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Austin, TX — Serving Bookkeeping Clients Nationwide
Case Studies

Books that hold up
under real pressure.

Six engagements pulled straight from our files. A margin nobody could explain. A sale process that couldn't afford a surprise. A grant that had to be spent on time. Real problems, real work, real outcomes.

What's real, what's withheld. Every problem, action, and result below happened. We've removed client names and exact dollar figures to protect confidentiality, industry, engagement type, and outcomes are accurate.

01
Design-Build & Reconstruction Full Books + Custom Build

A firm with three divisions and no way to see which jobs made money.

The problem

No job codes. No time tracking. Gross margin swung from up 74% one quarter to down 79% the next, so no single period told the truth, and owners had no way to see where a project was bleeding cash while it was still underway.

What we did

We built a private, PIN-gated job-cost application that splits material and labor cost per project and rolls profit up by division. We introduced job codes and daily time entry where none existed, tied a milestone billing ladder to real percent-complete, and set trailing-twelve-month gross margin as the one honest number for owner conversations.

Result
0 → Live

Job-level profit and loss, visible by project and by division, reconciled to QuickBooks automatically instead of guessed at after the fact.

02
Multi-Location Coffee & Roasting Multi-Entity Cleanup + Close

Ten separate books, months behind, mid-sale.

The problem

Ten-plus café and roastery entities, each its own legal entity and QuickBooks file, had drifted roughly five months behind on reconciliation. The prior bookkeeper's fee had climbed sharply while output quietly stalled, and inaccurate books were misstating adjusted earnings by six figures in the middle of a live ownership sale process.

What we did

We onboarded every entity, cleaned up intercompany balances and negative equity, and put every book on a fixed close-by-the-fifteenth cadence. We then built a portfolio dashboard with per-location views and a valuation-scenario tester so ownership could see sale-readiness in real time.

Result
10 → 1

Ten entities that were months behind, consolidated onto a single on-time monthly close, with sale-ready financials in hand for the buyer's diligence team.

03
Grant-Funded Nonprofit Full Books + Grant Dashboard

A hundred duplicate accounts and no way to see what a grant had left.

The problem

Roughly a hundred duplicate program accounts had piled up in the chart of accounts, the budget covered expenses only with no income side, and leadership had no per-grant spend visibility, real risk when unused grant dollars are forfeited at the deadline.

What we did

We collapsed the chart of accounts down to clean program-level classes, built a bucket-fill tracker with one tab per grant, and put together a full twelve-month income-and-expense budget. The finished three-tab dashboard, actuals, scenario planning, and monthly P&L, went in front of the board with exportable, board-ready reporting.

Result
~100 → 0

Duplicate program accounts collapsed into per-grant tracking, with forward cash visibility the organization never had before.

04
Cash-Intensive Recycling Operator Catch-Up Cleanup

A six-figure cash gap, and three hundred places it could have gone.

The problem

The middle step of a cash-heavy business, bank withdrawal to driver to vendor payout ticket, had stopped being logged for close to a year. With hundreds of cash-payout vendor locations, the cash-on-hand account had drifted deep negative and nobody could prove where the money actually went.

What we did

We reconciled a full year of cash activity by hand, tracing every bank withdrawal to the vendor tickets it funded, and rebuilt the reconciliation process so the gap could never reopen unnoticed.

Result
1,250+

Vendor tickets matched against 140-plus withdrawals, turning an alarming "where did the money go" gap into a documented, defensible balance.

05
Live Events & Brand Activation YTD Cleanup + Monthly Books

Reimbursed travel that was quietly booking itself as revenue.

The problem

Client-reimbursable expenses were arriving bundled into lump-sum invoice payments, so pass-through costs risked being counted as income. Contractor invoices lived only in a personal inbox, paid over Zelle and Wise with no W-8BENs on file for the international contractors, and a related party's spending was commingled across the business accounts.

What we did

We instituted a reimbursables-tagging practice so pass-through costs are flagged before payment ever lands, separated personal and related-party activity by class, drove W-8BEN collection for every international contractor, and worked a full year-to-date cleanup underneath it all.

Result
~90%

Dialed in, from a commingled book where reimbursements were routinely misread as revenue, to a repeatable, defensible practice.

06
Multi-Site Church Migration + Payroll + Budget

A migration they were scarred by, days before a capital campaign.

The problem

An earlier provider switch had turned into an eighteen-month ordeal, so trust in "migration" itself was the first thing to rebuild. Roughly 17% of expenses sat in an unclassified catch-all bucket, eighteen dormant accounts cluttered the chart of accounts, and cash reserves were thin heading into a multi-year capital campaign.

What we did

We ran the migration with a deliberate overlap so nothing dropped between bookkeepers, retired the dormant accounts, consolidated classes down to real ministry functions, executed a clean payroll cutover, built a driver-based operating budget for elder review, and stood up a weekly giving-intelligence dashboard.

Result
17% → Low Single Digits

Unclassified expenses reclassified and 18 dead accounts retired, with an elder-ready budget and weekly giving dashboard in place ahead of the campaign.

Your books can hold up the same way.

Every engagement above started as a diagnosis, not a pitch. Bring us your mess and we'll tell you exactly what we'd fix first.

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