Bookkeeping that already talks to your tax return.
Most owners find out how the year went in April. The news arrives from a tax preparer who inherited the books in February and had never seen them before. Bookkeeping is supposed to mean you already knew. Here the bookkeepers and the Enrolled Agent work in the same firm. There is no handover, so you stop learning things 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 sorts transactions well. It cannot spot the errors that cost real money. It will not notice that you expensed an inventory purchase in the month you paid, instead of the month the units sold. It will not notice that a marketplace collected sales tax for you, while those same sales counted toward a registration threshold in four states. Those are not data-entry errors. They are judgment errors, and they arrive as a tax bill.
Our bookkeepers do the books. Our Enrolled Agent files the return. They work in the same firm and they talk during the year. That sounds like a detail from an organisation chart. It is the whole product. Nothing passes between a bookkeeper who does not do tax and a preparer who inherits whatever arrives in February.
Behind, or just wrong?
Almost nobody sets out to fall behind. Books go wrong two ways, and the two ways have different causes. Either the work stopped, usually because the person doing it left or got busy in a good quarter. Or the work continued and was wrong the whole time, which is worse, because nothing looked broken.
That is why these are two jobs and not one. Catch-up fills in what is missing, which is months or years of transactions nobody recorded. Cleanup corrects what is there but wrong: miscategorised expenses, a chart of accounts full of duplicates, reconciliations that never balanced. Many businesses need both. Which one you need decides the timeline and the cost.
If you are years behind and dreading this conversation, the short version is this. We have seen worse. It is fixable. The penalty exposure usually shrinks the sooner someone looks at it. Nobody here will make you feel bad about a shoebox.
That is not a throwaway line. The most common reason books stay bad for years is not cost, and it is not difficulty. It is embarrassment. Every month that passes makes the showing worse, so it keeps not happening. Whatever state yours are in, you are not the worst we have seen this year. You are almost certainly not the worst we have seen this month.
More on catch-up and cleanup, including what the penalty clock costs while you wait →
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 and wholesale, often all at once. The settlement deposit that reaches your bank is not revenue. It is thousands of netted transactions. Book it as revenue and you overstate your sales, and you quietly lose every FBA and advertising fee you could have deducted.
- Agencies & studios
- Pass-through media spend is what wrecks agency books. Bill it gross and your revenue looks three times what you earned, which distorts every number below it. Then come 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 and severance filings. Most general bookkeepers do not know this vocabulary. That is why oil and gas books so often fail to show what actually happened in the field.
- Film & production
- Loan-out corporations and per-project accounting. A loan-out costs real money to maintain every year, whether the work arrives or not. It is worth having someone check that the structure still earns its keep.
- Contractors & trades
- Job costing and work in progress. Without them you learn that a job lost money after it finished, which is the most expensive time to learn it. We have a general contractor on the team. You will not be explaining retainage, change orders or draw schedules to someone who has only read about them. We also work with ServiceTitan and its QuickBooks integration, and we connect yours to your books as its own project. Read more →
- Real estate investors & landlords
- Per-property books, capital versus repair, and depreciation schedules that hold up. Passive-loss tracking matters at sale, not only at filing. There is a real estate professional on the team as well. These classification questions are worth real money and are routinely got wrong.
Getting your systems to talk to your books
Most of the worst books we see are not neglected. They are the result of two systems that nobody joined properly. A field or project platform sits on one side and the accounting sits on the other. Jobs get created twice under slightly different names. Somebody re-keys 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. It does not turn into a retainer. It is usually worth doing before a cleanup rather than after, because connecting the systems first means the cleanup happens once instead of twice.
We work with ServiceTitan and its QuickBooks integration in particular, both Online and Desktop. Your ServiceTitan revenue may never quite match your P&L, and everyone may have learned to live with a "known difference." That gap has a specific cause. It is usually GL mapping. A sub-account is named differently on each side. An account type disagrees. Or somebody reorganised the chart of accounts while the integration kept pointing at the old one. The sync reports success the whole time. That is why nobody notices.
This is most common in trades and home services, where the field software is the business. It applies anywhere the tools and the ledger disagree.
What it costs
Monthly bookkeeping starts at $400/month.
| Service | Starts at | What moves it up |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly bookkeeping | $400/month | Transaction volume, number of accounts and sales channels, payroll, inventory |
| Catch-up & cleanup | Quoted after we look | How far behind, and how much of the documentation survives |
| Tax preparation | $500 | Entity type, states, and the complexity of the return |
| Advisory | $1,500 | Scope of the engagement |
Where you land above that depends on the work itself. Transaction volume matters. So does the number of bank and card accounts that feed in, the number of sales channels, and whether payroll and inventory are involved. A single-entity service business sits near the bottom of the range. A multi-channel seller with inventory and a payroll run does not.
We quote catch-up and cleanup separately, after we have seen the state of things. A blind quote is how people end up with a number that changes later. We would rather look first and tell you.
You can still put a rough number on it yourself before you call. The convention most of this industry uses is the monthly rate multiplied by the months you are behind. Fourteen months behind on a business that would sit at $400 a month puts you somewhere near $5,600. It is a blunt instrument and the real quote moves with how much documentation survived. But if that figure is not survivable, tell us that on the first call and we will talk about sequencing rather than pretending otherwise.
You will have a fixed monthly figure before you commit to anything. For reference, tax preparation starts at $500 and advisory at $1,500. If bookkeeping is all you need, that is all we will 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 $400 a month we sit above the going rate for a local bookkeeper. That is deliberate. You are also getting the Enrolled Agent who files the return. If price is the deciding factor, offshore services cost a fraction of this. For a simple single-account business they may well be the right answer.
We do not take on multi-state sales tax registration and filing as part of bookkeeping. It is a genuinely different compliance job, and we would rather say so now than half-do it. We also do not 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.
Give us read-only access to the file, or the last three bank statements if the file is the problem. You get back what is actually wrong, what it takes to fix, and a fixed monthly figure. No charge for the look and no obligation after it. If your books are in better shape than you think, we'll say so and you will have lost an afternoon.
Send us your booksOr reach us directly: 347-787-0596 · hello@rwbtax.us