Half of our business activity comes from cleaning up QuickBooks online accounting, bank reconciliations and financial statements. Oftentimes, we assist business owners with this process for multiple years, if the client has not filed business tax returns for several years.
The usual progression for a business owner is they start recording the accounting themselves in QuickBooks online. This goes okay for maybe a year or two, but when the business reaches approximately $250k to $500k of annual sales, the business owner becomes too busy, and the accounting gets put on the back burner.
The business owners know they have a lot of money coming in and out, but they start to question, “Is my business profitable, or not?”
Accounting is not easy. QuickBooks Online is a great program, but the problem is that Intuit makes it seem like it’s easy, but it’s not. It does not think for you, and the suggestions it makes to record accounting transactions are typically incorrect. Some people think they can just get a QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor certification, and then they are an accountant. This is far from the truth. Accounting takes years to learn and, in my opinion, a 4-year bachelor’s degree in accounting is needed before starting to work on multi-million dollar companies.
Maybe it’s somewhat simple if your business stays under the $100k annual sales mark, but if your business is making over $1m in sales, it’s time to hire a professional accountant.
As a business owner, it’s just not a good use of your time recording the accounting when his/her focus should be working on the business, not in the business.
After running a CPA firm for seven years with a strong accounting team, it has become very clear to me that a novice accountant cannot handle QuickBooks online accounting for a business with over $1m or $2m in annual sales.
I’ve realized that if we want to serve businesses with $1m – $10m in annual sales, I need to hire accountants who have served as Controllers of large companies, have around 10 years of experience, and a 4-year accounting degree is a must. Repeatedly, we have clients come to us who were paying a bookkeeper $25 per hour and their books are a total mess.
I am not saying this to boast, I am saying this is as caution. Often, we see clients that have already paid a novice bookkeeper thousands of dollars to clean up their books, but the project never gets completed and they are in a bigger mess than they started out with.
I hope this message helps a business owner out there! I see the same QuickBooks Online situations almost every day. We are here to help, and we have your back!
Every business that we have worked with, we have successfully improved the condition of their books financially. A big attributor to the financial improvements we help make for our clients is that our accounting team and tax team work closely togethttps://calendly.com/josh-289/30min?month=2023-12her to implement financial/tax strategies that will help them.
Please feel free to reach out for a free 30-minute consultation.