QuickBooks Online & Excel · Small Business Bookkeeping

What bookkeeping
really costs after AI.

AI keeps cutting the effort bookkeeping takes, yet most bookkeepers charge the same. If the work drops, your cost should too, and you deserve a share of those savings. I'm a QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisor who uses advanced AI to keep every transaction categorized, every account reconciled, and clear reports delivered each month, then charges by the work, not your revenue. Under 200 transactions a month? Ask about MS Excel bookkeeping with no software fee.

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📗 New: Microsoft Excel bookkeeping for under 200 transactions/month, no software fee. See plans
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Monthly reconciliation P&L + Cash flow reports Tax-ready books
What you get

The same rigorous work,
done for less

AI makes the work faster, not thinner. You still get all three practices in full: categorization, reconciliation, and reporting, each one building on the last for a real-time, trustworthy picture of your money. The difference is what it costs you.

01

Categorization of Transactions: Weekly

Organizing income and expenses into clear categories (rent, payroll, supplies, sales) shows exactly where your money comes from and goes.

  • Faster, accurate tax prep: deductions are easy to identify and defend in an audit
  • Visible spending patterns: catch creeping subscriptions before they become a problem
  • Easier budgeting: historical data lets you forecast future costs realistically
  • Better decisions: know your most and least profitable revenue streams
02

Reconciling Accounts: Monthly

Matching your books to your bank statements on a regular basis ensures your records always reflect reality.

  • Catches errors and fraud early: duplicate charges and unauthorized transactions surface quickly
  • Prevents cash flow surprises: always know your true available balance
  • Audit-ready books: lenders, investors, and the IRS all want clean, reconciled records
  • Peace of mind: remove the anxiety of not knowing if your numbers are trustworthy
03

Generating Financial Reports

Turning raw transaction data into structured reports is where bookkeeping pays off most visibly.

  • Profit & Loss statement: shows whether the business is actually making money after all expenses
  • Cash flow report: reveals if you can meet upcoming obligations, even when profitable on paper
  • Balance sheet: shows net worth and financial health, essential for loan applications
  • Informed growth decisions: know when you can afford to hire, expand, or invest
  • Investor and lender credibility: professional reports signal a serious, organized operation
Sound familiar?

Why the three practices
are necessary

A lower price only helps if the work is still done right. Each practice protects your business in a different way, and each one depends on the one before it. Skip any of them and a real risk slips through, no matter what you paid.

🌀
Categorization · Weekly

If you don't categorize weekly

Wait longer than a week and you forget what half the transactions were even for. They pile up fast, receipts go missing, and guessing sets in. By month-end you've got hundreds of uncategorized lines, missed deductions, and no idea what's profit versus overhead.

⏳
Reconciliation · Monthly

If you don't reconcile monthly

Skip a month and errors compound. Duplicate charges, bank mistakes, and even fraud sit undetected for months, and by the time you notice, tracing them back is a nightmare. You never know your true balance, and cash-flow surprises hit with no warning.

📊
Reporting · Monthly

If you don't report monthly

Without fresh reports each month, you're always looking backward, reacting to problems long after they started. You can't spot a bad month until it's too late, can't tell if you can afford to hire or expand, and have no clean numbers ready when a lender asks.

In plain terms

If none of the three get done, you're flying blind. You don't know if you're making money, you overpay at tax time, you can't catch fraud or mistakes, and you can't plan ahead. Your business might be doing fine, but you'd have no way to prove it, protect it, or grow it with confidence.

The process

Three simple steps to
clean, confident books

01

Get Your Price

Use the pricing calculator to work out your monthly price in seconds, no email, no waiting, no sales call required. Put in your numbers and see exactly what it costs.

02

Book a Free Audit

If you think I can add value to your business, book your free audit. I'll review your current books, confirm the price, and check I'm a good fit, no pressure, no commitment.

03

We Work Together

You no longer stress about being prepared for tax season, and you know exactly where your money is going, every single month.

Why Decisive Bookkeeping

Less effort with AI should mean
a lower bill for you.

Bookkeeping takes less effort every year as AI gets better, yet most bookkeepers still charge the same old rates. If the work gets easier, the price should follow.

That's also why I don't charge based on your revenue like most bookkeepers do. You pay for the volume of transactions and the work actually involved, nothing more.

Umar Hassan, Founder of Decisive Bookkeeping LLC
Umar Hassan
QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisor

I'm Umar Hassan, a QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisor and freelance bookkeeper who does bookkeeping using the most advanced AI models. That lets me keep your books clean, accurate, and up to date in a fraction of the time it used to take, and pass the savings on to you.

Verify credential
The shift already happening

AI changed the work.
Your price should reflect that.

Modern AI tools have made a real difference to how quickly and accurately bookkeeping can be done. When the work takes less time, the cost of that work goes down, and I think that saving belongs with you, not in my margin. That principle shapes how I price every engagement.

The tools

I use advanced AI to handle the repetitive parts of bookkeeping (categorizing, matching, flagging) faster and with fewer errors than doing it all by hand.

The saving

Because the work takes less time, it costs less to deliver. I pass that difference on to you through pricing based on actual volume, not a percentage of your revenue.

The result is the same rigorous, reconciled books you'd expect from any good bookkeeper, at a price that reflects how the work is actually done today. That's the whole idea behind Decisive Bookkeeping: modern tools, careful work, and a fair share of the savings passed back to you.

Two ways to do it

QuickBooks, or MS Excel. Both are real bookkeeping.

Plenty of businesses don’t want another monthly software bill, and they don’t need one. MS Excel books are kept to the same standard: double-entry, reconciled, closed monthly. What changes is how much the software does for you, not how good the books are.

MS Excel bookkeeping

$0/mo software fee

For businesses who want proper books without paying Intuit for them.

What you get
  • Full double-entry books, reconciled against your bank and card statements every month
  • Monthly P&L and balance sheet your accountant, lender or a buyer will accept
  • Profit by client. Every transaction tagged to the account it belongs to, so you still see which clients earn and which cost
  • Ad spend booked as pass-through, not as your revenue
  • Contractor costs attributed to the client they worked on, ready for 1099s
  • Invoices prepared. I build and send them from a template on your letterhead
  • Weekly transaction intake. You send statements weekly, so coding is done while it’s fresh and nothing is reconstructed from memory
  • Clean handover. If you move to QuickBooks later, the history imports, so nothing is wasted
What it can’t do
  • No live dashboard. Reports land monthly. You can’t refresh your numbers on a Tuesday afternoon
  • No automatic bank feed. Nothing pulls transactions in on its own, which is why I ask for them weekly
  • No “pay now” button. I can write and send the invoice; I can’t give your client a card link to click. You’ll need Stripe, Wise or a bank transfer to actually collect
  • No automated chasing. Overdue invoices get followed up by hand, not by the software
  • No receipt capture. No snapping a photo and having it attach itself
  • No accountant login. Your CPA gets a file, not their own access
  • No tamper-proof audit trail. Excel can track changes, but whoever keeps the books can switch it off or overwrite the file. That is the difference an auditor cares about
  • Manual sales tax and 1099s. Done correctly, but by hand
QuickBooks Online

from $38/mo to Intuit

For businesses that want the numbers live, and want the software doing the chasing.

What the fee buys you
  • Everything in the MS Excel column, plus:
  • Live dashboard. Your numbers, any day, not just on the 5th
  • Automatic bank feed. Nothing for you to send me
  • Invoices with a payment link. Client clicks, pays by card, and it reconciles itself
  • Automatic payment reminders on overdue invoices
  • Receipt capture. Photograph it, and it attaches to the transaction
  • Accountant login. Your CPA works in the file directly
  • Tamper-proof audit trail. Every entry logged permanently, and nobody can disable it. Not even me. This is what a lender or a buyer asks for
  • Automated sales tax and 1099 prep
  • Class and project tracking. Profit by client maintained by the software, not by hand

How to choose. The books are equally good either way. This is not a cheap tier and a proper tier. The real question is whether you need collection and automation. If your clients pay by card and you want the software chasing them, QuickBooks earns its fee. If your clients pay by transfer and you’re happy seeing your numbers monthly, MS Excel does the job and saves you the bill. Above roughly 200 transactions a month, the manual work stops being worth the saving, and I’ll tell you when you get there. One exception worth naming: if you might raise investment or sell the business in the next couple of years, take QuickBooks. A buyer’s accountant will want an audit trail nobody could have edited, and that is the one thing a spreadsheet cannot give them.

Pricing

Work out your price. No email required.

I charge for the work, not for a tier you half-fit into. Put in your busiest month's transactions and the number updates as you go, with nothing hidden behind a form. Books can live in QuickBooks or in MS Excel. Both are done properly, and MS Excel saves you the software fee.

Maximum monthly transactions transactions in your business bank statement
Invoicing
Accounts to reconcile bank, cards, Stripe, PayPal
2
Where your books live both are done properly, they just do different things
What else you need QuickBooks to do this decides which plan you need
How often I close the books

Free downloads

COA, Mistakes and Bank Rules for you

Four PDFs for your industry, free and with no email required. How I’d actually work with you month to month, plus the chart of accounts I’d build for you, the ten mistakes I keep finding in these books and how to fix each one, and a bank rules guide so most of next month categorises itself. Pick your industry to download.

Select your industry
🛡️

The Clean Books Guarantee

If your books aren't fully reconciled and your monthly reports aren't in your inbox by the 5th of every month, that month is on me, free. No questions asked. I back my work because I know what I'm doing. You should never have to chase your bookkeeper.

FAQ

Questions I get asked
before every call

How do your fees work?+
I charge a flat monthly rate based on your transaction volume and the actual work involved, not a percentage of your revenue. Because I use advanced AI to do the work faster and more accurately, it costs less to deliver, and I pass that saving on to you. You can work out your exact price with the calculator above, with no email required, or we can talk through your specific needs on a call.
How does AI change what I pay?+
Modern AI handles the repetitive parts of bookkeeping, like categorizing and matching transactions, faster and with fewer errors than doing it all by hand. The books are just as rigorous and just as carefully reviewed; the work simply takes less time to deliver. Because it costs less to do, it costs you less. That saving is built into my pricing rather than kept as margin.
Why do you price on transaction volume instead of revenue?+
Most bookkeepers charge based on your revenue, which means your bill goes up as your business grows, even though the work barely changes. That charges you for succeeding. My pricing follows the actual work: transaction volume, number of accounts, and whether you need invoicing. When your revenue grows but your transaction count stays steady, your price stays steady too.
Does the price include QuickBooks Online subscription?+
No. QuickBooks Online is billed separately by Intuit directly to you. It is not included in my fees. I will help you set it up and connect it during onboarding at no extra charge. If you'd rather not pay a software fee at all, ask about MS Excel bookkeeping.
Should I choose QuickBooks Online or MS Excel?+
Both give you proper double-entry books, reconciled monthly, with reports your accountant or lender will accept. QuickBooks adds a live dashboard, automatic bank feeds, and payment links, and bills you a software fee to Intuit. MS Excel skips that fee and suits businesses under roughly 200 transactions a month. Above that, the manual work stops being worth the saving, and I'll tell you when you get there. If you might raise investment or sell in the next couple of years, I'd point you to QuickBooks for its audit trail.
What type of bookkeeping services do you offer?+
I keep your books in either QuickBooks Online or MS Excel, whichever fits your business, and I'm a QuickBooks Online Certified ProAdvisor. Either way you get the same standard: every transaction categorized, accounts reconciled monthly, and clear reports. I work remotely and use secure cloud based software for easy document uploads and transfers.
How does monthly bookkeeping work?+
Each month I categorize every business transaction, reconcile your accounts against your bank statements, and compile clear financial statements: P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow, so you always know exactly where your money is going.
What if I need a more frequent schedule than monthly?+
I provide excellent customer service, and I am here to serve you. I can absolutely meet more often to meet your specific business needs. I can even provide weekly cash meetings to help you optimize your cash flow.
When and how do I send my documents to you?+
I will need your bank statements every month. I can setup your bank statements to automatically synch with QuickBooks so that you can focus on your business while I handle your bookkeeping. You can also send me your documents if you prefer. I use secure cloud based software and email for document delivery.
When do you deliver my monthly financial reports?+
I will have your financial reports delivered by the 5th of every month so that you can better plan for your business.
What if my books are behind schedule or need a clean-up?+
Don't worry about that. I can help clean-up any messy transactions or inaccurate records from your past. I will discuss the details as necessary for your specific situation.
What if I need assistance for special projects?+
Let's talk about it! I love innovation and am constantly trying new concepts. Let's work together to improve your special projects and optimize your business.
What if I need tax preparation?+
I only provide bookkeeping services as I specialize in it.
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