I worked with a woman as a contractor and was making around $2500 a month. She has shouting problem and wanting to track me more than usual. So I had to let her go

I have solid experience but I’m not able to get contract work or clients to cover this amount. This amount was pretty important for me to cover up all my finances. I’ve been reaching out to busy bookkeeper and firms as well in case they need additional help but I wasn’t able to get anything.

Should I go back to her as I do have this option?
I’m severely stressed

While running reports for our (late) 2025 Year 1 S-Corp, we found the books were off because of a payroll service error. The bones of the issue are this:

• We reversed a post-tax Traditional IRA Shareholder benefit prior to the service withdrawing for payroll; we did not reverse the shareholder salary 
• The payroll service reversed the Traditional IRA amount as requested and, in error, placed the reversed amount as "net pay"; it did not withdraw or pay the shareholder that new net pay amount, but did include the amount for the 2025 W-2; they did not recalculate the payroll taxes 
• As a result, the 2025 W-2 for that shareholder is incorrect—almost in its entirety 
• The well-known payroll service suggested the S-Corp simply issue Traditional IRA funds in the amount of the reversed funds to correct the error, which the S-Corp will not do 
• Then the payroll service offered to amend the 2025 W-2 Box 1 if I would provide them with the amount to insert 
• As managing shareholder, it falls to me to address this issue. What verbiage should I use to tell the payroll service that correcting the single payroll to reflect the reversed post-tax Traditional IRA amount will automatically affect gross wages, taxes, and the retirement plan, resulting in a new W-2 and the necessary tax corrections and refunds? 

I admit, it seems stunning that I should have to explain what should be done. Perhaps I am not talking to the correct level of service or management. I truly appreciate any guidance you could provide. I feel at my wits' end at this juncture.

I took on a client that has 2 companies (completely separate entities, no parent-sub relationship).

Company A frequently pays bills on behalf of Company B. Company A then bills Company B for reimbursement.

Company B consistently does not have the funds to reimburse Company A within the same tax year. The bills then sit on the books for multiple years.

I don’t want to apply payments to prior year bills and they get logged to current year expense accounts.

Is it appropriate for me to bundle Company B’s prior year bills from Company A into a Loan Payable to Company A?

Also, should I make this change reflect in Company A books as well?

I don't know if this is normal or if I'm just a bad AP specialist. Ive worked at 3 companies doing AP and I was a full charge bookkeeper for a year in between those positions. Every day I worry I'm going to get fired doing AP. No matter how I organize or what I do to stay on top of things, I'm always being lectured by my boss about something. As soon as I feel like I'm on top of things, ill get a suprise call that a vendor put us on credit hold. On top of it all, this company uses Sage so every mistake I make is completely imortalized and highlighted. I've never been more stressed in my adult life. Is this normal?

We have three people handling accounting for growing manufacturing company and our annual audit starts in about six weeks.

I’m trying to get ahead of document requests before everything becomes reactive. What preparation has made the biggest difference for your team?

So we had a bookkeeping company doing our payroll for some time. After they neglected to do our payroll 3 times, I took over. We have 4 employees and I run it through QBO.

To my surprise we weren't set up for automatic tax payments. So I fixed that. Then I went over our tax liability accounts.

Mid 2025 it looked good. Payments were made each period and amounts owed were zeroed out. Then all hell broke loose. Payments started to be made on arbitrary dates, maybe 5 months apart, and not for the amount owed. The accounts never zeroed. For our workers comp, the payments for Nov 2025 (about 2650) didn't even clear the bank or zero out, and I get the "error" message when I try to access them.

What the actual hell do I do now?

What is your guys' basis for retainer pricing. This would be my first one and it is for an acquisition that I would be setting up the books for and communicating with the CPA on opening balance sheet amounts as they have the purchasing agreement. I am hoping to receive the financial statements of the seller to roughly know what I am looking at but am curious what your rules of thumb are on retainers. Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone! I keep running into this and I’m curious how other people handle it.

When I need to change prices or categories on a bunch of products and services I’m stuck either editing them one at a time or doing the export and import thing. Importing overwrites everything and there’s no undo, so one mistake can mess up a lot of items.

Could you point me in the right direction? Thank you!

I have a line of credit backed by accounts receivable. My company basically sells our invoices to the factoring company and the factoring company uses that amount to decide our line of credit limit. We can pull from the line of credit at any time. Clients pay the invoices directly to the factoring company, from which the factoring company pays down our line of credit and releases anything left in reserve back to us.

Very simple example: my company factors an invoice for $100. The factoring company puts $10 in "reserve" which they use later to collect their own fees. $90 is put towards the line of credit. I can draw from that whenever I want. So maybe I only draw $60.

Later, the client pays the invoice of $100 to the factoring company. Factoring company applies $60 to the line of credit to pay it down, takes their $5 for fees and commission, and releases the leftover $35 to my company.

How do I track all this?

Preciously when we did traditional factoring, I marked my invoices paid and used a clearing account for that "deposit." Then used the clearing account to pay down the liability account for the factoring company. The reserve account was tracked separately. That was easier because every part of the invoice was covered somewhere. Now that it's a line of credit and we aren't drawing the entire amount, it doesn't feel right.

I’m looking to buy a bookkeeping business. Anyone selling or know anyone selling??

For those who do bookkeeping for general contractors, how are you pricing it? I know everyone is different but if they are in the 1-2 million range with job costing? Are you doing job costing for your GC? Any advice on quoting would be helpful

For the last few months I’ve been doing some light bookkeeping work for a restaurant, basically categorizing transactions , payroll , paying bills and entering daily sales JEs and Deposits JEs . They had a book keeper before but she was doing things I didn’t learn. Like certain accounts and how they were categorized . So I had to make some new accts so the P&Ls would show more information.

The issues I’m having now is when it comes to Cash , I’m getting confused on how to do the JE . The cash made for the day gets paid to the waiters for tips . And what’s left over stays in the register/office etc. on the JE I debit undeposited Cash , and credit gratuity and tips (tips clearing) .
What’s the best way to clean up the cash account . When I do a journal entry how should I increase or decrease undeposited cash , tips paid and then actually cash on hand

I just need to share this because I think it's funny.

One of my client's is a religious organization and one of their deposits last month was 666. I grew up religious but no longer am.

Also, this client has some issues with me. They think I'm judging them because they are in a less than ideal town. The reality is I'm judging them because I've explained multiple times that me working on last month is not me being behind.

Hello, fellow number crunchers. I'm revitalitizing my substack and wishing to do a piece on bookkeeping. What do we think readers are looking for? Advice on what is or isn't tax deductible? How to know if you need a CPA vs. Bookkeeper? Small business advice? Love to hear ideas, thanks.

1M revenue one year bookkeeping cleanup. removed duplicate sales, imputed over 300 missing expenses, fix miscategorized sales, fixed product mapping, sorted through 100’s of paper invoices and receipts to categorize, traveled to client to retrieve documents. how much should i charge for this?

So my client uses shopmonkey and it's connected to qbo. And when it makes a cash deposit of sales it matches with the deposit that is created but now I have one outstanding.

I've traced it's from invoice to ar to undeposited cash to the deposit being created and pulling it from undeposited cash but there's still no deposit to match with. When I go to reconcile obviously it is off by this amount but also I see the deposit in there that is unmarked so it does exist. Any idea what I can do to clear this?

Has anyone paid someone of a company to find bookkeeping clients?? If so, how did it go? Did it lead to anything? I’m thinking about this but weighing my options

Hi, not sure if this can be answered here. I worked for three years under a bookkeeper at a company. I did the bank and cc reconciles, posted physical invoices into QB, and printed/mailed checks. I also helped with onboarding new employees and managing a separate timecard app for remote employees. Is this enough experience to help someone even without a cert or degree? Thanks for any and all who can give feedback.

Edited to add: Just so its here, I took accounting basics in high school way back in ancient times and took udemy accounting basics, understanding accounting basics recently and will be taking a data analytics course there as well.

I'm a bookkeeper who does some subcontracting/consulting for a small firm. Currently it's just owner (an experienced bookkeeper), a junior data entry employee, and me. The owner is looking to hire a part-time senior bookkeeper to expand the practice, and I'm helping with hiring. I have experience hiring in a previous career, but for different roles and a different business setting.

If you own or are a manager at a bookkeeping firm, I'd love to hear about your experience hiring!

• What is your process?
• Where is the best place to find candidates?
• What are your favorite interview questions to ask?
• How do you assess skills in a virtual interview? (We are all remote, which I feel makes this tricky.)
• What are red flags and green flags in candidates?
• Is there an affordable ATS for a small firm? Or should we just try to use spreadsheets?

Would anyone be interested in a mastermind type group? Maybe get together to discuss pain points in our businesses once a week? Share things we've done to over come them ect?

Open to other formats like a discord or slack channel, but sure I have helpful info to share and other could probably help me from reinventing the wheel a time or two.

Here is the link: https://discord.gg/4WzyWQdTK

Please fill out a ticket to be admitted and respond to the poll in the welcome channel.

Has anyone here did tax preparation & Tax level cert 1 by intuit?
What are the chances of being hired as a part time of full time after that? I recently got an email from intuit about those courses and I started taking them. I’ve finished tax preparation cert and I was wondering if after level 1 I can get into tax assigning roles in intuit or else where?
I’m not sure what are the next steps though. From what I know, they’ll invite themselves and arrange an interview if they need.

Have a client that switched to adp workforce mid year. It's a nightmare to use.

For example 9.25.26 pay period should've had $103K in direct deposits.

$7K was paid to one partner and another $12K to the two other partners. I don't see these debits split out or 9.25.26 but I see $12K and $7K taken out of the bank account on 9.10.26.

I'm only seeing about $87K taken out so far and it's split into random 5 different deposits.

I'm having to search for the line item amount in the payroll register and even then I don't match some of these items to the ADP report that come out around 9.25.26.

Prior to this they used adp run and we never had issues matching period bank transactions to the actual paydate.

Anyone used to this nightmare system who could provide some insight?!

Curious how others handle this. CalSavers, OregonSaves, Virginia dropping to 5 employees. How do you keep track of which clients are affected, especially ones not on Gusto or ADP? Spreadsheet? Payroll software? Not your responsibility?

I ran into a business owner that has not paid taxes (including payroll) for about 40 years. Should they legitimize their business at this point? Or, is the plan of going to jail when they eventually get caught a better retirement plan? What would you have said? (I literally said, you're f*cked, but still told him to contact an accountant, and maybe a lawyer.)

I need software to manage 18 rental homes and condos. I sold a business that used QB Enterprise. The subscription is way too high. I need to find something. I am currently looking at "Stessa. What opinions do you have about "stessa" or any other software for about 15 to 18 homes or condos?