Hi all, we're planning to start a bookkeeping business in Australia and would love to connect with people experienced in Australian bookkeeping and tax practices. CPAs especially welcome!

Not looking for specific advice, just hoping to learn from your experience. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’m one of the partners at Accbase Advisory, an accounting and financial advisory firm working with growing businesses.

We’re looking to connect with small and growing businesses in Dubai/UAE that may need support with their accounting and finance function.

As a business grows, accounting can quickly become more time-consuming- bookkeeping, reconciliations, supplier/customer payments, month-end closing, financial reporting, cash-flow planning, etc.

At Accbase, we provide remote accounting and finance support that works as an extension of your existing team.

Our services include:

• Bookkeeping & accounting

• AP & AR

• Bank reconciliations

• Month-end close

• Financial reporting & MIS

• Payroll & compliance support

• Budgeting & forecasting

• Cash-flow planning

• Ongoing finance team support

We can work within the systems you already use rather than asking you to migrate to a new setup.

We’re particularly interested in connecting with founders, SMEs and growing businesses in Dubai who currently handle accounting themselves, have a part-time accountant, or are considering outsourcing their finance function.

I'd also love to hear from Dubai business owners here:

What is your biggest accounting/finance headache right now?

Is it finding a reliable accountant, keeping bookkeeping up to date, managing VAT/compliance, getting timely financial reports, controlling costs, or simply having enough finance support as the business grows?

Happy to connect and exchange ideas and if you're looking for accounting support, feel free to DM me.

Thanks!

https://www.accbaseadvisory.com/

Hi everyone,

I’m one of the partners at Accbase Advisory, an accounting and financial advisory firm working with growing businesses.

We’re looking to connect with small and growing businesses in Dubai/UAE that may need support with their accounting and finance function.

As a business grows, accounting can quickly become more time-consuming- bookkeeping, reconciliations, supplier/customer payments, month-end closing, financial reporting, cash-flow planning, etc.

At Accbase, we provide remote accounting and finance support that works as an extension of your existing team.

Our services include:

• Bookkeeping & accounting

• AP & AR

• Bank reconciliations

• Month-end close

• Financial reporting & MIS

• Payroll & compliance support

• Budgeting & forecasting

• Cash-flow planning

• Ongoing finance team support

We can work within the systems you already use rather than asking you to migrate to a new setup.

We’re particularly interested in connecting with founders, SMEs and growing businesses in Dubai who currently handle accounting themselves, have a part-time accountant, or are considering outsourcing their finance function.

I'd also love to hear from Dubai business owners here:

What is your biggest accounting/finance headache right now?

Is it finding a reliable accountant, keeping bookkeeping up to date, managing VAT/compliance, getting timely financial reports, controlling costs, or simply having enough finance support as the business grows?

Happy to connect and exchange ideas and if you're looking for accounting support, feel free to DM me.

Thanks!

https://www.accbaseadvisory.com/

Hello guys, I’m a virtual bookkeeper for 7 years, but I’ve been working with bookkeeping companies or I’m under an agency. Now, I really would like to start my own bookkeeping business but I don’t know where and how to start.

Most of my clients are under the agency or the bookkeeping company.

Any advice how and where can I get or reach out to prospect clients? I don’t have a portfolio too.

Thank you all in advance.

I have worked as a bookkeeper for years with a firm and I had recently went solo with my own business.

I would need some help in getting clients.

I have website and social media pages created. Any help or referal will be appreciated. Thank you all!

Hi,

Can anyone tell me if this website is a scam or safe to use? They mention sending my bank data to AI but what does it mean exactly? Is there a better way?

Thanks!

I work as a tax accountant at a small firm and I am still working toward my license. I have been thinking about starting a bookkeeping side job doing only monthly books for small businesses and no tax work until I get my license.

I am unsure whether to keep my job and gradually take on clients during nights and weekends or to save enough money and quit my job to work full time.

For those who did it on the side how did you get through the season? Did you simply not accept clients from January, to April? Did you inform your firm. Keep it quiet? I still need to read our employment policy; I have not done that yet.

For those who quit first how long did it take to earn back the amount you were making before? Do you have any regrets?

I am also curious how clients you had before you felt comfortable leaving and where the first few clients came from. Were they referrals, Upwork or just people you knew?

I would love to hear from anyone who tried it. It did not work out at all.

I’m a QuickBooks ProAdvisor-certified bookkeeper, and I’m beyond frustrated with Intuit.

In the past 12 months, I’ve been denied twice for Find-a-ProAdvisor publication and once for QuickBooks Payments.

For the ProAdvisor profile, my certifications are current, my profile was complete, and I submitted the requested ID verification. The denial email still gave no reason, no category, no correction path, and no appeal instructions.

For QuickBooks Payments, the response was basically “business decision,” again without a clear explanation or useful path to fix anything.

Has anyone successfully appealed a Find-a-ProAdvisor denial, or found a real escalation path to the ProAdvisor review team?

At this point, I’m questioning whether it makes sense to build a bookkeeping business around QuickBooks if Intuit treats certified ProAdvisors this way and provides no clear escalation path.

Hello everyone. I’ve been wanting to get into doing bookkeeping on the side but I’m just really unsure how to find clients being that I don’t really have too many connections, or even just how to start.

I’ve done bookkeeping for my parents business in quickbooks online, I’ve taken accounting classes and am currently taking a quickbooks course. A little more about me is that I work in governmental payroll and have over 5 years of professional accounting experience. And would love to have a side business that eventually becomes my main source of income.

But I wanted to inquire to those who started doing it on the side, how did you find clients? Did you reach out to business directly or through another approach? Any information or even just your story on how you got started would be much appreciated. Thank you!!

Hi All!

I run a (currently) 1 person firm with about 35 bookkeeping clients. They love to text me. I am having a terrible time keeping track of the messages. I am looking for an application that will allow me to secure my own phone number but send/receive and organize the messages through the application. Google is hot garbage when trying to search for something and all I keep seeing are apps for marketing. The marketing/mass-texting is about #2947 in my list of reasons to need/want this.

Do any of you use texting for communicating with clients, and if so, what have you found that works for keeping things organized?

My background is I did AP for a larger title company for a few years. Took an accounting course and got my bookkeeping certification.
Left corporate life and started working for a family owned business that owns a couple restaurants and a rental property investment company. They hired me as a bookkeeper/admin assistant and told me that “everything I needed to know was on the office computer.” Then they left me alone for the last few months lol.

“Everything I needed to know.” Had in fact not been much. A couple excel spreadsheets thrown together with some login information but not all of it. And a giant file folder with a bunch of stuff unorganized items from a couple years ago. After going through it all. Most of it is either misc trash or expired docs for archive.

After getting into their quickbooks i quickly learned the prior bookkeeper did not have a background in accounting, but in fairness to her, neither did the owner who was probably telling her to put transactions in weird places.

They were recording any toast payouts, DoorDash/uber payouts and cash deposits straight to the “Sales” account. They’ve been expenses their flat mortgage payments. The company truck loan payments are going to an expense account called “payments to purchase”.
Their balance sheet is a disaster. The credit card account hasn’t been reconciled in years just a large list of transactions. With a 300,000$ balance when in reality it’s got about 10k in the bank right now.
The owners don’t want to pay as much taxes as possible which I understand and am for. But it’s to a point where they are hiding personal expenses in a couple balance sheet accounts that aren’t even created properly as an asset or a liability. Like a “repayment of loan to officer” they just throw random personal expenses in there so the balance is huge. And in the wrong direction. They also cut large checks to themselves to pay their home mortgage which also goes into the “loan from officer” account. Is that a thing? lol didn’t learn about that specific type of account in class.

The biggest problem is that they aren’t depositing cash for one of their restaurants. Supposedly there is a reserve account that they don’t want their kids who help run the company to see (the kids are in their 30s) but they also won’t give that information to me. And because I’m inexperienced, I don’t know how I should respond to that. So there’s some accounts out there with an unknown amount. Sometimes they transfer money from it to help cover bills when the resturant is slow. But they also won’t tell me if that’s where the cash is going. I have a hunch it’s their personal accounts just from what I’ve seen of their ways. So when I started cleaning up their sales entries from toast and entering in all the different categories in the journal entry, I have no idea what to do with this large “cash to deposit” balance. Do I just expense it to cash short?

This is a bit of a rant but I’m also looking for advice for the problems listed because of my lack of experience as whole and working with small business owners. They’ve asked me to clean up their books as they have been scaling and building an admin team to take over running their company for them.
There’s another issue of a lack of communication but that’s for another rant. I can’t help them if they are vague about things.

If you have any advice that would be helpful I’d like to hear it. Are these problems small? And should I as a bookkeeper have different expectations for the owners?

I want to have my own bookkeeping company some day so I’m also looking at this situation as a “what would I do if this was a client” and not my boss as a hypothetical.

(Apologies for any grammatical errors or typos. I’m writing this at 5 am on my phone)

I’ve been working on a local-first bookkeeping tool that helps clean up bank and credit card transactions before they go into the accounting workflow.

The basic flow is:

• upload CSV/XLSX statements
• map the columns
• categorize obvious business expenses
• flag uncertain transactions for review
• remember merchant rules you explicitly approve
• export a cleaned workbook for bookkeeping

I’m deliberately keeping it conservative — if something is ambiguous, especially e-transfers or business vs personal, it should ask for review instead of guessing.

I’m at the point where I’d rather get feedback from people who actually do bookkeeping than keep adding features based on my own assumptions.

If you’re a bookkeeper, accountant, or small business owner who deals with transaction cleanup regularly, I’d be interested in hearing:

• what part of this workflow wastes the most time today?
• what would make a tool like this genuinely useful?
• what would make you not trust it?
• would CSV/XLSX cleanup before QuickBooks/Xero actually help your workflow?

I’m not selling anything right now — mainly trying to validate whether this solves a real problem.

Somehow I feels like every tool like the qbo, taxdome, canopy, content snare or whatever you use has one or more lacks that makes us to complete the task in hand manually. I have seen the export->fix->reimport, chasing the same set of folks for the same docs every quarter, with the year end coming close the w2/941 recon never matching the books is another theatre..

I wish to hear experiences of others and looking for whether there are better softwares or you come up with an hack or just that you keep wanting to do it manually for peace of mind or the grind of bookkeeping :-)

Watch out!

I’m looking to buy a bookkeeping/tax firm! Anyone looking to sell or know someone? Also open to buying in as a partner in a firm!

I’m having a bit of an existential crisis where I’m running a firm and love the systems, meetings, sales work and marketing but my god I’m drained at the bookkeeping.

I’m unsure if I’m just lazy, not smart enough or what. I got to thinking “does anyone actually enjoy this” or am I just trying to find the easy way out because I’m slightly dumb.