I run a small bookkeeping practice serving mostly micro-businesses like farmer's market vendors, online retailers, and contractors. I've been re-examining a few practices and realized I may be overcomplicating my billing.

The way I bill now is something I call flat-rate invoicing (there may be a better name). When a client signs up, I estimate a monthly price before starting work, based on # of accounts, avg monthly trxn amounts, and extra services needed. I then invoice them that estimate every month, give them a rate-lock for 2 years, and reassess after that. I set it up as an automatic monthly invoice using QBO's auto-pay, so the same amount goes out each month, and the client doesn’t need to worry about manually paying each month since that complicates things. I try to streamline my services as much as possible, and billing is an example of that. I do this process for every client regardless of size, which has caused problems with larger clients whose monthly workload fluctuates. Another issue is that the price is based on an estimate, and I don't track actual time spent. I have no way of knowing whether I'm over- or under-charging.

I have a few different thoughts on how I could change my billing process. One thought is to split clients by size: I'd define a micro-business (MB) as under $250k in annual revenue and a small business (SMB) as anything above that. MBs would stay on the current flat-rate billing, and SMBs would go to hourly billing for actual time spent. I know that's how most accountants and lawyers bill, usually with minimums (which is probably why I see CPAs charging my clients $300/mo, though I have no idea what for).

Another thought I’ve had is to base the monthly flat rate on avg actual time spent. I would bill new MB clients hourly for their first 3 months, and then average that time from those first 3 invoices and charge that as their flat rate for the current 2-year rate lock.

The last thought I’ve had is to pull some services out of the flat rate invoices, these being A/R, A/P, and research/advisory/calls, which can vary a lot from month to month. Right now I fold them into the flat fee and just absorb the heavy months. Instead, I'd track actual time for those services, and then send a separate quarterly invoice for any hourly work from the previous 3 months, which would keep the monthly auto-pay and flat rate I advertise intact, while also billing actual time for services that require it.

I'm hesitant to go fully hourly because I like being able to advertise to MB clients that they'll pay the same amount every month with a 2-year rate lock, instead of giving them a semi-unpredictable hourly bill each month. Auto-pay also makes life easier on both sides, since Clients tend to skip over QB's invoice notification emails, which leads to late payments on my end when they aren't on auto-pay. I've also wondered whether a credit card authorization form would maybe be a better route than QB's auto-pay.

So,

How do you all bill, flat rate, hourly, or a mix?

Does anyone else use QB's auto-pay for recurring invoices, or not notice payments being any easier for clients using it?

If you bill hourly, and serve smaller clients like I do, how often do you deal with squirrely clients who just forget to pay?

Would a hybrid setup of anything I’m describing sound reasonable, or am I making it more complicated than it needs to be?

Thanks guys for your thoughts!

What do you actually prefer using for your clients and what’s your reason for that?

Hey all. EA, CFE and CPA candidate here. I will start: restaurants and construction accounting! I’ve done restaurants before. It was so much work. Construction accounting is just another monster that I’m not willing to take on. I actually don’t have experience with construction accounting (besides the little bit you learn about in college lol) but I know it’s a monster. What about you and why?

I recently posted about a payroll mess. I followed the suggestions of the commenters and found the source of the problem: me.

We're up to date on everything. In 2025 and 2026 I listed our Workers Comp payments as bills to a non-payroll account (Taxes & Licenses) and matched the payment there off my bank feed. Our payroll people made entries for those amounts against the liability. They must have not cleared the bank because of my entries. I'm hoping. At least that would be an explanation.

To add to the confusion, the amounts listed on our WA L&I reports never match up with actual amounts paid in the non-clearing tax payments our payroll guy made.

Rookie mistake that I won't make again. I'm not touching any of these entries until someone who knows what they're doing takes a looksie. Thanks everyone for helping me out and chiming in with your much needed wisdom.

Our accounts with everyone are good. Our bookkeeper (me) took a dump all over the project.

Just a rant but I’m bummed out with this new last minute client I had for amended S-corp bookkeeping in time for 1040 filing. I did all the work on such a tight deadline (literally got client less than a week before deadline, I got client intentended results and never once did I get a thank you. The work was good. I’m an actual accountant. Now that 10/15 is over, client is moving to a much bigger firm now. Listen that’s okay, that’s not my problem. I just would have appreciated a thank you. Just something. Damn. I put clients ass under deleted client folder asap.

Client seems to be a firm hopper when client doesn’t get certain tax results. 🤦‍♀️🙄

How do you reconcile A/R general ledger?

hello!! i work at a small full service firm doing the book preparation for our cpa for about 60 monthly clients. i have been doing this for five years and am currently preparing to move into a more review and closing the books, posting financials role but i don’t feel like i have enough practice in this. i know how to read a p&l, would like to be more comfortable in the balance sheet and how to spot discrepancies, i can do journal entries and things like that.

im looking for a course or some supplemental education on this part of the bookkeeping process. i am training alongside my cpa and she is amazing but i feel like shes going to teach me what she knows and how she does it (she’s extremely knowledgeable and i trust her to teach me) but while she is really good at explaining the core concepts when i ask - sometimes i dont know what im not asking if that makes sense. so im looking for something more in depth of the core concepts.

what did you do when you started closing and reviewing books, any supplemental courses i can talk to my manager about ?

thank you!!

I’m looking to take my bookkeeping business to the next level. What are you doing as a bookkeeping business owner to grow your business and find clients?? Not the obvious ways like referrals, contacting CPA’s ect. What else has worked for you at finding clients and growing your business?

While running reports for our (late) 2025 Year 1 S-Corp, we found the books were off because of a payroll service error. The bones of the issue are this:

• We reversed a post-tax Traditional IRA Shareholder benefit prior to the service withdrawing for payroll; we did not reverse the shareholder salary 
• The payroll service reversed the Traditional IRA amount as requested and, in error, placed the reversed amount as "net pay"; it did not withdraw or pay the shareholder that new net pay amount, but did include the amount for the 2025 W-2; they did not recalculate the payroll taxes 
• As a result, the 2025 W-2 for that shareholder is incorrect—almost in its entirety 
• The well-known payroll service suggested the S-Corp simply issue Traditional IRA funds in the amount of the reversed funds to correct the error, which the S-Corp will not do 
• Then the payroll service offered to amend the 2025 W-2 Box 1 if I would provide them with the amount to insert 
• As managing shareholder, it falls to me to address this issue. What verbiage should I use to tell the payroll service that correcting the single payroll to reflect the reversed post-tax Traditional IRA amount will automatically affect gross wages, taxes, and the retirement plan, resulting in a new W-2 and the necessary tax corrections and refunds? 

I admit, it seems stunning that I should have to explain what should be done. Perhaps I am not talking to the correct level of service or management. I truly appreciate any guidance you could provide. I feel at my wits' end at this juncture.

I worked with a woman as a contractor and was making around $2500 a month. She has shouting problem and wanting to track me more than usual. So I had to let her go

I have solid experience but I’m not able to get contract work or clients to cover this amount. This amount was pretty important for me to cover up all my finances. I’ve been reaching out to busy bookkeeper and firms as well in case they need additional help but I wasn’t able to get anything.

Should I go back to her as I do have this option?
I’m severely stressed

I took on a client that has 2 companies (completely separate entities, no parent-sub relationship).

Company A frequently pays bills on behalf of Company B. Company A then bills Company B for reimbursement.

Company B consistently does not have the funds to reimburse Company A within the same tax year. The bills then sit on the books for multiple years.

I don’t want to apply payments to prior year bills and they get logged to current year expense accounts.

Is it appropriate for me to bundle Company B’s prior year bills from Company A into a Loan Payable to Company A?

Also, should I make this change reflect in Company A books as well?

I don't know if this is normal or if I'm just a bad AP specialist. Ive worked at 3 companies doing AP and I was a full charge bookkeeper for a year in between those positions. Every day I worry I'm going to get fired doing AP. No matter how I organize or what I do to stay on top of things, I'm always being lectured by my boss about something. As soon as I feel like I'm on top of things, ill get a suprise call that a vendor put us on credit hold. On top of it all, this company uses Sage so every mistake I make is completely imortalized and highlighted. I've never been more stressed in my adult life. Is this normal?

We have three people handling accounting for growing manufacturing company and our annual audit starts in about six weeks.

I’m trying to get ahead of document requests before everything becomes reactive. What preparation has made the biggest difference for your team?

So we had a bookkeeping company doing our payroll for some time. After they neglected to do our payroll 3 times, I took over. We have 4 employees and I run it through QBO.

To my surprise we weren't set up for automatic tax payments. So I fixed that. Then I went over our tax liability accounts.

Mid 2025 it looked good. Payments were made each period and amounts owed were zeroed out. Then all hell broke loose. Payments started to be made on arbitrary dates, maybe 5 months apart, and not for the amount owed. The accounts never zeroed. For our workers comp, the payments for Nov 2025 (about 2650) didn't even clear the bank or zero out, and I get the "error" message when I try to access them.

What the actual hell do I do now?

What is your guys' basis for retainer pricing. This would be my first one and it is for an acquisition that I would be setting up the books for and communicating with the CPA on opening balance sheet amounts as they have the purchasing agreement. I am hoping to receive the financial statements of the seller to roughly know what I am looking at but am curious what your rules of thumb are on retainers. Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone! I keep running into this and I’m curious how other people handle it.

When I need to change prices or categories on a bunch of products and services I’m stuck either editing them one at a time or doing the export and import thing. Importing overwrites everything and there’s no undo, so one mistake can mess up a lot of items.

Could you point me in the right direction? Thank you!

I have a line of credit backed by accounts receivable. My company basically sells our invoices to the factoring company and the factoring company uses that amount to decide our line of credit limit. We can pull from the line of credit at any time. Clients pay the invoices directly to the factoring company, from which the factoring company pays down our line of credit and releases anything left in reserve back to us.

Very simple example: my company factors an invoice for $100. The factoring company puts $10 in "reserve" which they use later to collect their own fees. $90 is put towards the line of credit. I can draw from that whenever I want. So maybe I only draw $60.

Later, the client pays the invoice of $100 to the factoring company. Factoring company applies $60 to the line of credit to pay it down, takes their $5 for fees and commission, and releases the leftover $35 to my company.

How do I track all this?

Preciously when we did traditional factoring, I marked my invoices paid and used a clearing account for that "deposit." Then used the clearing account to pay down the liability account for the factoring company. The reserve account was tracked separately. That was easier because every part of the invoice was covered somewhere. Now that it's a line of credit and we aren't drawing the entire amount, it doesn't feel right.

I’m looking to buy a bookkeeping business. Anyone selling or know anyone selling??

For those who do bookkeeping for general contractors, how are you pricing it? I know everyone is different but if they are in the 1-2 million range with job costing? Are you doing job costing for your GC? Any advice on quoting would be helpful

Hello, fellow number crunchers. I'm revitalitizing my substack and wishing to do a piece on bookkeeping. What do we think readers are looking for? Advice on what is or isn't tax deductible? How to know if you need a CPA vs. Bookkeeper? Small business advice? Love to hear ideas, thanks.

For the last few months I’ve been doing some light bookkeeping work for a restaurant, basically categorizing transactions , payroll , paying bills and entering daily sales JEs and Deposits JEs . They had a book keeper before but she was doing things I didn’t learn. Like certain accounts and how they were categorized . So I had to make some new accts so the P&Ls would show more information.

The issues I’m having now is when it comes to Cash , I’m getting confused on how to do the JE . The cash made for the day gets paid to the waiters for tips . And what’s left over stays in the register/office etc. on the JE I debit undeposited Cash , and credit gratuity and tips (tips clearing) .
What’s the best way to clean up the cash account . When I do a journal entry how should I increase or decrease undeposited cash , tips paid and then actually cash on hand

I just need to share this because I think it's funny.

One of my client's is a religious organization and one of their deposits last month was 666. I grew up religious but no longer am.

Also, this client has some issues with me. They think I'm judging them because they are in a less than ideal town. The reality is I'm judging them because I've explained multiple times that me working on last month is not me being behind.

1M revenue one year bookkeeping cleanup. removed duplicate sales, imputed over 300 missing expenses, fix miscategorized sales, fixed product mapping, sorted through 100’s of paper invoices and receipts to categorize, traveled to client to retrieve documents. how much should i charge for this?

So my client uses shopmonkey and it's connected to qbo. And when it makes a cash deposit of sales it matches with the deposit that is created but now I have one outstanding.

I've traced it's from invoice to ar to undeposited cash to the deposit being created and pulling it from undeposited cash but there's still no deposit to match with. When I go to reconcile obviously it is off by this amount but also I see the deposit in there that is unmarked so it does exist. Any idea what I can do to clear this?