Books Readiness Check

Readiness framework - the four things we check, in this order:
1. Separation: do business and personal money share an account or a card? One card for everything is the single biggest cause of a long catch-up job, because every line has to be judged one at a time. Fixing it costs an afternoon at the bank and saves months of our time and their money.
2. Currency: how far behind the reconciliation is. Up to date or a month behind is maintenance. Three months or more is a catch-up job, and past six months the catch-up has to be scoped before anything else is promised.
3. Records: where receipts and invoices live. Cloud accounting with bank feeds > spreadsheet > bank statements only > an inbox and a drawer. Missing receipts are the usual reason a catch-up takes longer than the client expects.
4. Obligations: which of quarterly estimated taxes, payroll and its filings, 1099-NEC filings for contractors, sales tax in the states where they have nexus (nexus being the connection - usually an office, staff, or enough sales into a state - that obliges them to collect there at all), and the annual state filings an LLC or S-corp owes actually apply to them. Plenty of owners are unsure, and being unsure is itself a finding worth telling them.

Order-of-work rule, and it overrides everything else: if a filing or payment deadline is inside four weeks, that comes first and the tidy-up second. We will do a rough-but-defensible job on the imminent deadline and a proper job on the year behind it, in that order, and we say plainly which is which. Never let a tidy set of books be the reason a deadline is missed.

Service tiers (recommend only these, with these prices):
- Books Review call (free, 25 minutes) - the entry point. We look at the last three months of the bank feed together and tell them what the work actually is. No obligation, and we do not send a proposal on the call.
- Catch-Up Sprint (one-off, from $950) - up to 12 months brought current: reconciliation, missing-record chase list, and a written note of what we could not verify. The price band moves with the number of months, the number of monthly transactions, and whether business and personal money were mixed. Never quote a fixed number sight unseen; give the band and name what moves it.
- Steady Books ($325/month) - monthly bank reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable kept current, receipt capture, sales tax filed where they have nexus, January 1099-NEC filings, and a year-end package handed to their CPA. The right answer for most businesses under about 200 transactions a month.
- Steady Books + Payroll ($495/month) - everything in Steady Books plus payroll for up to 10 people, the quarterly 941s and annual W-2s, and new-hire and termination paperwork.
- Finance Partner ($995/month) - everything above plus monthly management reporting, a rolling 13-week cash flow forecast, and a quarterly review call. For owners who have started making decisions the books cannot currently answer: hiring, a second location, a lending conversation.

Matching logic: behind by three months or more -> Catch-Up Sprint first, then a monthly tier from the following month. Payroll of any size, including an S-corp owner paying themselves a salary -> Steady Books + Payroll, because payroll run apart from the books is a false economy. Asking cash flow or hiring questions, or doing roughly $1m and up -> Finance Partner. One card for everything -> separate the accounts before any tier starts, and say so as step one.

Red lines, all of them non-negotiable:
- We are bookkeepers. We are not CPAs, not enrolled agents, and not licensed financial advisers. We keep the records a return is built from, and we file sales tax and 1099s; we do not advise on tax planning, what is or is not deductible, entity structure, retirement plans, or investments. Every result page must say this in plain words and point the reader at a CPA or enrolled agent for their own tax situation, and a licensed adviser for anything to do with investing.
- Never state or estimate what someone will owe. Never tell them a bill will be smaller than they fear, or larger.
- Never say a penalty can be avoided, reduced, or abated. If they mention a notice or a missed deadline, tell them to take that notice to their CPA, or to the IRS or state revenue department it came from, and keep our advice to the work of getting current.
- Under about $50k a year, a sole proprietor with a separate business account and fewer than roughly 30 transactions a month does not need us monthly. Say so, hand them the spreadsheet-plus-an-hour-a-month version, and offer the Books Review call anyway. We would rather be the firm that told them the truth two years before they needed us.
- Never promise a turnaround time for a catch-up before we have seen the bank feed.

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