Monthly Accounting
The service in full: what the close covers, the software setup, and what arrives each month.
Learn moreMonthly Accounting · Redondo Beach, CA
Monthly accounting in Redondo Beach, for businesses that run on thin margins.
Books closed every month for restaurants, trades, retail, and small practices. Where the margin is tight, the difference between knowing and guessing shows up fast.
Book Your Free ConsultationHigh-volume, low-margin businesses cannot wait for the books
Redondo Beach runs on hospitality, retail, the trades, and owner-operated practices. These are businesses with a lot of small transactions and not much room between revenue and cost. A restaurant working on single-digit margins cannot find out in March that food cost drifted three points in June.
The bookkeeping load is different too. Daily sales that arrive through a point-of-sale system and settle across several deposits. Merchant fees taken out before the money lands. Tips that pass through the business without being its income. Sales tax collected on someone else's behalf and sitting in an account that looks like cash.
None of that is hard, but all of it is easy to get wrong, and wrong compounds quietly. This page covers the monthly bookkeeping. The planning it feeds sits on our Redondo Beach tax planning page, and the filing on the Redondo Beach tax preparation page.
What the monthly close covers
Built for businesses with volume rather than complexity.
- 01Daily sales to deposit reconciliation
Point-of-sale totals tied to what actually reached the bank, with merchant fees and holdbacks recorded rather than netted invisibly.
- 02Cost of goods and margin
Food, materials, or inventory cost tracked against revenue so a drift in margin shows up in the month it happens.
- 03Payroll and tips
Wages, tips, and payroll taxes reconciled to the filings, with tips treated as a pass-through rather than revenue.
- 04Sales tax
Collected amounts tracked as a liability, not as cash, so a filing deadline is never a surprise about money you no longer have.
- 05Vendor payables
What you owe, aged, so payment timing is a decision rather than whatever the loudest supplier prompts.
- 06Statements and a short review
Profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash position, with a note on what moved and why.
What we usually find in the first close
Common in owner-operated businesses where the owner is also the operator.
- 01Sales tax counted as income
Money collected for the state sitting in the operating account and read as available cash, until the filing comes due.
- 02Merchant fees never recorded
Only the net deposit booked, so both revenue and cost are understated and the true processing cost is invisible.
- 03Tips run through revenue
Pass-through money inflating the top line and distorting every margin calculated from it.
- 04Inventory counted once a year
Cost of goods estimated for eleven months, which means margin is a guess for eleven months.
- 05Cash spending with no record
Supplier runs and small purchases paid in cash and never captured, so costs look lower than they are.
How the month runs
Point-of-sale and bank feeds connect directly, so daily activity flows in without anyone re-keying it. Questions get batched once rather than trickling out, because an owner working the floor does not need a stream of email.
The close lands on a set date. You get statements, the margin trend, and a plain note on anything that moved. For a business where a few points of cost decide the year, that trend line is the part worth reading.
Because the same firm prepares the return, the books close in the shape filing needs, and sales tax, payroll, and income tax stop being three separate scrambles.
Where this connects
Clean books are the input. These are what they feed.
Tax Planning in Redondo Beach
Entity structure, owner compensation, and timing decisions run against current numbers.
Learn moreTax Preparation in Redondo Beach
Returns prepared from books that were already closed, rather than rebuilt in the spring.
Learn moreCFO Services
Pricing, staffing, and cash-flow work for owners deciding whether the next location makes sense.
Learn moreKnow your margin while you can still do something about it.
Book a discovery call. We will look at how your books are kept today, what the statements are missing, and what a monthly close would change.
Book Your Free Consultation No pressure, no obligation. Just clarity.Questions we hear most.
01Do you handle sales tax filings?+
We track sales tax as a liability every month so the number is always known and the cash is never mistaken for yours. Whether we file it or you do is a scoping question we settle at the start, and we will be clear about which of us owns the deadline.
02Can you connect to my point-of-sale system?+
Usually. Most common restaurant and retail systems connect to QuickBooks Online directly or through a bridge. Where a system will not connect cleanly we set up a summary process rather than pretending a broken integration is working.
03How do you handle tips?+
Tips are recorded as a pass-through liability, not as revenue. That keeps the top line honest and every margin calculated from it meaningful. It also matters for payroll reporting, which is where mishandled tips usually surface as a problem.
04I pay some suppliers in cash. Does that break the books?+
No, but it has to be captured. Cash spending that never gets recorded means real costs are missing, and the business looks more profitable than it is, which is the worst direction for the error to run. We set up a simple capture routine rather than asking you to change how you buy.
05My margins move month to month. Is that a bookkeeping problem?+
Sometimes it is real and sometimes it is timing. Inventory counted once a year, or invoices landing in the wrong month, will produce swings that have nothing to do with the business. Monthly closing separates the two, which is the first step to acting on either.