Who chases the receipts, me or the person I'm paying to keep the books

Chasing documents is the single worst part of the work and it's the part clients never want to pay for at cost. I timed it one quarter. Following up on missing backup for four clients ran about nine hours a month, which at my rate is more than one of those clients pays in total.

So I stopped selling it as a nice extra and made it a line item. If you want me to follow up, it's a fixed add-on and it comes with a rule: I ask twice, then the transaction goes into a suspense account and it stays there until you deal with it. That rule is what made it workable. Before, I was asking six times and eating it.

Solder, the sixty dollar spread on your quotes sounds about right for two doors. The question is whether you'd actually respond to her. If you ignore the second and third ask, you've paid more for the same result you'd get from the cheaper one.

Sixty a month to make sure the repair versus improvement split is documented seems cheap to me, honestly cheaper than reconstructing a year of it later.

I'm building this into an offer right now and I landed on the split. Every client gets the capture app set up on day one, I walk them through it on a call, and then my job is reporting the gaps rather than closing them. The month-end package has a page that just says which transactions have no backup and what the total dollar value is. Last month one client saw 4,100 dollars of undocumented card spend on that page and started photographing things the same week. Nobody had to nag.

Thatch, the suspense account rule is the piece I was missing. I've been leaving unsupported items in the expense category with a memo, which means the number looks finished when it isn't.

Solder, one thing about your specific situation. The truck purchases at a big box store are the exact case where a feed alone falls apart, because a single card charge can cover two properties and a tool you keep. That's a coding decision only you can make, and whether a given item is a repair or a capital improvement is a question for whoever prepares your return.

I've been sitting on this decision for months instead of making it, so take the reasoning and not the pace.

The feeds give you amount, date, and vendor. They do not give you purpose, and purpose is what drives almost every real estate coding question worth arguing about. Which property, repair or improvement, personal or business. A bookkeeper working from feeds alone is guessing on all three, and a good one will tell you they're guessing.

So the real split in this poll isn't about who does the clerical work. It's about who carries the risk when the purpose is unknown at the time the books close. If that's you, price the cheaper option honestly, because you're taking on a monthly task you may not do.

The substantiation standards for what documentation you need to keep are a question for a tax professional, and they're worth asking once directly rather than inferring from forum threads. But the mechanism is simple enough. Somebody has to record why the money moved, close to when it moved, or the information is gone.

We run five people and I handle this by not making it the bookkeeper's problem at all. Our admin does a Friday pass through the card statements, matches photos, and sends one clean file. Costs us maybe two hours of her week, which is cheaper than paying an outside firm to do the same chasing at their rate.

That only works because we have someone in-house. Solder, you don't, so your version of that is thirty minutes on a Sunday or paying the sixty.

The part I'd push back on is thatch's twice-and-suspense rule, though I understand why it exists. When we used a firm with that policy, items sat in suspense for four months and the monthly reports were useless for making decisions, because a chunk of spend was parked outside the operating categories. If you use that rule, someone still has to clear the account on a schedule or you've just moved the mess.

Cobalt, that suspense point is the thing I'd want answered before signing either quote. If undocumented spend just accumulates somewhere, then the cheaper engagement isn't producing books, it's producing a sorted list of bank activity plus a growing pile.

I'm still figuring out where I fit in all this, so I'm reading these threads mostly for how the work actually splits. What strikes me is that both quotes solder got are selling different products under one name. One is transaction coding. The other is coding plus document control. Sixty dollars is a strange amount of money to represent that difference, and I'd ask the second bookkeeper what she does when the receipts stop coming, because that answer tells you which product you're really buying.