Accounting and business services

Which service answers which problem?

The eight are not a menu of upsells. They are the places where a company's financial administration either holds together or starts to cost money: a ledger that is current, statements you can read, people paid correctly, filings tracked, registrations kept alive, and someone to think with when a decision has numbers attached.

Most engagements start in one place. A company with eighteen months of unreconciled bank activity starts with bookkeeping. A company about to put its first two people on a payroll run starts with payroll. What you do not need, we do not sell you.

The boundaries matter less than the handoffs. Bookkeeping feeds accounting; accounting feeds the tax work and the lender package; payroll feeds the wage cost that sits in your margin. When the same firm runs two of them, the data moves once instead of being re-entered and re-explained.

Can I take one service on its own?

Yes. Every service at Rationale Services can be engaged on its own. Plenty of clients use bookkeeping only, or payroll only, and keep everything else where it is. Nothing is bundled, and taking one service does not commit you to the next one.

There is one practical limit worth saying plainly. Some work depends on other work being done. Monthly management accounts are only as good as the ledger underneath them, so if the books are six months behind, the reporting engagement starts with catch-up rather than reporting. We will tell you that before you sign anything, not after.

How do several services work together in one engagement?

The advantage is that the data is entered once and reconciled once. Payroll runs feed the books as they happen; the books feed the month-end close; the close feeds the management reporting and the figures handed to whoever prepares the return. Rationale Services keeps the chain intact so the same number does not get rebuilt three times.

It also removes a familiar argument. When the bookkeeper, the payroll provider and the tax preparer are three unrelated firms, a disagreement between their numbers becomes your project to resolve. Under one engagement it is ours.

How do you work out what the work involves?

Scope comes out of a discovery conversation, not a form. We look at what you have — the systems, the volume, the condition of the records, how many entities and states are involved, how many people you pay — and we write down what we would actually do each month. That becomes an engagement letter before any work starts.

The things that move scope are worth knowing, because you can estimate your own position from them: how many transactions run through your accounts, how many bank, card and processor feeds there are, how many entities you file for, how many states you operate or employ in, how many people are on payroll, and the condition the books are in when we take them over.

Nothing is quoted before that conversation and nothing changes afterwards without you agreeing to it in writing. How we work sets out the steps, including how scope and fee are agreed and what happens when the work turns out to be bigger than it looked.

What happens in the first few weeks?

The opening weeks are mostly transfer and verification. Rationale Services takes access to your systems, pulls the history, finds the gaps, and agrees opening balances with you before producing anything you are meant to rely on. Nothing is reported as fact until it reconciles.

In practice that runs in four passes. First, access and inventory: logins, bank and card feeds, payroll system, prior-period files, and a list of what is missing. Second, a review of what is actually there — how transactions have been categorised, what has never been reconciled, which balances cannot be explained. Third, correction and opening balances, which is where catch-up work gets scoped if it is needed. Fourth, the first normal cycle, where you see the reporting you will be getting every month from then on.

You will hear from us during this period more than you will later. That is deliberate: the questions we ask in week two are the ones that stop a wrong number being carried forward for a year.

What do you need from me each month?

Less than most owners expect, and it shrinks after the first couple of cycles. The recurring items are statements or feed access for any account we cannot connect directly, documentation for transactions only you can explain, approval of payroll before it runs, and answers to a short query list.

The query list is the part worth taking seriously. It is usually short — a handful of transactions that could be two different things — and every unanswered item is a number someone has to guess at. Clients who clear the list in a day get a close on schedule. Clients who leave it for three weeks get a close three weeks late, and there is no way around that.

What if I already have a bookkeeper or someone in-house?

That is a common starting point and it does not have to be an either-or. Rationale Services often works alongside in-house staff: your person handles daily entry and invoicing, we handle reconciliation, the close and the reporting. The split is written into the engagement so nobody is waiting on work that was never assigned.

When it is a full handover, we run it as a transfer rather than a restart — pulling file backups and access, agreeing the cutover period, and checking opening balances against what the previous arrangement produced. The handover detail sits on the bookkeeping page.

Can you work with my business if we are nowhere near your office?

Yes. Rationale Services works remotely with businesses throughout the United States. Documents move through secure file sharing, we work inside your accounting and payroll systems rather than asking you to change them, and reviews happen by video call on a schedule you set.

Remote also means we are not limited to one state's worth of experience. Businesses that sell or employ across several states are a normal part of the work rather than an exception that has to be figured out, whatever industry you work in.

Who will I actually be dealing with?

You get one point of contact for all the services you use, and that person knows your file rather than reading it fresh each time you call. Questions go to one place. Rationale Services does not route you between separate departments for bookkeeping, payroll and tax questions about the same business.

Messages get a response within the working window agreed in your engagement, and anything time-sensitive — a payroll run, a filing date we are tracking for you — is flagged by us rather than waiting for you to ask.

What happens with work you do not do?

We say so and refer it out. There is work in and around accounting that belongs with other practitioners — certain kinds of assurance work on financial statements, legal structuring and employment questions, specialist valuation. When your situation needs one of those, Rationale Services tells you what is outside our scope and helps you get it in front of the right person.

That also applies inside an engagement. If something comes up mid-year that should be answered by your attorney or by a specialist, you hear that straight away rather than getting a cautious non-answer from us.