Bookkeeping that already talks to your tax return.
Most owners find out how their year went in April, from a tax preparer who inherited the books in February and had never seen them before. Bookkeeping is supposed to mean you already knew. Our bookkeepers and our Enrolled Agent work in the same firm, so that handover doesn't exist — and you stop finding things out eleven months late.
- ✓ Enrolled Agent — licensed by the U.S. Treasury
- ✓ Doing this since 2013
- ✓ Bookkeepers, a general contractor and a real estate pro on the team
The problem isn't the data entry
Software categorises transactions well. What it can't do is notice that your inventory purchase was expensed the month you paid for it instead of when the units sold, or that the marketplace collecting sales tax on your behalf still counted those sales toward a registration threshold in four states. Those aren't data-entry errors. They're judgment errors, and they surface as a tax bill.
Our bookkeepers do the books. Our Enrolled Agent files the return. They sit in the same firm and talk to each other during the year, which sounds like an organisational detail and is actually the whole product — nothing gets handed between a bookkeeper who doesn't do tax and a preparer who inherits whatever arrives in February.
Behind, or just wrong?
These get treated as the same job and they aren't. Catch-up fills in what's missing — months or years of transactions nobody recorded. Cleanup fixes what's there but wrong: miscategorised expenses, a chart of accounts that grew duplicates, reconciliations that never balanced. Plenty of businesses need both, and knowing which is which is what decides how long it takes and what it costs.
If you're several years behind and dreading the conversation: we've seen worse, it's fixable, and the penalty exposure usually gets smaller the sooner someone looks at it. Nobody here is going to make you feel bad about a shoebox.
That last part isn't a throwaway. The most common reason books stay bad for years isn't cost or difficulty — it's that the owner is embarrassed to show anyone. Every month that goes by makes the showing worse, so it keeps not happening. Whatever state yours are in, you are not the worst we've seen this year, and you almost certainly aren't the worst we've seen this month.
Who we do this for
Not every industry, and deliberately so. These are the ones where we know the vocabulary well enough that you won't be teaching us your business.
- E-commerce & multi-channel sellers
- Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, wholesale — often all at once. The settlement deposit that hits your bank is thousands of netted transactions, not revenue, and booking it as revenue overstates your sales while quietly losing every FBA and advertising fee you were entitled to deduct.
- Agencies & studios
- Pass-through media spend is the one that wrecks agency books — bill it gross and your revenue looks triple what you actually earned, which distorts everything downstream. Plus deferred retainers, project profitability, and getting contractor-versus-employee right before it becomes a payroll problem. Read more →
- Oil & gas working interest owners
- JIB, AFEs, division orders, depletion, severance filings. Most general bookkeepers don't know the vocabulary, which is exactly why oil and gas books so often fail to reflect what actually happened in the field.
- Film & production
- Loan-out corporations, per-project accounting, and the reality that a loan-out costs real money to maintain every year whether the work comes in or not. Worth having someone check the structure still earns its keep.
- Contractors & trades
- Job costing and work-in-progress — without them you find out a job lost money after it's finished, which is the most expensive possible time to learn it. We have a general contractor on the team, so you won't be explaining retainage, change orders or draw schedules to someone who's only read about them. We work with ServiceTitan and its QuickBooks integration too, and will connect yours to your books as its own project. Read more →
- Real estate investors & landlords
- Per-property books, capital versus repair, depreciation schedules that hold up, and passive-loss tracking that matters at sale rather than just at filing. There's a real estate professional on the team as well — the classification questions here are worth real money and are routinely got wrong.
Getting your systems to talk to your books
Most of the worst books we see aren't neglected — they're the result of two systems that were never properly joined. A field or project platform on one side, accounting on the other, jobs created twice under slightly different names, and somebody re-keying the difference every month until they stop.
We do that setup as its own engagement, separate from monthly bookkeeping. It has a defined scope and an end date rather than becoming a retainer, and it's usually worth doing before a cleanup rather than after — connect the systems first and the cleanup happens once instead of twice.
We work with ServiceTitan and its QuickBooks integration in particular — Online and Desktop. If your ServiceTitan revenue has never quite matched your P&L and everyone has learned to live with a "known difference," that gap has a specific cause. It's usually GL mapping: a sub-account named differently on each side, an account type that disagrees, or a chart of accounts someone reorganised while the integration kept pointing at the old one. The sync still reports success the whole time, which is why it goes unnoticed.
Most common in trades and home services, where the field software is the business — but it applies anywhere the tools and the ledger disagree.
What it costs
Monthly bookkeeping starts at $300/month.
Where you land above that depends on the actual work — transaction volume, how many accounts and sales channels feed in, whether payroll and inventory are involved. A single-entity service business sits near the bottom; a multi-channel seller with inventory and a payroll run does not.
Catch-up and cleanup are quoted separately, once we've actually seen the state of things. Quoting that blind is how people end up with a number that changes later, and we'd rather look first and tell you.
You'll have a fixed monthly figure before you commit to anything. For reference, tax prep starts at $500 and advisory at $1,500 — and if bookkeeping is all you need, that's all we'll sell you. We won't oversell you.
What we don't do
We aren't the cheapest, and we're not trying to be — at $300 a month we're roughly where the good local firms sit. If price is the deciding factor there are offshore services at a fraction of it, and for a simple single-account business they may be the right answer.
We don't take on multi-state sales tax registration and filing as part of bookkeeping — it's a genuinely different compliance job and we'd rather tell you that now than half-do it. And we don't work in every industry: the list above is the list, because knowing your vocabulary is most of what makes this worth paying for.
Send us your books. We'll tell you where they stand.
No charge for the look, and no obligation after it. If your books are in better shape than you think, we'll say so.
Let's see if we're a fitOr reach us directly — 347-787-0596 · hello@rwbtax.us