Willow Creek CMA

Willow Creek CMA Certified Management Accountant at Willow Creek Accounting

Quick question for the business owners.Open QuickBooks Online. Gear icon, then Account and settings, then Advanced. Look...
09/17/2026

Quick question for the business owners.

Open QuickBooks Online. Gear icon, then Account and settings, then Advanced. Look for "Close the books" under Accounting.

Is it on?

If it's off, every month you've already sent to a banker, an investor, or your tax preparer can still be changed by anyone with access, including by accident. QuickBooks builds each report fresh from whatever's in the file that day, so nothing warns you when an old month shifts.

The first place it shows up is your balance sheet, usually as a reconciliation that stops lining up.

Reconciling is how you prove a month is right. Closing is what keeps it that way. More on why:

https://willowcreekcma.com/blog/never-actually-closed-a-month

A while back I was helping a company that sent financial reports to its investors. Later we'd pull the same numbers out ...
09/15/2026

A while back I was helping a company that sent financial reports to its investors. Later we'd pull the same numbers out of QuickBooks and they wouldn't match what had gone out.

It happened more than once. By the time it showed up again, the owner said, "Oh no, not again."

Nobody was doing anything wrong. Several people could enter transactions, nobody was watching the dates, and entries kept landing in months that were already closed and already reported.

If you've ever sent a P&L to a banker and then forgotten about it, this one's worth ten minutes.

https://willowcreekcma.com/blog/never-actually-closed-a-month

There's one number that tells me most of what I need to know about a set of books. It's the last date the bank account r...
09/12/2026

There's one number that tells me most of what I need to know about a set of books. It's the last date the bank account reconciled clean.

If yours was a while back, this is worth your time. Skip one month and the next one starts from a balance nobody checked, so now you're searching two months of transactions to find one difference. Skip it again and it's three.

An unreconciled month doesn't stay one month.

I'm running free diagnostics right now. Give me accountant access to your QuickBooks file and I'll write up what's actually wrong and what it's costing you. No charge and no obligation.

https://willowcreekcma.com/diagnostic

You write a check on Tuesday and enter it the same day, because you want the record while it's fresh.Four days later it ...
09/10/2026

You write a check on Tuesday and enter it the same day, because you want the record while it's fresh.

Four days later it clears and comes across the bank feed. The date is different now. The payee reads as whatever the bank calls that vendor, which usually isn't what you typed in. It doesn't look familiar, so it gets added.

That payment is in your books twice, and you were being careful both times.

Deposits do more damage. Five payments walked to the bank as one deposit should match what's already in your file. Add it instead and the income is recorded a second time.

None of this makes any noise the day it happens.

https://willowcreekcma.com/blog/bank-feed-duplicates

How many accounts are in your chart of accounts right now? Most owners have never counted, and the number usually comes ...
09/05/2026

How many accounts are in your chart of accounts right now? Most owners have never counted, and the number usually comes in higher than they'd guess.

If yours has gotten long, here's a check you can run on your own file this weekend. Should take about twenty minutes.

Search the list for "fee," "misc," "other," and "ask my accountant." Anywhere two accounts mean the same thing, you've found your first merge.

Sort by balance and find anything with no activity in the last twelve months. Those are your candidates to make inactive.

Then read last month's P&L top to bottom. Every time you hit a line and think "I don't know what's in there," mark it.

Most owners need about fifteen or twenty lines on a P&L and a balance sheet they can take in on one screen.

Full walkthrough: https://willowcreekcma.com/blog/chart-of-accounts-should-have-30-accounts

Here's the question I ask an owner before I touch their books: what have you gone looking for in the last year that you ...
09/03/2026

Here's the question I ask an owner before I touch their books: what have you gone looking for in the last year that you couldn't find?

That answer usually tells me more than the file does. Whatever you went hunting for and couldn't turn up is the thing your reports were never built to answer.

Then I read the balance sheet one line at a time. Equipment sold years ago, still on there at full value. Loans paid off and never closed out. Two versions of the same bank account from the time a feed got disconnected and reconnected.

None of that came from one bad decision. It grew one reasonable addition at a time, and pruning it was never anybody's job.

More on how I work through it: https://willowcreekcma.com/blog/chart-of-accounts-should-have-30-accounts

A business owner told me he wanted to see everything. He meant it. Every piece of equipment his company owned had its ow...
09/01/2026

A business owner told me he wanted to see everything. He meant it. Every piece of equipment his company owned had its own account in QuickBooks, right down to a four hundred dollar tool sitting at one site.

The trouble is that equipment moves around. It breaks, it gets replaced, it gets hauled off. Almost none of that ever made it back to the accounting file.

So his books carried equipment he no longer owned and missed equipment he'd bought last spring. Two hundred accounts. A balance sheet over six pages long.

He could see everything. Most of it was already wrong.

I wrote up the whole story here: https://willowcreekcma.com/blog/chart-of-accounts-should-have-30-accounts

You didn't start your business because you love bookkeeping.You started it because you're good at the work. The dentistr...
08/28/2026

You didn't start your business because you love bookkeeping.

You started it because you're good at the work. The dentistry, the hauling, the case files, the treatment plan. Somewhere along the way you also became the person who invoices, chases payments, and tries to figure out why the bank balance doesn't match what the P and L says you made.

I've got a 47 minute commute each way for my day job, so I've been working through books on Audible. Just finished The E-Myth Revisited. Michael Gerber's argument is that most small businesses get started by technicians, people who are excellent at the actual work, who then wake up and realize they've bought themselves a job. He says there are three roles inside every owner: the entrepreneur who has the vision, the manager who builds the systems, and the technician who does the work. The technician usually wins, because that's the part you were already good at.

Here's my opinion after eight years of looking at other people's books. The technician in you is exactly why the books slip. Nobody skips a patient. Nobody skips a load. Everybody skips the reconciliation.

I'll go first. I'm a numbers geek. When a spreadsheet or a financial model finally just works, the way it was supposed to, that's the best part of my week. Which means my technician role wears a disguise. It looks like building systems, and then quietly rebuilding them. I'll refactor a model that already answered the question. I'll polish something that was perfectly usable four hours ago. And while I'm in there, the thing my business actually needed that week is still sitting untouched.

Good enough and shipped beats polished and late. I know that. I still have to say it to myself most weeks.

Yours probably wears a different disguise. Maybe it's taking one more appointment instead of sitting down with your numbers. The trap is the same either way. The role you enjoy quietly eats the roles nobody is covering.

The work you love is what makes the money. The books are what tell you whether it's working.

If you need help making sense of your books, I'd love to connect.

I want to share more of why Willow Creek Accounting exists.Part of it is close to home. I have a wife and two little boy...
08/25/2026

I want to share more of why Willow Creek Accounting exists.

Part of it is close to home. I have a wife and two little boys. I'm building this so our family has more flexibility. More concretely it's so my wife doesn't have to work as much as she does now. I also want us to reach a place of real financial freedom & be more present for our boys while they're still small.

The other part is the work itself. I have a real passion for small business. I believe small business is the backbone of the economy, and I want to see these owners win. So many of them love what they do and pour everything into it, but they never learned how to keep the books straight. That's the part I'm good at, and the skills I've built as a CMA and controller can be a real asset to them. I want to put that knowledge to work for people who need it.

That's the whole thing really. Build something that gives my family more freedom by helping other families keep their businesses healthy.

If you own a small business and the books feel like a mess you keep meaning to get to, I'd love to help.

The true cost of broken books isn't the cash. It's the stress and opportunity cost of flying a business blind.How can yo...
08/22/2026

The true cost of broken books isn't the cash. It's the stress and opportunity cost of flying a business blind.

How can you know if it's the right time to hire, change pricing, or take on more work if none of the numbers are real?

One bad number won't lead you far astray. Six months of them certainly will.

Clean books provide clarity, and that takes attention all twelve months, not one week in April.

That's what a good bookkeeper provides. Clarity.

If you'd like that kind of clarity in your business, I'd like to talk.

Full post: https://willowcreekcma.com/blog/pl-says-you-made-money-bank-account-disagrees

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Rupert, ID

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Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

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+12084303323

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