The oldest job in business, done on a schedule.

Seven thousand years and counting

Bookkeeping is older than money, older than writing as we usually think of it, and very probably older than the wheel in commercial use. Archaeologists have found Mesopotamian accounts pressed into clay with a stylus that may go back seven millennia, and Babylonian tablets recording transactions from around 2600 BC. Cities appear in the archaeological record, and accounts appear with them. The two seem not to be separable.

The system still in use was set down in 1494, when Luca Pacioli published a description of the double entry method Venetian merchants were already using. He did not invent it. He wrote it down, and it has not fundamentally changed in the five centuries since. Every debit and credit in your accounting software is running a Renaissance algorithm.

The detail I like best is colonial American. Merchants kept what they called a waste book, a running note of the day's receipts and payments, scribbled in order as things happened. It was never meant to last. At intervals the entries were copied properly into the daybook and the ledger, and once that was done the waste book was thrown out. Hence the name.

What is included

Scoped to what you need rather than sold as a package, but this is the usual shape of it.

Area	What gets done
Transactions	Bank and credit card activity brought in, categorized, and coded consistently so the same expense lands in the same place every month
Bank reconciliation	The books agreed to the statements, every period. This is the step that catches duplicated payments, missed deposits and the charge nobody recognizes
Accounts payable	What you owe and when, so nothing is paid twice and nothing is paid late
Accounts receivable	What you are owed and how long it has been outstanding, which is usually the most useful single report a small business never looks at
HST	Returns prepared and filed on your schedule, with input tax credits captured rather than left behind
Government remittances	Source deductions and the rest, remitted on time. These are the ones where late is expensive
Reporting	Statements you can read, on whatever cycle you want them, with someone to ask about what they say

Payroll usually sits alongside this and is handled through an ADP partnership. See payroll.

How often

There is no correct answer, only a fit.

• Monthly suits businesses with staff, inventory, or a bank that wants to see something. It is also the only cadence that lets the numbers inform decisions while the decisions are still open
• Quarterly works well for steady operations without payroll, and often lines up with an HST filing period
• Annually is fine for a straightforward business where the year end is the only reporting that matters. It costs less and tells you less, and that is a legitimate trade

Plenty of clients start annual and move to monthly once they notice how much they were guessing.

If you are behind

Very common, and not a problem. Books that have not been touched for a year or three get caught up as a defined piece of work, quoted separately from the ongoing arrangement so it never turns into an open ended bill.

What is needed is usually less than people fear. Bank and credit card statements reconstruct most of a year on their own, and the gaps get filled from whatever you do have. Bring it in whatever state it is in.

If the catch up also means returns that were never filed, that is a related but separate question. See personal tax and the Voluntary Disclosures Program.

Software

If what you have works, I will work in it. If it is costing you time, I will say so and explain what changing would involve before you decide, including how much work the migration itself is, which is worth planning for properly.

Most clients end up on a cloud platform, because it means we are both looking at the same file at the same time rather than emailing backups around. Setting it up properly at the start, with a chart of accounts that suits your business rather than the default one, saves more time than any other single decision in this list.

What good bookkeeping buys you

Compliance is the floor. HST filed, remittances made, year end straightforward. That is worth the money on its own and it is where most bookkeeping stops.

The part worth having is what becomes possible once the records are clean and current. Job costing that tells a contractor which contracts are worth bidding again. A cash flow view that reaches ninety days out. Margins by product or location. None of that requires new data. It requires the data you are already paying to have collected, organized well enough to answer a question.

That is the difference between reporting outward and reporting inward, and it is the argument on the home page and in customized accounting solutions.

Questions