Core Bookkeeping
Diagnostic Reviews
A fixed-fee review of your existing books, your trust account and your systems, delivered as a written report with a specific list of what is wrong and what it will take to fix. Yours to keep, whether or not you hire us.
Sound familiar?
- You inherited books from a bookkeeper who left and have no idea what state they are in
- You suspect something is wrong but cannot articulate what
- Every bookkeeping quote you have received is a wild guess because nobody looked first
- Your partners want an independent read before agreeing to spend money on a cleanup
- You are buying into or merging with a firm and need to see the real numbers
What you get
What changes once this is running.
- A written report on the actual state of your books, not a sales pitch
- A three-way trust reconciliation attempt on your current data, with the result documented
- A prioritized list of what needs fixing, ordered by risk
- An accurate, fixed-fee quote for any cleanup — based on evidence, not a guess
- A document you can hand to your CPA, your partners or your successor bookkeeper
Included
What the engagement actually covers.
Books health check
Reconciliation status of every account, unexplained balances, duplicate or miscoded transactions, negative balances that should not exist, and how long it has been since anything was genuinely closed.
Trust account review
We attempt a full three-way reconciliation on your current data — bank, book, and the sum of client ledgers — and document the result whatever it turns out to be.
Chart of accounts assessment
Whether your account structure separates fee income, advanced client costs, reimbursements and trust liability, or whether it is a generic small-business template doing none of that.
Systems and integration audit
What your practice management software is actually syncing to QuickBooks, what is being entered twice, and where data is silently being lost between the two.
Written findings and roadmap
Everything above in one document, with findings ranked by risk and a recommended sequence for addressing them. Written to be read by a non-accountant.
How it runs
No surprises about the process.
Intake call
Thirty minutes on your practice areas, your systems, your volume and what is currently causing you pain. This shapes what we look hardest at.
Read-only access
We take read-only access to QuickBooks and your practice management system, plus bank and trust statements for the review period. Read-only genuinely means read-only — nothing gets changed.
The review
Usually about a week, depending on volume. If we find something urgent — a trust variance in particular — you hear about it immediately, not in the final report.
Findings walkthrough
A call to walk the report, answer questions and talk through options. You keep the document either way, with no obligation attached to it.
What we are actually looking for
A diagnostic is not a spot-check. There is a specific list of things that go wrong in law firm books, and we go looking for all of them.
Trust that does not prove. The single highest-risk finding. Either the three numbers agree or they do not, and if they do not, you need to know today rather than at your next bar audit.
Case costs in the wrong place. Advanced client costs coded as firm expenses instead of receivables. It understates your assets, overstates your expenses, and makes it impossible to see which costs never got billed back.
Revenue that is not revenue. Trust deposits recognised as income. This is the error that makes a firm look profitable while its cash quietly belongs to someone else.
A chart of accounts from a template. Generic small-business structures have no concept of a client trust liability or an advanced cost receivable. Everything downstream inherits that gap.
Integrations that lie. Practice management software that appears to sync with QuickBooks but is dropping transactions, duplicating others, or pushing time entries as revenue before anything is collected.
Reconciliations that were forced. An account marked reconciled with a plug entry to make it balance. Common, and it hides whatever the real difference was.
The report is yours
We write it to be read by an attorney, not an accountant — plain language, findings ranked by risk, each one explaining what it means and what happens if it is left alone.
Plenty of firms take the report and fix things themselves, or hand it to their existing bookkeeper. That is a completely legitimate outcome and we price the review on the assumption that it might be what happens.
Questions
About Diagnostic Reviews
Why pay for a review instead of just getting a quote?
Because a quote given without looking at your books is a guess, and guesses get revised upward once the work starts. The review means the cleanup quote is based on what is actually there. It also means you own a written assessment of your own financial records — genuinely useful if you are changing bookkeepers, bringing on a partner, or facing a bar inquiry.
What if the review says my books are fine?
Then that is what the report says and you have spent a small fixed fee to find out you are in good shape. It happens. We would rather tell you that than manufacture a problem.
Will you tell me if my trust account has a problem?
Immediately, and in writing, before the final report. What you do about it is a legal and ethical decision for you and your ethics counsel — we document the accounting facts and hand them to you clearly.
Is the review confidential?
Yes. Findings go to you and to anyone you nominate in writing, and nobody else. If you are reviewing a firm you are considering joining or acquiring, we will confirm who is authorised to receive it before we begin.
Keep going
Related services and tools.
Ready when you are
Find out what shape your books are actually in.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether we are the right fit for your firm — and you will leave it knowing more about your own numbers either way.
- No obligation, no sales script
- Straight answer on whether we fit
- Talk to the person who does the work