You left the CPA shop, or the corporate accounting job, somewhere between ten and twenty years ago because you wanted to run something clean. You got there. Somewhere around 40 clients, QBO and Xero files in good order, Dext or Hubdoc catching the receipts, Gusto running payroll, a small team you actually like.
And then it stopped moving.
Not because the phone stopped ringing. Referrals still come in. You are turning them down, or letting them sit in your inbox for three weeks until they go away on their own, because you know exactly what the next yes costs. It costs a hire. And you know what a hire costs, because you have made a few.
You tell prospects "we're at capacity." What you mean is: my senior is spending her afternoons keying vendor bills when she should be reviewing, and I cannot put one more client file on her desk without watching her update her resume.
"The instinct is to hire someone who does what you do so you can split the load. But then you're managing a junior version of yourself, reviewing their work anyway."
A firm owner's reply on r/Bookkeeping
What being stuck at 40 actually costs
Take the last junior you hired. Three months to learn your chart of accounts and your coding rules: which client wants Meals split from Travel, which owner runs personal charges through the business card and gets an Ask My Accountant instead of a guess, which vendor is COGS for the contractor and Supplies for everyone else. Three months of your senior's time, on top of her own client load. Then somewhere around month eight the junior gets a better offer, or moves, or decides bookkeeping is not for her, and you start over. You paid for that training twice. Once in her salary, and once in the review hours your senior spent catching her mistakes.
Meanwhile the client you turned down was $600 a month. Clean books, a decent owner, a referral from your best client. That is $7,200 a year you did not bill so you could protect the team you have. Turn away four of those in a year and you have quietly declined a full salary's worth of revenue in order to avoid paying a full salary.
That is the trap. Every new client means a hire. Every hire means training. Every trained person can leave. And because your clients see bookkeeping as a commodity, you cannot raise prices enough to make the hire pencil out. So you sit at 40 and call it comfortable. You have used that word with your spouse, and you did not fully believe it.
She sits the new hire at the computer and says, "Just enter the bills." He freezes. Hand on the mouse. Five silent minutes.
The Successful Bookkeeper podcast, episode 427, on a hire Debbie Roberts made
What Keyed Books actually is
I did not start Keyed Books to sell you bookkeeping. You do bookkeeping better than anyone I could put on it. I started it to take one specific piece of production off your team's desk: entering and coding client vendor bills.
Not a tool you learn. Not a person you train. Not a firm that wants a relationship with your clients. A mechanism. Bills leave your queue. Coded entries come back into your review queue. Your senior goes back to being a reviewer.
Bill entry is the right piece to take because it is high volume, rule driven, and completely reviewable. Every bill either follows one of your coding rules or it does not. The ones that do get coded to that client's chart of accounts. The ones that do not get flagged with a one-line note. Nothing gets guessed, and nothing posts until your team says so.
I run production. Bills in, coded entries out, your firm reviews. That is the whole company.
How it works, start to finish
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01
You send the bills. However they reach you now. Forward the email, share the Dext or Hubdoc inbox, drop them in a folder. We do not ask you to change how bills arrive.
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02
You give us your rules. That client's chart of accounts, plus the coding rules your senior keeps in her head or in your SOPs. "Amazon is Supplies unless the memo says client gift." "This vendor is always COGS." Ten minutes on a call or a page of notes. If nothing is written down, we write down what your senior tells us and hand it back. You get an SOP out of it.
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03
We enter and code. Vendor, date, amount, due date, line items, class or location if you use them, coded to that client's chart of accounts under your rules. Nothing posts.
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04
Exceptions get flagged, never guessed. A vendor your rules do not cover. A charge that could be Repairs or could be a capital purchase. A likely duplicate. An amount that does not match the PO. Each one comes back with a plain-English note: "New vendor, no rule. Looks like Subcontractors. Confirm?" That is the sentence you wish your last junior had written.
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05
Your team reviews and posts. Coded entries land in your review queue the way a junior's would. Your reviewer approves, changes, or bounces. The books are touched by your firm and nobody else.
The eight things you are about to ask me
Do I lose control of the books?
No. We do not post to the ledger, ever. Every entry we produce sits unposted until your reviewer moves it. We never touch payments, never see a bank feed, never talk to your client. If you stop tomorrow, your files look exactly the way they did, plus a folder of coded bills.
How do I know the coding is any good?
You grade it. That is the whole offer. Your senior takes the first 50 bills we code and marks them the way she would mark a new junior's first week. If it does not pass her grade, you owe nothing and you lost an afternoon. I am not going to show you a badge or a case study. There are no testimonials on this page because I would rather your own reviewer be the testimonial.
I tried offshore. Never again.
I know. And the reason it hurt was not the geography. You were sold a person. You spent three months teaching that person your rules, then the person left and the shop sent you a new one, and you started over while paying for the privilege. We are not selling you a person. Your rules live with us, written down, applied the same way on bill 51 as on bill 5,000. Nobody quits in month eight. Nobody needs to be re-trained.
"They might disappear on you. They might not understand the work but will not say it."
A bookkeeper on r/Bookkeeping, on offshore hires
What is under the hood?
You have been pitched every tool that promises to categorize everything and then quietly guesses. I am not going to pitch you a method. How we produce the work is my problem. Whether it passes your senior's grade is the only thing that matters to you, and you find that out for free, on your own client, before a dollar changes hands.
Where does client data go?
Think about what a vendor bill is: a vendor name, an amount, a date, a description. No bank logins. No payroll. No Social Security numbers. No authority to pay anything. Bills reach us the same way they reach you now, and coded entries go back to you. If it helps, start the test with a client whose bills you would hand a new junior on day one. That is exactly the level of access this is.
What happens when a bill is weird?
It comes back flagged, with the reason, in one sentence. Never guessed. Your files will not fill up with a stranger's best guesses. A weird bill costs your reviewer fifteen seconds to read the note and decide. A guessed bill costs her a cleanup in April.
Do I have to change my stack?
No. QBO, Xero, Dext, Hubdoc, BILL, a shared drive, a forwarding address. We come to your stack. If you switch tools next year, we switch with you.
What does my team do differently on Monday?
Your senior stops keying and starts reviewing. That is the whole change. The stack of bills that used to take her afternoon takes her twenty minutes of approvals. Your junior spends the day on bank recs and chasing receipts instead of typing vendor names. You spend it on the two prospects sitting in your inbox.
What it costs, next to what you pay now
A bookkeeper at the national median wage runs about $950 a week before payroll tax, benefits, a QBO seat, a laptop, and the three months she is not yet productive. Loaded, call it $1,200 a week. That is before the cost of your senior's hours training her, and before the day she gives notice.
About $115 a week. Flat, not hourly. No one to hire, train, or manage. Nothing to install.
The first 50 bills are free, and your senior grades them
Pick one client. Send us the next 50 vendor bills the same way you would hand them to a new hire. We code them to that client's chart of accounts under your rules and hand them back. Your senior grades the batch the way she would grade a new junior's first week.
If it passes, we keep going at $500 a month. If it does not, you owe nothing, and you walk away with 50 coded bills and a written copy of your own coding rules for the trouble.
The risk sits on my side because that is where it belongs. You have already paid for enough things that did not work.
Which client would you test us on? [email protected] or 650-690-2765.
For
Firms of 3 to 20 people with 30 to 80 clients, whose senior is doing production work she should not be doing, and who have turned down a client in the last six months because it meant a hire.
Not for
Anyone who wants us to own the client relationship, touch payments, or replace their review. We don't. Not for the solo bookkeeper with eight clients who likes the keying. Not for a firm looking for the cheapest pair of hands to dump the whole file on.
Which client would you test us on?
Email [email protected]Or call 650-690-2765. A person answers, usually same day.
John Rood
Founder, Keyed Books. New York, NY.
P.S. The client you are picturing right now, the one with the sprawling vendor list and the owner who runs Costco through the business card, is the one to test us on. If we pass on that file, the rest is easy. Which client would you test us on? [email protected], 650-690-2765.