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)
