Bookkeeping and the close, answered
The questions owners actually ask about their books, answered the way we answer them on a call.
Fix what is broken, publish what people actually search for, then earn links. In that order. Publishing more onto a site the crawler struggles with is the most common way to waste a year.
Work it out in a minute
Two dates and what you invoice in a month. Splits the delay into the part you control and the part you do not, and prices the gap.
Common questions
Straight answers on bookkeeping, the close and the CPA, including the parts most firms avoid saying.
How far behind is too far behind?
A quarter is common and fixable in weeks. A year is a project. Two years usually means rebuilding from bank statements rather than repairing what is there.
The number that matters is not the months, it is whether the bank balances can be tied to the books at any point. Once they tie, everything after that is maintenance.
What does a catch-up actually involve?
Statements in, month by month. Every transaction categorized, every account reconciled, the differences explained, and a reviewed set at the end.
It ends with two things: books your CPA can file from, and a weekly rhythm so the gap does not reopen.
What should a monthly close take?
For most companies under a few hundred people, five to ten business days once the checklist exists. Longer than that usually means a missing reconciliation or a person waiting on a person.
The day matters more than the speed. A close that lands on the same business day every month is worth more than a fast one that moves.
Can you work with our existing CPA?
Yes, and it usually lowers their bill.
They file and advise; we keep the books they file from. Clean, reconciled books are cheaper for a CPA to work with, and the year-end questions get shorter.
Do you do taxes?
No. Returns, tax positions and audits belong to a licensed CPA, and we say so plainly.
What we do is make the tax-ready set exist on time, with every number traceable to a reconciled account.
Which systems do you work in?
QuickBooks Online and Xero for most companies, NetSuite for larger ones, and whatever payroll, billing and payment gateway you already run.
Nothing moves to a system of ours. Your account, your login, your data.
We invoice late and collect slowly. Is that a bookkeeping problem?
Partly. Late invoices are a process problem that shows up in the books as cash that is not there yet.
We fix the handoff between finishing work and raising the invoice, then the collection schedule. The invoice tool on this site shows how much of the delay is yours before a customer is ever late.
Is AI doing our books?
The sorting, yes: categorizing, matching, reconciling and flagging what looks wrong.
The judgment, no. A person reviews every exception, signs every close and answers for every number you see. That is the split that makes the books both fast and trustworthy.
Do you work outside North America?
Yes, when the shape is the same: a growing company, books in QuickBooks, Xero or NetSuite, and a close that needs to land.
The United States and Canada are home and most of the work is there.
What do we get every month?
A closed month by a set business day, the profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow, a short note on the three or four numbers that changed, and a current cash view.
Read in ten minutes, acted on in the same meeting.
How do we start?
A short call, read access to the books, and a look at the last three months.
Within a week you have a plain statement of where the books stand, what the catch-up would take, and what the monthly rhythm would look like.
Your situation is specific. Write to hello@shaheer.io and get the specific answer within one business day.
Read next
The service itself, the working guide, and the questions we get on adjacent work.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built
Books are a rhythm, not a rescue. The service page says what we run and on what day; the invoice tool shows how much of your cash is waiting on your own process before a customer is ever late.