receipt an employee has not submitted, an answer to an open item that sits in an inbox for a week. During onboarding we agree a realistic close date based on when your statements and data actually become available, not an arbitrary business day.

If that date consistently slips because of something on your side, such as a card statement that only finalizes near month end, we flag it and adjust the schedule rather than quietly missing the target every period. The goal is a close date you can actually plan around, whether that is a board update, a loan draw or simply knowing where you stand.