Consulting is for owners who keep their own books and want them to tell them more. We fix the layout, show you the ratios that matter, and teach you to read what you already have.
QuickBooks setup
New to QuickBooks, or starting over? Our setup package is a flat $600 and includes two hours of training. See what’s included
Financial report layout
We have never seen a set of financials that could not be laid out more effectively.
- Profit and Loss. It needs a Cost of Goods section, with categories grouped to show how you drive your business. A restaurant wants to see labor against materials. A retailer needs its overhead percentage to set prices correctly.
- Balance Sheet. It is often neglected. Liability balances should be accurate at all times, and loan payments should be split into interest and principal. Getting this right also saves your accountant time at year end.
Metric review
Knowing your cost ratios lets you make decisions on real numbers.
- Overhead rate. Once you know what rent, utilities and fixed costs come to, you have a clear percentage to mark up your goods with.
- Labor cost. If labor in your industry typically runs under 35%, you can compare your own and act on it.
- Percentages by line. Adding a percentage column shows you that rent is 5%, labor is 33% and advertising is under 1%.
- Month against month, and against budget. We can build in budgets and compare them side by side to see if you are hitting your targets.
- History. Plotting the last few years of sales or gross profit on one chart shows your seasonality.
Job costing
Job costing is overlooked too often. QuickBooks has a customer or class field on every entry, so any purchase can be tied to a customer’s job. When it is time to bill, those items and notes go straight onto the invoice. You can also run a report showing what you billed against your cost of materials and labor.
Entering last year at tax time
Have a box of receipts and a tax deadline? We can take it from here.
- We read receipts quickly and know where each one belongs, whether it is gas, meals or office supplies.
- Where we can, we post from the bank statements instead of flipping through every receipt.
- If your bank or credit card company lets us export transactions, we use that to save time.
We talk through the approach in our first meeting.
Next step
Call (207) 619-2065 or contact us. We work with small businesses in South Portland, Portland, Scarborough, Cape Elizabeth, Westbrook and Falmouth, and across Southern Maine.