How your month goes

Getting started

Before any monthly rhythm begins, there is a short setup. You tell me where things stand, I look at what exists, and you get a written scope and a flat fee before anything is agreed. If your books are behind, catch-up is scoped as its own project first, because monthly work on an unreliable ledger just produces confident-looking numbers that are wrong.

Then the same three steps, every month

1. Connect

Read-only feeds from your bank, cards and payment processors land in your ledger. Nothing gets keyed in by hand, which removes an entire category of error before it can happen. Read-only means the connection can see transactions and nothing else. No money can be moved from your accounts through it.

2. Reconcile

Each account is matched to its statement and each transaction to its account. This is the part that separates real bookkeeping from categorising a bank feed: if the ledger does not tie to the statement, the reports built on it do not mean anything.

Anything genuinely unclear comes back to you as one short list, once, rather than forty separate emails through the month. Your time is part of the cost of bookkeeping, and most of it gets wasted on interruptions.

3. Report

Statements arrive every month with a plain note on what moved and why. You should be able to read it in five minutes and know where the business stands. If something in it looks strange, the note usually explains it before you have to ask.

What I need from you

• Read-only access to your bank, card and payment accounts
• Access to your existing bookkeeping file, if you have one
• An answer to the monthly question list, when there is one
• A heads-up when something unusual happens, like a loan, a new account or an asset purchase

That is genuinely the whole list. The point of the arrangement is that bookkeeping stops being something you think about.

Where to next