QuickBooks bookkeeping services for businesses already running QBO

More than categorising the bank feed, which is the part most people picture. On a Growth file, a normal month looks like this: we review every transaction QuickBooks pulled in and code it against your chart of accounts, match customer payments to the invoices they settle so nothing lands in Undeposited Funds and stays there, enter and schedule bills, and reconcile every bank, credit card, loan and merchant account against the actual statement rather than against the feed balance.

Then comes the part that makes it a close rather than data entry: accruals and prepayments where they change the picture, depreciation, a line-by-line look at the balance sheet to see whether each balance can be proved, and a review of the profit and loss against the previous two months to catch coding that has drifted. When it is right we set the closing date password, produce the profit and loss, balance sheet and statement of cash flows, and send a short note on what moved and why. Books are closed by the 10th. On Essentials the scope is narrower: up to 2 bank or card accounts reconciled and a profit and loss and balance sheet, without A/R, A/P, the cash flow statement or the written note.

No. We ask you to invite us as an accountant user from Manage Users in QuickBooks Online, or as a standard user with whatever access you are comfortable giving. You stay the primary admin, the subscription stays in your name and on your card, and you can remove our access in about thirty seconds without asking anyone.

We also never ask for online banking credentials. Bank feeds are authorised by you, directly with your bank through the QuickBooks connection flow, and if a feed needs reconnecting we tell you and you click it. Any bookkeeper who asks for your bank password or your QuickBooks primary admin login is asking for more than the work requires. There is a side benefit to the accountant user route: every action we take is stamped in the QuickBooks audit log with our name, the date and the before-and-after values, so our work is inspectable by you at any time without you having to take our word for anything.

Yes, and it is quoted as a separate one-off fixed fee rather than folded into a monthly price. The first step is a diagnostic: we open the file, run the balance sheet, the profit and loss by month and the audit log, and list what is actually wrong. Duplicated feed imports, an Opening Balance Equity balance nobody ever closed out, Undeposited Funds that has been growing for two years, reconciliations forced shut with an adjustment, expenses coded to whichever account was closest alphabetically. You get that list and a fixed number before we touch anything.

Then we work oldest month forward, because repairing the current month on top of a broken prior year just moves the problem. Where bank feeds no longer reach back far enough, and QuickBooks feeds usually pull only recent history, we work from statements instead. At the end you have a file where every balance sheet line can be proved with a schedule, plus a written note on the judgement calls we made so your accountant can follow them. The full method is in our guide to catching up 12 months of bookkeeping.

Undeposited Funds is a holding account and it is meant to be temporary. You receive a payment against an invoice, it sits in Undeposited Funds, and when the money lands you create a Bank Deposit that groups those payments into the single line that actually hit your account. The balance clears.

It grows when that second half never happens, usually because the deposit on the bank feed was added as new income instead of matched to the payments already waiting. That counts the revenue twice: once on the invoice, once on the feed line. We clear it by opening the account, matching each item back to the real deposit it belongs to, removing the duplicate income entries, and reversing any payment that was never genuinely received so the invoice goes back to open. After the fix, the routine matters more than the repair: if you take card or platform payments, grouping deposits has to be part of the weekly rhythm rather than something attempted in a panic at year-end.

Opening Balance Equity is the plug account QuickBooks uses during setup. When you enter an opening balance on a bank account, or import a trial balance that does not balance, QuickBooks posts the difference there so the file still balances. It is supposed to be emptied as the last step of setting the file up. In practice it sits on the balance sheet for years, and because most owners never read the balance sheet, nobody notices.

Clearing it properly is not a matter of writing one journal to make it disappear. We work out what each component actually was: a genuine opening bank balance, an unrecorded loan, money the owner put in, a prior-year retained earnings figure that was never brought across. Each piece is reclassified to the account it belongs in, and only the true prior-period residual moves to Retained Earnings. If the file's opening position was never agreed to a prior-year trial balance we say so, because an Opening Balance Equity balance is often the visible symptom of a setup that was never finished.

Yes, with an accountant user. In QuickBooks Online the Undo option sits under Accountant Tools, in the history list on the Reconcile screen, and it un-reconciles a whole month at once. There is no partial undo, which is exactly why it is not a routine tool. Most of the time the right move is smaller: run the Reconciliation Discrepancy report, find the transaction that was edited, deleted or re-dated after the month was closed, and correct that one thing.

A full undo is warranted when the reconciliation was never real in the first place, typically when someone forced it shut with a reconciliation adjustment to make the difference go away, which simply parks the error in a discrepancies expense account. When we do undo, we work from the most recent month backwards to the first bad one, re-reconcile forward against the actual statements, and then set a closing date password so the period cannot be edited again without it. If a prior year is involved we tell you first, because it can change figures your accountant has already used.

We switch auto-add off on almost every file we take over. Bank rules themselves are genuinely useful. A rule that codes your monthly software subscription, your rent or your merchant fees saves real time, and QuickBooks can match on vendor, amount, description or the raw bank text.

The problem is the automatic-add switch, which posts the transaction straight into the register with nobody looking at it. The day a rule is slightly too broad, it starts silently miscoding. The classic case is a rule on a large retailer or marketplace: it correctly catches the $40 of stationery and it also catches the $1,200 laptop, and both land in office supplies. By the time anyone reads the profit and loss there are six months of it to unpick. Our rhythm is rules on, auto-add off. QuickBooks suggests the category, a person confirms it, and anything that does not fit the pattern gets stopped. We review the whole rule set at least quarterly and delete the ones that have stopped matching reality.

Classes and locations are the way to slice one company's numbers without splitting the file. A class is usually the thing you want a profit and loss for: a service line, a department, a project type. A location is usually a place or a trading name. Both are switched on in Account and Settings under Advanced, and both only work if they are enforced, because the setting that warns you when a transaction has no class is the difference between real departmental reporting and a report with a large unspecified column.

Use separate QuickBooks companies when the entities are genuinely separate legal entities with their own bank accounts, their own filings and their own balance sheets. Do not split files just to see two sides of one business, or you will be reconciling intercompany balances forever for reporting you could have had from classes. One practical note: class and location tracking is a Plus and Advanced feature, so on Simple Start or Essentials the real question is whether the reporting justifies the upgrade.

QuickBooks Online tracks inventory on Plus and Advanced, and it costs on FIFO only. There is no average cost and no LIFO option in QuickBooks Online. For a business buying and selling finished goods with straightforward purchase costs, it works well enough.

It strains anywhere costing gets real: landed costs such as freight and duty are not applied to inventory items automatically, there is no bill of materials assembly on Plus, negative quantities are allowed and will quietly produce nonsense cost of goods sold, and there is no lot or serial tracking. In those cases we usually recommend a dedicated inventory app that posts summarised journals into QuickBooks rather than forcing QuickBooks to do a job it was not built for. Either way we insist on the same monthly check: inventory on the balance sheet agreed to a count or to the app valuation, cost of goods sold agreed to sales, and negative-quantity items investigated rather than ignored. An inventory balance nobody proves is the least reliable number on most small business balance sheets.

No. We do not file sales tax returns, VAT returns or income tax returns, and we do not audit. We would rather be plain about that now than have it surface in March.

What we do is make the filing straightforward for whoever does it. Sales tax and VAT are coded correctly on transactions as they are entered rather than reconstructed afterwards, the liability account is agreed to what the QuickBooks sales tax centre says is owed, 1099 vendors are flagged and their totals tracked through the year, and you get a year-end pack with a trial balance, reconciliations and a schedule for every balance sheet line, handed to your CPA, EA or chartered accountant in the format they asked for. A tax professional who receives reconciled books and a schedule for every balance should not need to bill hours repairing them first. If you do not have a tax professional we will tell you what kind you need, but we will not pretend to be one.