Bookkeeper

Screening notes

Experience

6 years bookkeeping for US clients, the last 4 at a Manila outsourcing firm where I carried 7 e-commerce accounts doing $200K–1.2M a year each. Monthly close on QuickBooks Online for all seven, closing by the 8th business day. Reconciled Shopify, Stripe, PayPal and Amazon settlements against the bank every month. Caught and cleaned an 11-month misclassification of Stripe fees at one client that had overstated revenue by about $38K cumulatively — the prior bookkeeper had been booking deposits gross.

Tools

QuickBooks Online, Xero, A2X, Bill.com, Dext (was Receipt Bank), Excel (index/match and pivot tables, not just entry), Gusto for payroll journal entries

Scenario answer

Asked: You find a $2,340 discrepancy between the bank statement and the books during month-end close. Describe your exact process for hunting it down, in order.

A $2,340 gap is a number I would want to recognise before I go hunting, because most of them are one of four things and I can usually name it in ten minutes. First: is it exactly a transaction? I sort both sides by amount and look for 2,340.00 sitting alone on one side. If it is there, it is a missing entry or a duplicate and I am done. Fastest check, so it goes first. Second: is it divisible by 9? 2,340 divided by 9 is 260, so yes — that is the classic transposition signature. I would look for a figure entered as 2,340 that should be 3,240, or 340 that should be 304-ish. Trial-balance-era trick and it still works because humans still type. Third: is it half of something? 2,340 doubled is 4,680. If a 4,680 entry went in on the wrong side of the ledger, the books move by exactly twice the amount. I search for 4,680. Fourth, and for e-commerce this is where it usually ends: processor fees. Stripe pays out net, Shopify Payments pays out net, PayPal nets per-transaction. If a deposit was recorded at the gross sale amount and the fee was never booked, the difference IS the fee. On a $200K/month store, $2,340 is right in the range of one month of Stripe fees at 2.9% on roughly $80K. I would pull the Stripe payout report for the month, total the fees column, and compare it to whatever hit the fee expense account. If all four miss, I stop guessing and start bisecting: reconcile the first half of the month alone, then the second, and keep halving until the gap lives in one week, then one day. Slower, but it always terminates. What I would not do is post a plug to Ask My Accountant and move on. That is how a $2,340 gap becomes a $2,340 gap every month for a year.

Work sample

Asked: Explain, step by step, how you'd set up the chart of accounts and monthly close checklist for a small e-commerce business doing ~$50K/month. Name the tools you'd use.

CHART OF ACCOUNTS + CLOSE CHECKLIST — $50K/month e-commerce TOOLS QuickBooks Online Plus (needs class tracking and inventory). A2X to bridge Shopify and Stripe into QBO — this is the piece most $50K/month stores skip and it is the single biggest source of the reconciliation pain later. Dext for receipt capture. Bill.com only once AP is over about 15 bills a month; below that it is overhead. CHART OF ACCOUNTS — the parts that matter Income 4000 Product sales 4100 Shipping income (separate — it is revenue, and you need it separate to see true shipping margin) 4200 Discounts and refunds (contra) Cost of goods sold 5000 Product cost 5100 Inbound freight and duty 5200 Fulfilment and pick-pack 5300 Merchant fees (Stripe, Shopify Payments, PayPal, Amazon) Expenses 6000 Advertising — one sub-account per channel (Meta, Google, TikTok). Merged, you cannot answer the only question the owner will ask. 6100 Software 6200 Contractors 6300 Payroll and payroll taxes 6400 Owner draws (equity, not expense — this is the mistake I see most) The two decisions that cause the most cleanup later: keep merchant fees in COGS rather than expense so gross margin is real, and never let ad spend sit in one account. MONTHLY CLOSE CHECKLIST Day 1–2 1. Confirm all bank and credit-card feeds pulled through the last day of the month. A feed that stopped on the 27th is the most common cause of a mystery variance. 2. Import A2X settlement summaries for Shopify and Stripe. Confirm each settlement maps to a bank deposit — amount and date. 3. Enter or import any bills not in Bill.com. Day 3–4 4. Reconcile every bank and card account. Difference must be $0.00, not close. 5. Reconcile the processors: gross sales less fees less refunds must equal net deposits for the month. This is the step that catches fee misbooking. 6. Inventory: compare units sold in Shopify to COGS posted. If the store uses average cost, recompute; if it uses landed cost, confirm freight was allocated. Day 5–6 7. Accruals — any invoice for the month received after month end. 8. Review P&L against prior month line by line. Anything moving more than 20% gets explained in writing before close, not after a question. 9. Review balance sheet: Undeposited Funds should be zero or explainable, Ask My Accountant should be empty, owner draws should not be in expenses. Day 7–8 10. Lock the period in QBO and send the owner three things: P&L, balance sheet, and a short note naming what moved and why. THE ONE CHECK THAT CATCHES THE MOST Step 5. On an e-commerce book, if net deposits tie to gross sales minus fees minus refunds, almost nothing else can be badly wrong. If it does not tie, stop and find it before doing anything else — every downstream number is built on it.

Availability

Full-time, flexible PHT with 4 hours of US Eastern overlap. Can start in two weeks.

Screening notes

Experience

7 years in accounting, the last 3 as the sole bookkeeper for a US agency group with three entities (an LLC, an S-corp and a small holding company) on Xero, plus intercompany eliminations at year end. Monthly close by the 10th across all three. Handled AP for ~60 vendor bills a month and AR chasing on ~$180K of open invoices, which I brought from 47 days average collection to 31 over about eight months by doing the boring thing: an invoice goes out the day the work is signed off, and a reminder goes at day 15, not day 30.

Tools

Xero, QuickBooks Online, Hubdoc, Bill.com, Stripe, Expensify, Excel, and Fathom for the monthly reporting pack

Scenario answer

Asked: You find a $2,340 discrepancy between the bank statement and the books during month-end close. Describe your exact process for hunting it down, in order.

My order is cheapest test first, and the cheapest test is always the one that needs no thinking. 1. Confirm the statement period actually matches the reconciliation period. A gap that appears out of nowhere at month end is very often a statement that runs to the 28th against books that run to the 30th. Thirty seconds to check, and it is the answer more often than it should be. 2. Search for the exact amount on both sides. 2,340.00. If it exists on one side only, it is a missing or duplicated entry. 3. Divisibility by 9 — 2,340 is divisible by 9, which points at a transposition. I would scan for two digits swapped in the right magnitude range. 4. Look for 1,170 (half) and 4,680 (double). Half means something was entered once instead of twice or the split was wrong; double means an entry hit the wrong side. 5. If none of that lands, I narrow by date. Reconcile week by week until the variance appears in one week, then day by day. I would rather spend forty minutes on this than post a plug. 6. For this client shape I would also check uncleared items specifically — a cheque written in a prior month that cleared this month, or a deposit in transit at the cut-off. These are not errors, they are timing, and if that is the answer the fix is a reconciling item, not a correction. When I find it, I document what it was and why it happened in the close notes. If the same cause shows up twice, it is a process problem rather than a mistake, and I change the process — usually by moving the step earlier in the close.

Work sample

Asked: Explain, step by step, how you'd set up the chart of accounts and monthly close checklist for a small e-commerce business doing ~$50K/month. Name the tools you'd use.

CHART OF ACCOUNTS + CLOSE CHECKLIST — $50K/month e-commerce TOOLS Xero with A2X, Hubdoc for documents, Bill.com for AP once volume justifies it. I would use Xero over QuickBooks here only if the client already has an accountant on Xero; in the US the accountant network is mostly QuickBooks and that matters more than the software. CHART OF ACCOUNTS Revenue: product sales, shipping income, discounts and refunds as a contra account. COGS: product cost, inbound freight and duties, fulfilment, payment processing fees. Operating expenses: advertising split by channel, software, contractors, payroll and payroll taxes, professional fees, bank charges. Balance sheet items that need care: inventory, undeposited funds, sales tax payable, owner's equity and draws. Sales tax payable deserves its own note. On an e-commerce book it is not an expense and it is not revenue — it is money held for a state. Booking it into income is a mistake I have had to clean up twice and it makes every revenue number wrong until you do. MONTHLY CLOSE CHECKLIST 1. Verify all feeds are current through month end. 2. Import processor settlements and match each to a bank deposit. 3. Enter outstanding bills and expense claims. 4. Reconcile all bank and card accounts to zero difference. 5. Reconcile processor gross-to-net: sales less fees less refunds equals deposits. 6. Post inventory and COGS for units sold. 7. Review sales tax collected against sales tax payable and confirm the filing is scheduled. 8. Accruals and prepayments. 9. Review P&L and balance sheet for anything unexpected; investigate before closing, not after. 10. Lock the period and issue the reporting pack with a written commentary. THE CHECK THAT CATCHES THE MOST Step 5, the gross-to-net processor reconciliation. If that ties, the revenue line is right, and the revenue line is what everything else hangs off.

Availability

Full-time, 9am–6pm CST (full US Central overlap). One month's notice.

Screening notes

Experience

3 years as an accounting assistant at a Cebu BPO, supporting two US clients under a senior accountant. My work was data entry into QuickBooks, categorising transactions, chasing receipts from the client's team, and preparing the bank reconciliation for the senior to review and sign off. I have a BS in Accountancy from the University of San Carlos and I am taking the CPA board exam next year.

Tools

QuickBooks Online, Excel, Google Sheets, Dext

Scenario answer

Asked: You find a $2,340 discrepancy between the bank statement and the books during month-end close. Describe your exact process for hunting it down, in order.

When there is a discrepancy during month-end close, I would first double-check my own work, because most of the time the error is on my side. I would go back through the transactions I entered for the month and compare them line by line against the bank statement to make sure each one matches in both amount and date. If I do not find it that way, I would check whether any transactions are duplicated or missing. Sometimes a transaction is entered twice by mistake, or a deposit was not recorded at all. I would also check whether there are any outstanding cheques or deposits in transit that have not cleared the bank yet, since those would explain a difference without being an error. If I still cannot find it after that, I would raise it with the senior accountant and show her what I have already checked, so she does not repeat my steps. I am careful and I would not want to close the month with a difference I could not explain.

Work sample

Asked: Explain, step by step, how you'd set up the chart of accounts and monthly close checklist for a small e-commerce business doing ~$50K/month. Name the tools you'd use.

CHART OF ACCOUNTS + MONTHLY CLOSE CHECKLIST Tools: QuickBooks Online for the accounting, Dext for receipt capture, Excel for any supporting schedules. CHART OF ACCOUNTS Assets: cash in bank, accounts receivable, inventory, prepaid expenses. Liabilities: accounts payable, credit card payable, sales tax payable, loans. Equity: owner's capital, owner's draws, retained earnings. Income: sales, shipping income, less sales discounts and returns. Cost of goods sold: purchases, freight in, merchant fees. Expenses: advertising, software subscriptions, contractors, salaries and wages, office expenses, bank charges, professional fees. MONTHLY CLOSE CHECKLIST 1. Download the bank and credit card statements for the month. 2. Make sure all transactions for the month have been entered into QuickBooks. 3. Categorise any uncategorised transactions. 4. Match the Shopify and Stripe payouts to the deposits in the bank. 5. Reconcile the bank account and the credit card account. 6. Record depreciation if applicable. 7. Review the profit and loss statement and the balance sheet. 8. Give the reports to the client or the senior accountant for review. The most important check is the bank reconciliation, because if the bank does not reconcile then the financial statements will not be accurate.

Availability

Full-time, can work US hours. Available in 30 days.