Katie Wells

The industries Katie knows best

Construction and professional services. Those are two of the harder sets of books to keep well — job costing, retainage, progress billing and work-in-progress on one side; work-in-progress of a different kind, unbilled time and client-matter profitability on the other. Both are businesses where the books either answer the profitability question by job or client, or they do not answer it at all.

What twenty-five years actually buys you

A bookkeeper who has seen twenty-five year-ends knows which accounts go wrong, which numbers look fine while hiding something, and what a set of books needs to look like for a return, a lender or a buyer. That is not something a certification produces on its own.

What Katie does

• Monthly bookkeeping — reconciliation, categorization, financial statements and a closed period
• Catch-up and cleanup — for businesses months or years behind
• QuickBooks setup and support — chart of accounts, bank rules, training
• Payroll — processing and Oregon compliance, including the local withholding most systems miss
• Accounts payable and receivable, ageing and cash flow reporting

Why the books come before the return

A business return prepared from unreconciled accounts is a guess with your signature on it. When the bookkeeping and the return happen under one roof, the books are built to support the returns — which means filing season is a review rather than an excavation, and it costs less.

The Portland-area complication

Portland businesses file more separate returns than businesses almost anywhere else — city, county, Metro and Oregon CAT, each with its own base and its own apportionment. Books that cannot show where revenue was sourced cannot support those filings without a reconstruction every March. Setting the chart of accounts up to answer that question is the single highest-value thing Katie does at the start of an engagement.