Branch and Ledger is a boutique bookkeeping practice for small businesses that have outgrown their books. A file that never quite reconciles. Reports that raise more questions than they answer. A CPA who finds the same issues every year. We rebuild the structure, and then we maintain it.
Most businesses that find us have already tried a bookkeeper. Sometimes two. Categorization was done on autopilot, reconciliations were skipped, and the reports do not agree with the bank. The last bookkeeper cannot explain why. The file needs a rebuild before ongoing work will hold.
Bank feeds get categorized on autopilot. Half the entries are guesses. Reconciliations were done a long time ago, if at all, and nobody could confidently defend the P&L in an audit.
Owner draws, personal expenses, and business spend all live in the same account. Reconciling anything means untangling everything first, and the P&L is optimistic in ways that will not survive a closer look.
The P&L shows numbers, but you cannot tell which service line is actually profitable, which client is a loss leader, or where your margin quietly went this quarter.
Prior-period adjustments pile up. Retained earnings never quite ties to the tax return. Your accountant finds the same issues every March, and you write the same check for cleanup year after year.
Contractor payments were miscategorized throughout the year. Vendor W-9s live somewhere in email. Every January is a fire drill that could have been ten minutes with clean books.
You have asked what a line item is or why a balance moved and gotten a shrug. Nobody can tell you why your books look the way they do, and the confidence gap is growing.
Two services, in that order. Cleanup is a scoped, fixed-fee project. Ongoing is what happens after the file is trustworthy.
A scoped rebuild of the accounting system for your business. Historical reconciliations, categorization corrected, chart of accounts restructured for how your business actually operates, and the file brought current. Fixed fee, written proposal, defined finish line.
Monthly work that keeps the file defensible. Full closes, not just categorization. Bank and credit card reconciliations every month. Financial packets by the fifteenth. Answers within one business day. A disciplined file that stays disciplined.
A cleanup is a full restoration of the accounting system. Ongoing bookkeeping is the discipline that keeps it that way. The transition from one to the other is not a sales upsell. It is the whole reason to do the cleanup in the first place.
Categorization by guess. Reconciliations skipped. Reports that do not answer your questions. A CPA asking for documents nobody can produce.
A scoped, fixed-fee cleanup. Historical reconciliations complete, categorization corrected, chart of accounts restructured for how your business actually operates. Written summary of every material change.
Your CPA files with confidence. Financial statements reflect what actually happened. Numbers you can defend, and numbers you can actually use to make decisions.
Monthly bookkeeping takes over. Full closes, not just categorization. Reconciliations completed every month. You never have to do this cleanup again.
Most bookkeeping is just categorization. That is not enough for a business trying to make decisions with the numbers. Cleanup is what happens when someone actually rebuilds the file so the reports mean something. Ongoing bookkeeping is what happens when that discipline is maintained every month.
Both are what we do. Neither is what a generalist bookkeeper on autopilot delivers.
See the cleanup approachA large share of our engagements come through CPA referrals. Not because we are a bookkeeping vendor, but because our work makes yours faster and cheaper at deadline, particularly on the messy files where categorization, prior-period adjustments, and reconciliation are usually where the year-end hours go.
If you are a CPA whose small-business clients keep pushing your year-end into overtime, there is a page for that.
See how we work with CPAsBring your questions. We will tell you honestly what your books look like, what a cleanup would take, and whether we are the right fit. If we are not, we will point you toward someone who is.
Book a discovery call