Frequently Asked Questions

That answer is different for everyone. For some owners, that may not want to be involved in the bookkeeping side of things, the best time may be when you are starting your business. For other businesses, it could be when the business owner has become frustrated with working late hours trying to stay on top of the books. For other, larger businesses they will hire an outsourced professional bookkeeper to act as a second set of eyes and make certain the in house staff is taking care of things correctly and accurately. An Outsourced Professional Bookkeeper will help you to maximize your profitability and let you get back to running your business.

We perform all bookkeeping and payroll virtually. This means we will maintain and manage your accounting ledgers (for most businesses this is through various QuickBooks products) from our physical workspaces but will access your QuickBooks through various cloud storage products or remote access. We also work with QuickBooks Online.

Most of our clients will email documents to us, upload to ShareFile or Dropbox. We have clients who have a weekly or monthly scheduled courier that can come and pick up documents at your location (we call it a doc drop). My Seattle Bookkeeper is very adept at tailoring our services to suit our clients specific needs.

While there are some accountants who will do your day to day bookkeeping for you, it is considered prudent to separate out the duties between bookkeepers and accountants (for the difference, see our FAQ below). Bookkeepers are typically more detail orientated and skilled at providing you with financial reporting that you can easily absorb and understand while an accountant is much more focused on tax law and regulations. We always work very closely with our customers accountants and all of our clients see great benefit to leveraging the skills of both types or professionals.

Both Bookkeepers and Accountants have the same long term goal of helping your business succeed in a oftentimes very complicated financial world. Bookkeepers will generally do your day to day accounting and focus on recording and maintaining your financial data. Bookkeepers will also provide you with a myriad of financial statements to help you understand how your business is doing. An accountant will generally provide tax advise throughout the year, prepare your year end federal tax return, and provide tax planning services.

My Seattle Bookkeeper loves a schedule. When we have our initial consultation, we will come up with a schedule based on your needs. For the most part, we work at least every other week for all clients. Larger clients typically require weekly work while our smaller clients sometimes only need once a month to stay on top of things. We can easily set up a daily, weekly or monthly schedule for the duties we do for your business.

While we handle the day to day bookkeeping, payroll and taxes you free up your time to run your business or enjoy your life. All of the time we spend on your books, is time we have freed up for you to further grow your business. We have saved countless business owners countless hours of tedious bookkeeping so that they can spend their time doing what they do best. In addition, our outsourced bookkeeping and payroll service will save you money in payroll taxes, insurance, benefits, and office space overhead.

My Seattle Bookkeeper cannot prepare these taxes for you. This is best handled by a professional tax preparer or accountant. We work with many accountants in the Seattle area and are always happy to provide a referral should you need one. We work very closely with our client's accountants throughout the year so that tax time is a breeze for our customers.