Playbooks
Step-by-step routines you can put in place this week, start to finish, with the decisions already made.
A chart of accounts that splits where your return splits
Design the chart around the questions you ask each month and the lines your 2025 return already has. Where the return splits an expense in two, your accounts should split it too.
When a QuickBooks Desktop to Online migration is actually finished
The import finishing is not the migration finishing. What has to agree between the two files on the conversion date, how to run each figure, and what the Desktop file still has to hold afterward.
Where does opening balance equity go when you clear it?
A leftover balance is several postings with different origins. Trace them one at a time, delete the duplicates, reclassify what was miscoded, and only then move what remains into the right equity accounts.
Scope your catch-up bookkeeping before you reconcile anything
Two decisions come before the first reconciliation: which year you start from, and whether the transactions for those months can still be pulled out of the bank. Answer both and the backlog stops being open-ended.
What to give your accountant for taxes, and the things they should never have to ask for
Nine items, where each one comes from, what your preparer actually does with it, and what a missing one costs you in their hours. Plus the four things they should never have to ask for.
You can review your bookkeeper's work yourself in six checks
Six checks, each naming the report to open and the figure it should equal. Two of them appear nowhere else: the audit log read for changes made after a reconciliation, and payroll deposits confirmed at the source.
Past due invoices, from the first reminder to the write-off
An unpaid invoice ends one of two ways, and both of them change your books. The escalation sequence with wording and timing, the point where a receivable becomes bad debt, and the entry that closes it out.
Amortization of startup costs: how to record what you spent before the business opened
You paid the designer in April, off a personal card, three months before the business opened. Here is where that lands in a set of books, and what the monthly amortization entry looks like after it.
How to read a balance sheet, one line at a time, and what each line should tie to
Most guides teach you to read somebody else's balance sheet. This one walks down your own, naming the document each line should agree with and what it usually means when it doesn't.
Can the owner of an LLC pay himself through payroll? What changes in your books the day the election takes effect
The election is filed and the payroll provider is set up. The part nobody covers is the books: one draw account becomes three, and the transfer you have coded as a draw for two years stops being one.