Bookkeeping & Monthly Close
Categorized transactions, reconciled accounts, and a documented month-end close that lands the same way, on the same date, every month. This is the baseline every other financial decision depends on — and the first thing a lender, buyer, or investor checks.
Why clean books are the whole ballgame
Most small-business owners don't have a reporting problem — they have a recording problem. Transactions pile up uncategorized, accounts go unreconciled for months, and by the time anyone looks, the P&L is a guess. Every downstream decision — pricing, hiring, borrowing, selling — inherits that guess.
Reconciliation is, quite literally, cleaning — and on a factory floor, cleaning isn't cosmetic: it's how you find defects. A monthly reconciliation is how you find the missed revenue, the duplicate charge, the subscription nobody uses, the fraud. Books that aren't reconciled aren't just late — they're hiding things.
The part most bookkeeping services skip is what happens after the cleanup. Anyone can sort a backlog once. Without a standardized, documented close — the same checklist, the same dates, the same reports, regardless of who does the work — the books decay back to a mess within months. If you've had a cleanup before and watched it unravel, that wasn't a cleanup problem. It was a sustainment problem.
What's included
- Transaction categorization with a rules engine that learns your business
- Bank & credit-card reconciliations — every account, every month
- A written month-end close checklist with owner and due date per step
- Core financial statements: P&L, balance sheet, cash summary
- Vendor & customer ledger maintenance (no duplicate vendors, no stale unapplied payments)
- 1099 tracking & filing
- Chart of accounts mapped to how the business actually operates
- Monthly data-quality scan — uncategorized, unreconciled, and imbalanced items flagged before they compound
How Kaizen runs it
We run books on a modern stack — QuickBooks Online, Ramp, Gusto — configured so data is captured at the source instead of keyed in after the fact. Receipts attach themselves. Cards code themselves. The data entry a full-time bookkeeper would spend their day on mostly shouldn't exist.
Then we do the two steps cleanup vendors skip: Standardize — the close is documented so it produces the same output no matter who executes it — and Sustain — a monthly cadence with automated quality checks, so the defect rate falls every cycle instead of creeping back. Our name is our operating model: kaizen, continuous improvement. Each close is sharper than the one before.
Pricing
Frequently asked questions
My books are months (or years) behind. Can you catch them up?
Yes — that's the normal starting point, not the exception. Month 1 of the Reset is dedicated to the backlog: categorization, reconciliations, and a first real close. Most catch-ups land inside the first 30–45 days.
Do I need to switch accounting software?
We work on QuickBooks Online. If you're on desktop software or spreadsheets, migration is part of the setup; if you're already on QBO, we work in your existing file and fix it in place.
What happens to my current bookkeeper?
Often they stay. If you have someone good, we standardize their close, add controller-level review over their work, and remove the volume that was drowning them. If the seat is empty, we simply replace the hire.
How do you price it — hourly?
No. Flat monthly, scoped to transaction volume and entity count — typically around 1% of monthly revenue with a $1,000/mo minimum. Hourly billing rewards slow work; flat pricing rewards the process improvement we're named after.
Related services
Free 20-minute books assessment
We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you engage us, hire, or do neither.
Or call us directly: +1 786 789 0969