Between the Bookkeeper and the CPA.
A 45-day close and intercompany differences in the hundreds of thousands. Four businesses, ~$17M revenue.
The bookkeeper was trusted. There was an outside CPA for tax. The problem was the work between them — closing the books on a schedule, matching intercompany between the businesses, and getting the owner numbers before they were six weeks old.
The setup
Four businesses under one owner, around $17M in revenue — a small-batch manufacturer and three retail locations. The manufacturer supplies all three stores and also sells direct-to-consumer and wholesale. A unit sold through a store gets recorded twice before a customer ever pays for it — once by the manufacturer, once by the store. An existing bookkeeper handling day-to-day transactions. An external CPA handling tax filings and year-end.
The specific damage was in the intercompany. The manufacturer was invoicing its own stores constantly, and there was no matrix holding the two sides of those transactions together — no place where what the manufacturer booked as a sale was checked against what the store booked as a purchase. None of it was third-party revenue — it was the owner moving inventory between his own businesses. Each side still had to record it, and both sides had to agree, before any of it could be taken back out of the group picture. The unreconciled difference ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Nobody had stolen anything. The entries simply had nothing tying them down, and at that size the combined reporting was not reliable enough to manage from. The close was landing around forty-five days after period end, which meant even the wrong numbers arrived too late to argue with.
The ongoing work
- Match internal transfer activity and due-to/due-from balances on both sides, then record the elimination adjustments in the combined reporting
- Run monthly close on a calendar — accruals included, payroll posted from Paylocity, unearned revenue tracked through release
- File sales and use tax across the businesses on the right schedule
- Handle the unglamorous compliance — insurance audits, business license renewals, annual filings
- Coordinate with the existing bookkeeper on flows that need changing, on a quarterly cadence
- Coordinate with the CPA on tax filings and year-end positioning, before they're under deadline
- Build adhoc reporting the owner needs for specific decisions — pricing, hiring, channel performance
- Sit with the owner on revenue trends, near-term and forward — what's working, what's slowing, what to plan for
What changed for the owner
The close runs about seven days now, down from forty-five. That single change is what makes the rest of it work. A number the owner can still act on beats a better number that lands six weeks late.
The intercompany matrix reconciles across all four businesses, so the hundreds of thousands that nobody could account for now have both sides agreed before anything rolls up. The owner stopped being the person between the bookkeeper and the CPA — the role no operator should be carrying. The CPA gets cleaner data, on time. The owner gets revenue conversations, not bookkeeping conversations.
What didn't have to change: nobody got fired. No accounting systems got swapped. No existing professional relationships got restructured. The work went into the seat that was empty.