10/21/2026
A business owner gets quoted $1,500 a month for bookkeeping. She finds someone online for $250 and goes with that. Bookkeeping is bookkeeping, right?
Ten months later she applies for a business loan, and the bank denies it after one look at her balance sheet. The bank accounts haven’t been reconciled since spring. Owner draws are coded as expenses, loan payments were posted entirely to principal with no interest ever deducted, and payroll taxes were never paid. She saved $12,500 on bookkeeping. The cleanup costs $18,000, before payroll penalties, the tax she overpaid on that missing interest, and the loan she didn’t get.
Her tax preparer never caught any of it. That’s not a knock on them. They file the return from the numbers they’re given, and checking whether those numbers are right isn’t what they’re hired to do. So if your books were wrong right now, who would catch it? If you’re not sure, send me a message.
