What Your Bookkeeper Needs From You in the First Month

Hire a bookkeeper and the first thing that arrives is a list of requests: software access, bank statements, payroll reports, and a question about a deposit from March. It can read like a lot to gather at once, and it’s fair to wonder how much of it is genuinely needed before anyone can start.

Most of it is, and every item on that list has a reason you can check. Here is what gets asked for in a first month, what each piece is holding up while it is missing, and what you have in your hands once that month closes.

Access comes first

Nobody can work on books they cannot open, and in QuickBooks Online opening them does not mean handing over your password. You sign in as a primary or company admin, go to Manage users, open the tab Intuit labels “Accounting Firms,” and send an invitation. That creates what Intuit calls an accountant user, and its own guidance notes that “Accountant users invited this way don’t count toward your user limit,” so the invitation costs you nothing in seats.

Bank and credit card feeds are the other half of access, and they behave differently. Intuit’s own instruction for connecting one is to “Sign in to your bank using your online banking credentials,” from inside QuickBooks, which is a good reason to do that step yourself rather than pass those details to anyone. Once a feed is running, your transactions come into QuickBooks on their own, ready to be reviewed and categorized rather than typed in from scratch.

The history a feed cannot reach

A new connection does not bring your whole past with it, and Intuit is direct about the limit: “Download timespans vary by bank, ranging from 90 days up to 24 months.” What that means for a handover is that a connection may or may not reach back as far as your books need to start, and nobody finds out which until it runs.

That limit is one reason a bookkeeper asks for statements. Where your books need to start earlier than the feed reached, the gap gets filled from the bank instead of from the software, and Intuit’s own second route is to “download your company’s historical transactions from your bank or credit card in a file” and bring that in by hand.

Reconciling is the other reason, and it does not stop after that first load. It is the step where every transaction is matched against your bank and credit card statements, one month at a time, and it is where a duplicate, a missing deposit, or a charge that never reached the books can be found.

The parts a bank feed never shows

A feed is a record of money that has already moved. A fair amount of what belongs in your books either hasn’t moved yet or moved in a way the line on the statement doesn’t explain. The IRS makes the same point in plain recordkeeping terms: “Purchases, sales, payroll, and other transactions you have in your business generate supporting documents. These documents contain information you need to record in your books.”

Four kinds of record sit outside the feed.

• Payroll. Wages are only part of what a payroll run covers. The federal income tax and the Social Security and Medicare withheld from your employees belong to it, and so does the employer’s own share. Whether those amounts reach your bank as one withdrawal or several depends on how your payroll is run, so the statement on its own does not say which money belongs to which. Your payroll reports do, and they are records worth keeping in any case: the IRS asks that employment tax records be kept “for at least 4 years after the date the tax becomes due or is paid, whichever is later.”
• Loans and lines of credit. A payment to a lender is not necessarily all going against what you owe. Depending on the loan, some of it is interest, and some payments carry fees as well. The bank line gives the total and nothing else, so what the books need is the lender’s own statement showing how each payment was applied. A payment booked entirely against the balance leaves your books saying you owe less than you do.
• What you are owed and what you owe. An invoice you sent and a bill you received both exist before any money moves. Entering them is what lets your books answer what is still outstanding in either direction. Left out, the file holds only the payments that have already gone through.
• Equipment and other large purchases. The bank shows the payment. The books need when you bought the item, what you paid, and what you have spent improving it since, which is close to the record the IRS asks a business to keep for an asset. That record is the bookkeeping job, and it is the thing your CPA will be working from later.

If you carry inventory, that is a fifth, and it is worth mentioning at the start rather than in month three. What you paid for stock, and how much of it is still unsold, are records the file has to be set up to hold.

The answers only you have

The rest of a first month is questions, and this is the part nobody can do on your behalf. A bookkeeper can see that $840 left your account on the ninth. Whether that was a supplier, a software renewal, or your own car payment run through the business card is not in the line itself, and a guess that lands wrong sits in your books until somebody finds it.

Deposits work the same way in reverse. Money arriving can be a sale, a refund, a transfer from another account of your own, money drawn from a loan or a line of credit, or your own cash going in to cover a short month. Each of those is a different entry, and the description on a bank statement is not always enough to tell them apart.

None of it is a test. Books get behind and cards get mixed. Coastal’s position on that is on the clean-up page in one line: we meet your books where they are, with no judgment, and get them current. If you’re still choosing who will do this work, the questions worth asking first are in how to hire a remote bookkeeper.

What a first month gives back

Once the access is in and the history is loaded, the work settles into the shape it keeps. Monthly bookkeeping at Coastal means your bank and credit card accounts reconciled, your transactions entered and categorized, and a month-end profit and loss and balance sheet in your hands. The first of those shows what the business earned and spent over the month. The balance sheet shows what it owns and what it owes on the last day of it.

Payroll, sales tax, and accounts payable and receivable are available as add-ons to any monthly package, so they are worth naming early if you need them.

That first set of reports is worth reading slowly rather than filing. It’s the first time everything you sent comes back as a number. A figure that does not look like your business is worth asking about while the month is still fresh in your memory, rather than after several more have been built on top of it.

How this works with Coastal

Those reports come out of your own QuickBooks, because Coastal works in your file. Your records stay in your own account, and your financial details stay confidential, from the first call through every month after.

If your books are behind before any of this begins, catching up is its own piece of work rather than part of the monthly one. In most cases Coastal can give you a flat rate up front, so you know the cost before the work starts.

Coastal handles the bookkeeping. Your CPA handles the taxes.

Tell us a little about your business and Selena will e-mail you back to set up a time to talk. E-mail sms@coastalbookkeepingllc.com or request a quote.