Bookkeeping and Accounting Services
Clean books are what make everything else cheap: an accurate return, a defensible deduction and a lender who takes you seriously.
What this service covers
Most tax problems in small businesses are really bookkeeping problems arriving late. When transactions are uncategorised and accounts unreconciled, deductions get missed because nobody can prove them, the year-end return costs more because someone has to reconstruct twelve months in a hurry, and you spend the year making decisions without knowing your actual margin. EvoTax keeps the books monthly — categorising transactions, reconciling bank and card accounts, tracking receivables and payables, and producing a profit and loss and balance sheet you can actually read. By the time the return is due the books are already closed, which makes filing faster and cheaper. If your records are behind, we catch them up first rather than filing on top of an unreliable set of numbers.
Reviewed by Teja K, CPA · last reviewed . General information, not tax advice for your situation. How we research and review this.
A deduction you cannot evidence is not a deduction
The reason bookkeeping is a tax service rather than an administrative one is that the burden of proof sits with you. If a deduction is questioned, the question is not whether the expense was reasonable — it is whether you can show it happened, what it was for, and that it was a business cost. Records are the whole of that answer.
The IRS expects you to keep records that support the income, deductions and credits on your return, and to retain them while they remain relevant — generally at least three years from filing, and longer in specific circumstances. What it does not do is prescribe a system. A spreadsheet maintained properly beats accounting software nobody reconciles.
The single most common reason a deduction cannot be substantiated is not a missing receipt. It is a mixed account. When business and personal spending run through the same card, every claim requires reconstructing intent transaction by transaction, months or years later, from memory. Separating the accounts costs nothing and removes most of the problem.
Why monthly costs less than annually
Catching up twelve months in March is more expensive than closing twelve months one at a time, and the reason is not just labour. It is that context decays. A $340 payment categorised in the week it happened is a known thing; the same payment categorised eleven months later is a guess, and a guess is what gets removed when a return is examined.
Late books also cost decisions. Without a current profit and loss you are running the year on bank balance, which conflates profit with timing — a healthy balance in a month when you have not yet paid quarterly tax is not the same as a good month. For anyone who needs to decide whether to hire, raise prices or make an S-election, the numbers have to exist before the year ends, not after.
And where a lender, a landlord or an immigration filing needs financial statements, they need them at a point in time you do not control. Books closed monthly can produce them in a day. Books closed annually cannot produce them at all until the year is done.
QuickBooks, Xero, and moving between them
We work in QuickBooks Online and Xero. Both are double-entry cloud platforms with bank feeds, reconciliation and proper financial statements, and either will do the job well. If you are already on one of them we work in your file rather than exporting your history into something of ours.
It is worth saying plainly that the choice of platform is the least important decision here. A file nobody reconciles produces confident, wrong numbers on either one, and the most common problem we inherit is not the wrong software — it is the right software with two years of uncategorised bank feed sitting in it.
- Ongoing monthly bookkeeping in your existing QuickBooks Online or Xero file.
- Setup from scratch, including a chart of accounts built for your business rather than a template.
- Cleanup: recategorising history, removing duplicated feeds, and reconciling accounts that never were.
- Migration between the two, or from spreadsheets and desktop software.
On migration, two things are worth knowing before you start. Balances, the chart of accounts and a period of transaction history convert reasonably well; attachments, reconciliation status, custom reports and payroll detail often do not. Expect to keep read-only access to the old system for a while rather than switching it off on day one.
And convert at a period boundary wherever you can — the start of a financial year, or failing that a quarter. Splitting a year across two systems means every annual figure has to be assembled from two sources, which is precisely the reconstruction work that doing the books monthly is meant to avoid.
If you are choosing between the two from a standing start, we will suggest one based on your transaction volume, whether you invoice, and what your bank supports — not on which has the longer feature list.
What AI bookkeeping does, and what it does not
Automation has genuinely changed the mechanical half of this work, and it is worth being specific about which half. Importing bank feeds, matching a transaction against how a similar one was treated last month, reading a receipt, flagging a duplicate or a gap in a statement sequence — software does all of that faster and more consistently than a person, and we use it.
What it cannot do is know why money moved. A $340 card payment at a hardware store is a deductible repair, an improvement that has to be capitalised, or a personal purchase made on the wrong card. The transaction data is identical in all three cases. The only thing that separates them is knowing what the money was for, and that lives in your head rather than in the feed.
| Task | Handled well by software? |
|---|---|
| Importing bank and card transactions | Yes — this is what feeds are for |
| Matching a transaction to a prior categorisation | Usually, where a clear precedent exists |
| Reading a receipt or invoice | Yes, with the figures checked |
| Flagging duplicates and missing statement periods | Yes, and more reliably than a person |
| Repair or capital improvement | No — a judgement about the nature of the work |
| Business or personal on a mixed account | No — the data does not contain the answer |
| Revenue, a loan, or a refundable deposit | No — depends on the arrangement behind it |
| Related-party and cross-currency flows | No — see the India section below |
The reason this matters is not philosophical. The burden of proof on a deduction sits with you, as the first section of this page sets out, and "the software categorised it that way" is not evidence of anything. An automated categorisation nobody reviewed is a guess with a timestamp on it.
So the honest description of how we work is that automation does the matching and a person makes the decisions and signs off the reconciliation. That is cheaper than doing all of it by hand, and considerably more defensible than doing none of it by hand.
Sales tax obligations you can acquire without noticing
Sales tax is where online businesses most often discover an obligation retrospectively, and it is worth understanding because the trigger is not intuitive.
Obligations are created by economic nexus, which turns on sales volume or transaction count into a state rather than on any physical presence there. A business operating entirely from one state, with no office, employee or inventory elsewhere, can acquire filing obligations in several other states purely by selling to customers in them. Thresholds differ state by state, and so do the rules about what is taxable — several states tax software and digital services that others do not.
The practical consequence is that this needs watching as revenue grows rather than being decided once at formation. Tracking taxable sales by jurisdiction from the start is considerably cheaper than establishing after the fact which states you crossed into and when.
Sales tax is a state matter with fifty-odd different answers, so nothing here is a substitute for checking your specific states. What we do is identify where you appear to have crossed a threshold so the question gets asked before a state asks it.
If your business touches India as well
Books for a business with an Indian side have two complications generic bookkeeping does not handle, and both are easier to build in than to retrofit.
The first is currency. Transactions in rupees have to be translated for US reporting, and the rate used needs to be consistent and defensible rather than whatever the payment processor showed that day. Where you hold a rupee balance, movements in the exchange rate can themselves have tax consequences.
The second is that money moving between a US entity and an Indian entity or contractor under common ownership is not simply a transfer. Payments between related parties attract their own reporting and pricing expectations, and a foreign-owned US entity has annual information reporting obligations of its own with substantial penalties for non-filing that apply even when the entity made no profit. Recording those flows correctly through the year is what makes the year-end filings possible; discovering them in March is what makes them expensive.
Where this comes from
- IRS — Recordkeeping for businesses: what to keep, why, and for how long
- IRS Publication 583 — Starting a Business and Keeping Records
- IRS — How long should I keep records: the retention periods and the exceptions
- IRS Publication 535 — Business Expenses, including the substantiation expected for each category
- IRS — Foreign currency and currency exchange rates for US tax reporting
Benefits & What You Get
Monthly, not a January scramble
Books closed each month, so the year-end return is a formality rather than a reconstruction project.
Deductions captured as they happen
Costs categorised while the context is fresh, which is when a deduction is easiest to substantiate.
Statements you can use
A profit and loss and balance sheet each month, so you know your margin without waiting for a tax return.
Catch-up for behind books
Where records have slipped, we bring prior months current before anything is filed on them.
Straight into your return
The same team files your business return, so nothing is lost handing books from one party to another.
How It Works
Connect accounts
We set up secure read-only access to your bank, card and payment platforms.
Categorise and reconcile
Transactions are categorised to a proper chart of accounts and every account is reconciled monthly.
Report monthly
You receive a profit and loss and balance sheet, with anything unclear queried.
Close the year
We finalise the year and carry the books directly into your business tax return.
Pricing
Up to 100 transactions monthly
Up to 500 transactions, multiple accounts
Per month of back records
Annual tidy-up before filing
Final pricing depends on the complexity of your case. Contact us for an exact quote.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need bookkeeping if I only have a few transactions?
You need records, though not necessarily a monthly service. What you cannot do without is a clean separation between business and personal spending and evidence for what you deduct. A single mixed account is the most common reason a deduction cannot be substantiated. If you are genuinely low-volume, a year-end close may be enough.
What is the difference between bookkeeping and accounting?
Bookkeeping is the recording — categorising transactions and reconciling accounts so the numbers are complete and accurate. Accounting is what you do with those records: producing statements, interpreting them, planning tax and reporting. Reliable bookkeeping is the precondition, because accounting on unreliable books produces confident answers that happen to be wrong.
Can you fix a year of neglected books?
Yes, and it is common. We rebuild from bank and card statements and payment platform records, categorise the year, reconcile it and identify deductions that were never captured. It is priced per month of back records. Doing this before filing is almost always cheaper than filing on unreliable numbers and amending later.
Do you handle sales tax?
We support sales tax reporting where you have an obligation, including tracking taxable sales by jurisdiction. Whether you have an obligation at all depends on economic nexus rules that differ by state and are triggered by sales volume or transaction count rather than physical presence, so a business selling online can acquire obligations in states it has never visited. We help identify where you have crossed a threshold.
Which accounting software do you work with?
QuickBooks Online and Xero. If you are already on either, we work in your file rather than moving your history somewhere else. We also migrate between the two and across from spreadsheets or desktop software, and we can work directly from bank feeds and statements if you use no software at all. If you are choosing from scratch we will suggest one based on your transaction volume, whether you invoice, and what your bank supports, rather than on which has the longer feature list.
Can AI do my bookkeeping?
It can do a large part of the mechanical work and none of the judgement. Importing transactions, matching one against how a similar payment was treated before, reading receipts and spotting duplicates or gaps are all things software does well, and we use it for exactly that. What it cannot determine is why money moved — whether a hardware store payment was a repair, a capital improvement or a personal purchase on the wrong card, because the transaction data is identical in all three cases. That matters because the burden of proof on a deduction sits with you, and an automated categorisation nobody reviewed is not evidence of anything. The practical answer is that automation should do the matching and a person should make the decisions and sign off the reconciliation.
How long do I need to keep my records?
Generally at least three years from the date you filed the return the records support, because that is the ordinary window in which a return can be examined and in which you can claim a refund. Several situations extend it: records supporting the basis of an asset should be kept until three years after you dispose of it, employment tax records have their own retention period, and the window is longer where income was substantially understated. Digital copies are acceptable, so the practical answer for most small businesses is to keep everything and not think about it — storage is cheaper than the alternative.
My business bills clients in India. Does that change the bookkeeping?
Yes, in two ways worth building in from the start rather than retrofitting. Rupee transactions have to be translated for US reporting on a consistent and defensible basis rather than whatever rate a payment processor happened to show, and holding a rupee balance means exchange-rate movement can itself carry tax consequences. Separately, if there is an Indian entity or contractor under the same ownership, money moving between them is not just a transfer — related-party flows carry their own reporting and pricing expectations, and a foreign-owned US entity has annual information filings with substantial penalties for missing them even in a year with no profit. Recording those flows correctly through the year is what makes those filings straightforward.
Background reading and tools
The guides cover the federal treatment in detail. The calculators let you check a number before you commit to anything.
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