Steingard Financial

English
Book a Call

Should You Hire a Bookkeeper or Just Use QuickBooks Yourself?

A cafe owner sitting alone at a table in his empty cafe after closing

By Adam Cortez · Steingard Financial

QuickBooks records what you tell it. The question is who checks it.

Plenty of small business owners run their own books in QuickBooks, and for some of them it’s the right call. I’ve also seen what a file looks like after two years of “I’ll catch up on it this weekend.” Here’s how I’d decide.

Doing it yourself works when:

  • You have one bank account and one card, and not many transactions a month.
  • You don’t run payroll and don’t collect sales tax.
  • You actually reconcile every month, not just categorize the bank feed.
  • You enjoy it, or at least don’t mind it, and it doesn’t take time you’d bill for.

It stops working when:

  • You’re categorizing but not reconciling. The bank feed makes books look finished when they aren’t. Reconciliation is the step that catches duplicates, missing transactions and payments recorded twice.
  • You’ve added payroll, sales tax or contractors. Each one brings filings with deadlines and penalties. In California that means the IRS, the EDD and often the CDTFA.
  • Your numbers have to convince someone else. A lender, an investor, a buyer or a landlord will ask for statements. Books that only make sense to you don’t help.
  • You’re behind. If the last reconciled month was more than a quarter ago, the work tends to compound. Catching up a year of books is a bigger job than keeping a year current.
  • Your time is worth more than the fee. If you bill $100 an hour and spend six hours a month on the books, that’s $600 of your time.

The middle option

You don’t have to choose all or nothing. Some owners keep entering their own invoices and expenses and pay a bookkeeper to reconcile, close the month and send statements. Others get a one-time cleanup, then take the books back.

What to ask yourself

  1. When was the last month I fully reconciled?
  2. Could I hand a lender my last three months of statements today?
  3. Do I know my profit last month to within a few hundred dollars?

If any answer is “no” or “not sure,” it’s worth talking to someone. That doesn’t have to be us. For what it’s worth, Steingard’s monthly bookkeeping is $199 to $999 a month, inside your own QuickBooks file, so you keep full access either way.

Adam Cortez is the founder of Steingard Financial and an Intuit-certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor.

This article was also published on LinkedIn.