Hiring someone to work inside your books should not feel like handing over the keys and hoping. Here is the whole engagement in plain terms — what happens, in what order, and where you stay in control.
How the engagement works, start to finish
Working with us runs in six steps: a free review, written findings with a fixed quote, your approval, the work itself, a verification pass on your reports, and a documented handback. The first three cost nothing and commit you to nothing — you only ever pay after you have approved a written plan and a fixed fee.
The six steps
The shape is the point. The three steps on the left cost nothing, and you can stop at any of them. The three on the right only begin once you have decided the work is worth it, and each one leaves a record. Below is what actually happens at each step.
Step 1: A free review of your file
We start with a free, read-only look at your actual QuickBooks — not a sales call and not a form. We open the books to find what is genuinely wrong: accounts that never reconciled, transactions filed under the wrong type, a chart of accounts that has bloated, balances that never cleared. You grant the least access the job needs, and you can revoke it whenever you like. The free review exists so nobody is quoting your work blind — including us.
Step 2: Written findings and a fixed quote
You get the findings in plain English, in writing, followed by a fixed price. The findings say what is wrong, what it will take to fix, and roughly how long — and the quote turns that into one number for the whole job, not open-ended hours that grow with the mess. Pricing starts from a published floor of $1,500 that the review makes real for your file. If the review finds you do not actually need us, we say so; a short, honest "you're fine" is a valid outcome.
Step 3: You approve — nothing starts first
Nothing in your file is changed until you have approved both the plan and the price. This is the gate the whole process is built around. Everything up to this point is reversible and free; the moment you say yes is the moment the work is authorized, and not a second before. If the number or the scope is not right for you, you walk away having spent nothing but the time it took to read the findings.
Step 4: The work, done in the open
Once you approve, we do the work — one visible change at a time, in the order that keeps your reports honest. Reconciliation comes first, because every downstream number depends on the cash being right, and then we correct what reconciliation exposes. You can watch through the access you control, and every change is recorded as it is made. This is the same fixed-scope work behind our QuickBooks services, from a one-time cleanup to catching a badly behind file back up.
Step 5: We verify the reports still tie
Before we hand anything back, we check that fixing the present did not break the past. We save a snapshot of your key reports before we start, re-run them after the work, and compare the two — so a prior period you have already filed a return on does not quietly shift. If a filed total would move, we catch it in that comparison and raise it with you rather than let it become a surprise. A cleanup that ties the current books but breaks last year's is not a fix, and this step is how we prove it did not happen.
Step 6: Handback, and what you keep
At the end you get the file back with a written record of everything that changed and why. That record is the artifact that makes the work auditable long after we are gone: it lists what moved, what happened to it, and where its history went, so you — or your CPA, or a lender doing diligence — can trace any figure back to the decision behind it. A cleanup or catch-up job ends here. We only continue into ongoing monthly work if that is what you actually want; you are never rolled onto a recurring engagement by default.
How this differs from our full methodology
This page is the plain-terms map; the deep version is our methodology. If you want to see exactly how the work is done and checked — the reconciliation-first ordering, the change-mapping loop where every correction is written, approved, executed, and re-checked, the before-and-after report snapshots, and how we handle access and least-privilege security — that is where it is spelled out step by step. The steps on this page are the same engagement, told at the altitude of "what happens when I hire you." When you are ready, the honest first move is the same either way: a free review of the real file. Not sure it is the right fit? A short call sorts it out.