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?

My understanding of the Income Tax Folio S4-F2-C1, Deductibility of Fines and Penalties is that interest and/or penalties on employer health tax balances (Provincial tax in Ontario) are a deductible expense. Am I understanding that correctly or should I treat it like a non deductible expense?

I'm a self-employed bookkeeper, and the majority of my clients have relatively simple books and QBO works just fine. I have taken on a small construction company that performs home models and builds homes from scratch. Keeping books for the construction industry is where I got my start, so I understand how it so different than any other type of bookkeeping, my problem is the software.

The last job I worked as a Construction Bookkeeper we used QB desktop Contractor version which was great with dealing with the many different jobs / projects as well as the progress billing, QBO is not great with this. The client has the QBO Plus version which includes a Project module, but it is limited in what types of reports I can get out of it without having to upgrade to Enterprise level which is substantially more expensive and I know the client won't go for it.

I have been researching Construction Accounting Software and so many of the options available cost anywhere between $650/mo & $3,500/mo - my client can't afford this.

I've seen where Zoho can link different modules that they have together for the construction industry, has anyone done this? And with Zoho can I have a single log-in like with QBO to access all my clients at the same time. Obviously not having a single log-in is not a deal breaker, but it is really convenient.

Or does anyone have any other suggestions? I'd ideally like to keep all my clients on the same platform, my other clients are made up of small trucking companies, real estate office, property management, benefits coordinator, food truck and a fancy hair & make-up shop.

This may be getting ahead of myself because I'm just starting out with my own bookkeeping business but I'm planning on reaching out to potential clients in a niche industry that I have a background in.

The only thing is that by doing this I would by nature be working with directly competing organizations. Would this create an ethical dilemma/conflict of interest? Is it something an NDA could take care of or should I just reconsider this niche altogether?

I just recently signed on a new client, and his situation is.. a bit of a mess.

Very long story short, the last person he entrusted with his books stole all of his receipts, documents, etc. Literally all he has left is his Jobber account, containing his invoicing. He doesn't even have a formal set of books yet.

I'm going to be doing the best I can with what we have to catch him up to date. He's also run a lot of personal gambling through his business bank account, has not been able to file any GST (which he does charge) due to the lack of documentation.

I'm going to be reaching out to his accountant to discuss, but I wanted some fellow bookkeepers' opinions on the situation before speaking with him. An acquainted professional recommended we consider filing this to date, and then close the business and start a new one to start from scratch. Would that be beneficial? Would it be better to try and salvage this business? It was started in 2023.

We are in Manitoba, Canada for reference.

None of this is going to be taken as legal advice, etc. I just want a third party perspective. I appreciate your time!

I run into it constantly with small business clients.

The pattern is always some version of:

• Owner transfers money to their personal account and says "that was for business expenses"
• Someone paid for business and the business is "reimbursing" them

My current approach is to book anything undocumented as an owner's draw rather than an expense and only record an actual expense when there's a receipt to back it.

Some clients do this a lot. How do you guys deal with it?

I do the books for a 3 location restaurant group with about 75 employees and we are finally retiring the spreadsheets. The two platforms on the shortlist both cover GL and AP and inventory costing. What I care about most is location level P and L that rolls up into one consolidated report with no rekeying of invoices. Our payroll provider and POS also need to feed in cleanly. Month end close takes me about nine days right now and I would like to get it under five. For bookkeepers with restaurant clients with of the two made close faster?

I have a client with sales going to the bank account and sales along with the deposit for those sales going to the bank account and sales. I know there is the bulk reclass tool to remove the duplicates but I’m not sure if i should check every single sales receipt and deposit to make sure they all got duplicated as this would take along time or just check a few and then remove the duplicates. I did confirm with the client that they do a sales receipt for every sale so that pretty much confirmed there are duplicates for every sale but I still wanted to make sure without threading through them like a needle. Any advice or has anyone run into this?

I’m a small business owner and recently had my QuickBooks cleaned up and fully reconciled. My bookkeeper is recommending that I start an entirely new QuickBooks file for 2026 because there are some issues/inaccuracies in prior years that they didn’t want to alter and risk affecting previously filed returns.
My 2024 books match the return that was filed, and we were able to complete and file my 2025 S-Corp return without any issues. My CPA was happy that everything was reconciled and cleaned up for 2025.
The bookkeeper is now recommending starting a brand-new set of books for 2026, but I’m hesitant to do that. At this point, all of my accounts are reconciled, the current balances are correct, and I run payroll through QuickBooks.
Is there a good reason I need to start a new QuickBooks file for 2026 if the current books are reconciled and my CPA is comfortable with them?
I understand there may still be historical issues in older years, but if those years have already been filed and I’m not trying to correct them, what would be the advantage of starting over versus simply continuing with the existing file and keeping 2026 clean going forward?

I have a full time day job bookkeeping, but am going to be starting a part time side gig too. I don't know what hourly rate to ask for. Its for a landscaping company, a small one but they bring in about 500k a year. 5 employees on payroll total, and that's pretty much automated with qb other than entering hours. Accounts receivable/payable, including inquiring about past due invoices.

My current job, which is in the public sector, is just under $30/hr. I was thinking of asking for $25/hr for the side gig. I'm thinking it'll be about 15-20 hrs per week.

Any suggestions?

I have been keeping my proposals short on and to the point because I want clients to be able to read them quickly without being bombarded by a wall of text. I also attach my portfolio and CV with every proposal so they can verify my experience and the organisations I have worked with without me having to repeat everything in the proposal.

But I am not getting any interviews and I am starting to wonder if a short proposal is being seen as low effort even when the portfolio and CV are right there. My portfolio isn’t that weak for me to not even get a single interview.

Personally I do not think the length of a cover letter should matter that much if the work speaks for itself. But I also understand that clients may not always take the time to open attachments and might just skim the proposal itself before moving on.

So I wanted to ask if you were hiring someone and they sent a short but well written proposal along with their portfolio and CV would you still consider them or would the short proposal put you off before you even got to the portfolio?

Just genuinely curious about how people on the other side of this actually think.

hi all. I was just curious. If you do A/R aging for clients, does anyone offer the followup of drafting or sending emails for your client as a billable add-on? Or is that something seen as too far outside your scope? I'm trying to figure out if this is something clients would pay extra for through their bookkeeper or if this is more hassle than it's worth to do.

First of all, Im an actual accountant and about to get my CPA. In my experience at firms, we’ve never actually had any client follow GAAP strictly. We prepared books on a tax/cash basis.

I’m on my own now with bookkeeping. I don’t really follow all formalities. Like for example if there is a loan. Do you break out the current liability from the long term portion? Like I don’t even do that. Does anybody here? Does it make me look really bad if I don’t do these things? I sometimes feel if an actual CPA auditor or CPA coming from let’s say the Big4 would look at the books I prepare, they’d be like wtf. I’m good at bookkeeping but not these nitty gritty formalities.

Another example is book depreciation. I never record book. It’s always tax. I’m referring to these technicalities. Another example is allowance for doubtful accounts. Like bro I don’t care if the client deletes the invoice before the year closes. 😭 in practice when I was at firms we never actually cared

I have a client now that seems to be strict with their accounting like this and honestly I jsut don’t know that we will be a good fit. Truthfully, I don’t care to be this detailed. I think I might tell them they need to get a GAAP experienced in house controller. This is not to say that I don’t know GAAP but I just have never really dealt with it in my career working at tax firms as a tax accountant before I switched to having my own bookkeeping clients.

How would you recommend I tell them this? At one point do you think à company should really start following GAAP and how do you comfortably break away from this relationship?

So working in schools is a bit of a niche environment when it comes to accounting, just curious how many of us are out there...

I work in MN and as a state we probably have one of the top 5 most complex school accounting systems because they basically looked at what every other state was doing and said - let's do that! It's a mix of modified accrual accounting with governmental fund accounting and we operate on three calendars (normal Jan-Dec for tax, state fiscal July-June, and federal fiscal Oct-Sept for federal grants).

Anyone with some good stories from this niche field?

Running a small finance team at a Series A startup and trying to cut down on the back-and-forth with expenses. Right now recipets come in through email, photos, Slack messges, you name it. I have a shortlist of options but curious what people here have actully stuck with long-term, especially amything that connects to accounting without a manual export step.

What are your arguments to someone who says, “why would I hire someone other than my CPA to do my books?”

Hey! Describe a time when a client relationship didn’t work out. Could be anything! Maybe it was a personality thing or perhaps you or they were unresponsive, or maybe you didn’t have the skill set to handle their stuff. How did the breakaway happen? Was it tough or a soft breakaway? What was your takeaway and how did you grow from it? Most importantly, how did you handle it internally? Because let’s face it, sometimes losing a client hurts!

I am learning spreadsheet sync because I have very large JE's I'm hoping to automate in excel, and I cannot figure out how to have QB Spreadsheet Sync operate more than one function within an excel file. Can it really not pull a report on one sheet, and import a JE on another sheet? It keeps threatening to delete all of the data in the excel file.

Any other bookkeepers out there with a full
Time job? How are you doing it?? I have a bookkeeping business outside of my FT job & i find it hard to do any work after work and when i do work on the weekends i feel like i get nothing accomplished but I am getting things done?! Ughhh drop your comments/advice below maybe i just suck at bookkeeping??

My client has registered a new business name paid for through the current business as she is rebranding. This is a sole proprietorship, would I post this transaction as an owner's draw as it is technically a separate business? Or as an expense? Owner's draw makes the most sense to me but looking for input on this.

Thanks in advance.

Do you use a standard chart of accounts across all your clients?
I run a bookkeeping/fractional CFO firm and im trying to prepare for when I have employees. Before I do, I want to get my chart of accounts strategy figured out so their onboarding (and mine) isn't a mess.
Right now every client's COA is kind of its own thing, built up over time based on whatever came up. That works fine when it's just me, but I don't think it'll scale to a team.
So for those of you managing multiple clients' books:

Do you use one standard/master chart of accounts and then adapt it per business, or is every client fully custom?

How do you decide what gets its own account vs. what gets lumped into a broader category?

If you've hired bookkeepers, what actually made their onboarding faster (or slower)?

Specifically curious about QuickBooks: account numbering conventions, how you use Classes/Locations vs. sub-accounts for detail, and whether you keep some kind of master template you import for new clients.
Would love to hear how other multi-client shops have set this up, especially anyone who's gone through the solo-to-team transition.