DIY QuickBooks or Hand It Over: How to Decide

Three ways to run the books, side by side

This is rarely all or nothing. There are three workable setups, and each one below gets the same three questions: how much of your time it takes, what catches a mistake, and when it fits.

Option 1: You do it all yourself in QuickBooks

Your time: a regular block every month, spent categorizing the bank feed, matching deposits to invoices and reconciling each account to its statement. Skip a month and the next session gets longer, because the skipped month has to be rebuilt from memory.

What catches mistakes: you do, and mostly at reconciliation. A miscoded expense still reconciles, so it can sit in the file until your tax return is being prepared.

When it fits: one account, one card, no staff, no sales tax, and an owner happy to do the work in the same week every month.

Option 2: You keep entering, someone sets it up and checks it

Your time: about the same, since the day-to-day entry is still yours. What changes is the file underneath: a chart of accounts built for your trade, bank rules for the recurring items, and a scheduled review.

What catches mistakes: a second person who reads the file regularly and spots a miscoded expense early.

When it fits: you want to stay close to the numbers and the file is simple, but you've never been sure it was set up right. QuickBooks setup, cleanup and support are part of our bookkeeping services, so this is help you can ask us about directly.

Option 3: You hand the monthly work over

Your time: mostly answering a short list of questions each month and sending receipts for anything you paid out of pocket.

What catches mistakes: the person doing the close, every month, working from the statements. You should get a profit and loss and a balance sheet you can read, and you can ask to see the reconciliation report behind them.

When it fits: payroll, sales tax, job costing, inventory or church funds are in the file, or months have stopped closing on time.

What decides it: how much the file has to carry

The size of the business matters less than the number of moving parts. A single account with a few dozen transactions a month is a small job whoever does it. Each of the following adds work with its own method or its own calendar.

Payroll brings withholding, tax deposits, quarterly filings and year-end W-2s, and payroll can be handed over on its own if the rest of the file is simple. Sales tax means collecting it, holding it as money you owe, and filing it with NCDOR on the schedule they give you. Job costing means tying every cost to a job while the job is still open. A church or nonprofit has designated gifts that must show as restricted in the reports, which is why church accounting is its own kind of work.

One of those in the file, handled with care, is manageable for a careful owner. Two or three at once is a different job, because each runs on its own calendar and none of them waits for a quiet month.

Is the monthly work really happening?

The second test is habit, and it's the more honest of the two. Open QuickBooks and look at when each account was last reconciled. If every account, cards and loans included, ties to a statement from the last month or two, the do-it-yourself setup is doing its job. If one account hasn't been reconciled since spring, the file is telling you something.

Not sure what a finished reconciliation looks like? How to tell whether your books are actually reconciled walks through the checks you can run on your own file.

Signs a do-it-yourself file has outgrown you

These show up well before anything goes badly wrong. The bank feed holds uncategorized transactions older than a month. Sales tax gets worked out from deposits at filing time rather than tracked as it's collected. Payroll runs, but nobody has checked that the payroll liability accounts clear back to zero. The profit and loss says you made money, the bank balance disagrees, and you can't say why.

Around Greenville there's a seasonal version too. A late-summer storm that closes a shop for a week leaves a gap in the books, and insurance money or relief funds land in the account with no obvious place to record them. A wrong entry there follows you into the return, so that's a good moment to get help even if you normally manage fine.

If the file is already several months behind, a monthly arrangement can't start until it's caught up. That's a cleanup, a separate job with its own order of work, and our guide to QuickBooks cleanup for a Greenville business covers what it involves.

What changes on your side when someone else does the books

Less than you might think. Receipts for anything paid out of pocket still come from you, and so does the reason behind an odd transfer or a payment that could be stock or could be equipment. A new loan, a second account or a first hire needs mentioning when it happens, since finding out three months later means correcting entries rather than recording them.

What you should expect back from any bookkeeper is a close on a schedule, meaning reconciled accounts and reports you can read on roughly the same date each month.

When to make the switch

Timing matters more than it looks. Switching during the spring filing rush means handing over a year of receipts in the weeks you have the least time to talk about them. For a contractor or seasonal owner in Winterville, Ayden or Farmville, the short winter slow spell is the better window for a setup review or a handover, and starting at the top of a quarter keeps the filings tidy.

Whichever setup you choose, we work with businesses across Greenville and the towns around it, and a free consultation is the simplest way to find out which one fits your file.