Solo Bentonville bookkeeping — answered personally, never a queue.
Bookkeeper — answered personally.
A plain-English walkthrough of life on a monthly bookkeeping engagement — what the first call is, what changes on day one, how a typical week and month feel, when the quarterly review shows up, and how the year-end handoff to your CPA actually goes. So you know what working with a solo QuickBooks Online bookkeeper looks like from start to finish.
Plain English · NWA & remote · No sales pitch
Thirty minutes, on the phone or on video. I learn where your books stand today — transaction volume, entities, the chart you came in with, whether anyone’s been working the file lately — and I tell you whether a monthly engagement is the right shape for it, whether you need a catch-up & cleanup first, or whether the right answer is to keep doing what you’re doing with a bit of nudging.
I read every request myself and reply within one business day with a time. No proposal follows the call — only the call, then the engagement letter if you want one. If the right answer is “not me,” I’ll say that too.
What to bring · One banker’s box of statements, an idea of monthly volume, the name of your CPA
Three short steps on day one. After that, the file is in the right shape and the routine can start without me hand-holding you through it.
A one-page letter that names the scope, the monthly fee, and the standing assumption that you own the QuickBooks file and the credentials. Signed once, kept on file, never renewed in surprise.
You stay the primary admin on your QuickBooks Online file — I get added as an accountant user with the access I need to do the work and nothing more. You can revoke access at any time without losing your history.
Bank and credit-card statements from the prior two or three months go into a secure shared folder. That’s my starting point — everything before that I read through for context, but the close starts here.
Each week, statements sync, transactions categorize against a chart that fits how you actually run the business, and bank & credit-card lines get matched to real charges — not glommed into a “miscellaneous” bucket.
Every transaction pulled in during the week gets a category that fits how you actually run the business — quickly, before the inbox fills up with receipts. Office coffee goes under office; vendor payouts don’t get rolled into a catch-all.
Every line on your bank statement gets matched to a real transaction in QuickBooks Online. Anything I can’t match — a missing receipt, a duplicate charge, a fee that quietly doubled — gets flagged for you, not buried.
Every card, every charge, down to the last dollar. The point isn’t a perfect spreadsheet — it’s that on the 10th nothing is left to chase.
The first ten days of every month are reserved for last month’s close. On the 10th — end of business, not “around,” not “by end of week” — you get a short package: P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, and plain-English notes on anything you should look at. See a sample of what they look like →
You don’t need to ask “are we closed yet?” or wonder whether a late statement will stall your CPA. The 10th is the deadline I set myself, and I hold myself to it the same way every month.
P&L · by the 10th
What you made and spent last month.
Short summary in the buckets that match your business, written so you can read it in five minutes and know where the money actually went.
Balance sheet · by the 10th
Where you stood financially at month-end.
A snapshot of what the business owned, what it owed, and what was left at midnight on the last day of the month — runway, solvency, the picture vs. last month.
Cash flow · by the 10th
Where your money actually moved.
Cash in, cash out, what’s sitting in the account right now — useful answer: can I pay next month’s bills, and where is the cushion quietly going?
Also — when you’re behind
First things first — the catch-up & cleanup engagement.
If you’re behind on the books, switching to QuickBooks Online, or fixing what the last bookkeeper left, the catch-up & cleanup is what comes first — not the monthly rhythm. It’s a separate project, scoped and quoted per file, that brings your books into a state where the monthly close can hold every month after that.
Three months in, the monthly file tells a story — revenue trend, where cash is going, who owes you, who you owe. The quarterly review is where that story becomes a decision, not just a report.
What the review covers
The quarterly review is short, but it’s structured so you walk away with a handful of decisions to make — not a stack of pages to read on your own time. NWA owners, we’ll do it in person at your place, a coffee shop, or wherever you run the business. Out of NWA — same call on video.
P&L trend
Are we trending up, flat, or sideways?
Three months of revenue, costs, and margin side-by-side. The useful question: did last quarter move the needle, and where did margin grow or compress?
Cash position
Runway, cushion, the next 60 days.
Where cash is sitting now — operating accounts, savings, owner draws. The useful question: are we two months from a cash crunch, or three months from a comfortable buffer?
AR & AP
Who owes you, who you owe, who’s late.
Open receivables by aging bucket, open payables by aging bucket. The useful question: are we collecting reliably, and are we slipping on our own payments?
Owner question hour
Your decisions, not my opinions.
Bring whatever’s on your mind — a hire you’re considering, a loan you’re pricing, a purchase you want to model. The books are the launching point; the decisions are yours.
NWA owner? We sit down in person — Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, Fayetteville, anywhere you run the business. Out of NWA? See where I work remotely →
Because the books were closed every month — reconciled, categorized, the statements matched line by line — the year-end handoff isn’t a hunt for receipts, statements, and a 1099 roster. By January, every artifact your CPA is going to ask for already lives in the file under the name they’ll ask about: bank & credit-card statements by month, payroll summaries, the 1099 roster, the prior-year return, mileage, depreciation, your owner-question notes. The same close keeps seasonal cash-flow cuts from surprising the books in October.
The CPA walkthrough becomes mechanical — not archaeological. Most CPA engagements I work with finish in under an hour, because nothing is missing and nothing is misnamed. The full printable checklist — the one I run against my own books and walk client books through every quarter — is on the handoff page.
The full handoff checklist
A free printable worksheet you can bring to your CPA, walk through together, and be done — because every line on it already came in clean.
Tell me where your books stand today — transaction volume, entities, any cleanup in the history. I’ll read every request personally and reply within one business day with a time for a free 30-minute call.