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Bookkeeping Services Chicago
Bookkeeping (Operational Accounting)
Bookkeeping involves capturing essential operational data for business processes. This includes transactions such as customer invoices, purchase orders, vendor bills, payroll checks, customer payments, credit card expenses, and item receipts.
These transactions should be periodically reconciled with information from your business partners to ensure alignment with operations and third-party records.
This process helps protect against fraud, waste, and abuse, and controls business processes. Frequent data updates are crucial for timely insights into operations and to support management decision-making.
Our Bookkeeping Services Include:
- Data Entry: Accurately capturing operational data.
- Data Integration: Exporting and importing data from various sources (e.g., website sales, Amazon, Teemu) into accounting systems like QuickBooks for consolidated reporting.
- Reporting Structure Advice: Guidance on available reports and cut-off procedures.
- Transaction Processing: Handling transactions like payroll.
Bookkeeping services do not include higher-level accounting functions such as producing financial statements that comply with authoritative accounting standards or making other financial disclosures like income tax returns.
Instead, bookkeeping provides the initial building blocks to ensure that higher-level accounting functions can be performed efficiently and accurately.
While accounting systems like QuickBooks can automatically produce financial reports similar to those under US GAAP, they may lack the necessary information required to calculate the statements in a manner compliant with reporting standards.
For more information on transforming bookkeeping data into proper financial statements, please refer to the Accounting section.
Accounting
We distinguish between Bookkeeping and Accounting by the purpose of the data and information produced.
Bookkeeping captures the operational activity of the business, while Accounting Services involve procedures to produce financial statements that comply with authoritative accounting standards, such as the United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP).
Information produced through our Bookkeeping procedures is primarily intended for your employees and managers to inform them about business activities.
It also represents information that may be sent to third parties, like customers and vendors, to inform them of business transactions.
Financial Statements prepared using authoritative accounting standards are designed to allow users to compare the operational results of different companies or report the operating results of businesses consistently.
Additionally, Accounting procedures can include estimates and other information where a business transaction has not occurred or adjust how the accounting system includes/excludes certain transactions in financial statements.
These procedures provide better insight into your company’s operational performance.
Our Financial Accounting Services Include:
- General Ledger Maintenance and Management: Procedures to maintain the comparability of financial statements over time and ensure stakeholders can obtain accurate, timely, and relevant financial information.
- Financial Statement Support and Documentation: Procedures to create and maintain support for your company’s financial disclosures. This information may support an audit of your Financial Statements, assist with examinations or other third-party scrutiny, and provide management with useful context when examining past results.
How it Works
We typically enter into month-to-month contracts with our clients, which can be canceled with 30 days’ notice. These contracts include our monthly bookkeeping and accounting services.
We charge a fixed monthly fee, based on the hours worked and the task’s complexity.
Usually, we require a retainer equal to the first month’s service, which we replenish as we complete our work.
The scope of work will outline a clear schedule for closing. All fees and expenses will be detailed in an agreed-upon Statement of Work before we bill our clients.
Partnering With You
We are here to assist with your bookkeeping and accounting needs.
We differentiate ourselves from our competitors by focusing on helping you create an accounting function that follows leading practices and ensures your investment in accounting maximizes the usefulness of the information produced.