Plan one
Basic Bookkeeping
Accurate books and real financial statements every month, handled by a certified QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor. This is the foundation, and for a lot of small businesses it is everything they need.
What Basic Bookkeeping covers
Three things, done consistently. Consistency is most of what separates books you can rely on from books you have to reconstruct.
Weekly bank feed monitoring
Your bank and credit card activity flows into QuickBooks Online automatically. We review and categorize it every week rather than letting a month stack up.
Weekly matters more than it sounds. A transaction reviewed within days is one you still remember, and one where the receipt still exists. A transaction reviewed nine weeks later is a guess. Reviewing weekly also means a duplicate charge, a wrong amount, or activity you did not authorize surfaces while you can still do something about it.
What this saves you: the Sunday night where you sit down to 300 uncategorized transactions and cannot remember what half of them were for.
Monthly bank reconciliations
At month end we match your books against the actual bank and credit card statements. Every transaction is accounted for, and anything that does not line up gets chased down until it does.
This is the step that catches the problems nobody notices otherwise. Duplicate charges. Deposits that never landed. Checks written months ago that never cleared. Subscriptions still billing for software you cancelled. Bank errors, which do happen. Reconciliation is also the difference between books that are merely filled in and books that are actually correct, which is why lenders and CPAs ask whether your accounts are reconciled before they ask anything else.
What this saves you: finding out at tax time that the numbers you have been making decisions from for eleven months were wrong.
Monthly financial statements
Each month you get a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet, prepared from reconciled books.
The profit and loss shows what came in, what went out, and what was left over across the period. The balance sheet shows what the business owns and owes at a point in time. Together they answer the questions owners actually ask: are margins holding, which costs are creeping, can the business afford a hire, and is the thing that feels profitable actually profitable.
What this saves you: running the business on your bank balance, which tells you what you have today and nothing about whether you are making money.
Basic is probably right if
- You are doing the books yourself and it keeps sliding
- You want to see real numbers monthly instead of once a year
- You pay your own vendors and handle payroll, or have no payroll
- Your CPA has asked for cleaner records at tax time
- You need reconciled books for a lender or an application
- You are early enough that simple is genuinely better
You probably need more if
- Paying vendor bills eats a morning every week. Intermediate takes that over.
- You are running payroll yourself and would rather not. Also Intermediate.
- Your questions have moved from what happened to what happens if. That is Advanced.
- You need budgets, forecasts, or someone to think through a hire or a loan with you. Advanced again.
- Prior months or years are a mess. Cleanup comes first, before any monthly plan. Ask about cleanup.
If the past few months are a mess
Monthly bookkeeping works forward from wherever your records currently stand, so if those records are wrong, the monthly work inherits the problem. When there is history to sort out, we clean it up first and then start the ongoing plan from solid ground. Cleanup is quoted separately, because scope depends entirely on how far back it goes.
Ask about cleanupQuestions about Basic Bookkeeping
What is the difference between bookkeeping and accounting?
Bookkeeping is the recording and organizing: categorizing transactions, reconciling accounts, and producing financial statements. Accounting is the interpretation built on top of that, including tax strategy, advisory work, and audited reporting. Good bookkeeping is what makes good accounting possible, because no amount of analysis fixes inaccurate underlying records.
Do I need to use QuickBooks Online?
Yes. We work in QuickBooks Online as a certified QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor, which means tested, current expertise in that platform specifically. If you already have a company file we can take it over and correct it as needed. If you do not have one, we set it up.
Will you catch mistakes in how things were categorized before?
Going forward, yes, that is part of the weekly review. For periods before we started, correcting prior categorization is cleanup work rather than part of the monthly plan. We will tell you what we find and what it would take to fix it.
Is Basic enough, or should I start higher?
If you are paying your own vendors and either running payroll yourself comfortably or have no payroll, Basic usually covers it. The most common reasons to start higher are accounts payable eating real time each week, or wanting forward-looking budgets and forecasts rather than monthly reporting. You do not have to decide alone, and moving up later is straightforward.
Do you work with businesses outside Ohio?
Yes. Putnam Accounting Solutions is based in the Akron, Ohio area and works with small businesses nationwide. All of the work is handled remotely, so where you are does not affect whether we can help.
Hand the books over
Tell us what the business does, roughly how much activity runs through it, and what is currently causing you problems. We will confirm whether Basic is the right fit, quote your monthly rate, and tell you honestly if you do not need us yet.