St. Louis Bookkeeping for Small Business Owners
Bookkeeping is the least interesting thing your business needs and the one that breaks everything else when it slips. Nobody starts a company because they were excited about reconciling accounts. Then a lender asks for financials, or the tax return is due, and eleven months of receipts are sitting in a shoebox and a bank feed nobody has categorised since February.
Thompson Flaherty handles monthly bookkeeping for small businesses across the St. Louis metro, with CPAs reviewing the work rather than only a data-entry service. Get in touch and we will look at where your books actually stand.
What Our St. Louis Bookkeeping Service Covers
Every month we categorise and reconcile your transactions across bank and credit card accounts, so the numbers tie out to something real. We manage accounts payable and receivable tracking, so you know who owes you and what is going out.
You get a monthly financial package: profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow, delivered on a schedule rather than whenever you chase for it. We handle payroll processing and the filings that come with it, plus sales and use tax preparation where it applies.
Underneath all of that, a CPA reviews the file. That is the part that separates bookkeeping services in St. Louis from each other, because clean-looking books can still be wrong in ways only someone who prepares returns will catch.
Why Bookkeeping and Tax Should Sit With the Same Firm
Here is the pattern we see constantly. A business uses one company for bookkeeping and a separate CPA for the return. In March the CPA opens the file, finds the owner’s distributions coded as payroll expense and a vehicle purchase sitting in repairs, and spends billable hours cleaning up twelve months of decisions nobody flagged at the time.
Let’s look at an example. We took on a client whose books had been maintained faithfully all year by a bookkeeper who had never seen a tax return. Loan principal payments were being run through as expenses. The books balanced perfectly and the profit figure was meaningfully wrong, which meant every quarterly estimate that year had been calculated off a number that was not real.
When the same firm does both, the person entering the transaction knows how it lands on the return. Nothing needs unwinding in March. Our St. Louis tax accountant work and the bookkeeping run out of the same file.
How Much Does a Bookkeeper Cost in St. Louis?
Monthly bookkeeping typically runs $400 to $1,500 a month with us, driven by transaction volume, the number of accounts being reconciled, and whether payroll is included.
A single-owner service business with one bank account and a card sits near the bottom of that. A business with inventory, multiple entities, or a dozen employees sits toward the top.
If the books are behind, catch-up work is quoted separately as a one-off, and it is worth doing properly before we start a monthly cycle. Most of our bookkeeping clients bundle it with tax and planning, which lands between $1,200 and $3,000 a month for the full relationship.
Do I Need a Bookkeeper or an Accountant?
They are different jobs and most growing businesses eventually need both.
A bookkeeper records what happened: transactions, reconciliations, invoices, payroll runs. An accountant interprets it and acts on it: the tax return, the planning, the entity decisions, the question of whether your pricing actually works.
The reason we bundle them is that the second job is only as good as the first. Planning built on unreliable books is guesswork with a nicer font.
Signs Your Books Need Attention
Your bank balance and your accounting software disagree and you have stopped investigating why. You cannot say what last month’s profit was without opening three files. Your accountant asks the same clean-up questions every March. A lender or investor asked for financials and it took you a fortnight to produce them. You are making pricing and hiring decisions on the feel of the bank account.
None of that is unusual and none of it is a reason to be sheepish about the state of things. It is a reason to fix the foundation before building anything on it.
Which Software Do You Work With?
We work primarily in QuickBooks Online and Xero, which covers most St. Louis small businesses. If you are on something else, tell us and we will let you know honestly whether we can support it well.
We do not force a migration for the sake of it. If your current setup works, we work in it. If it is genuinely holding you back, we will explain why and let you decide.
Where We Serve
We provide bookkeeping across St. Louis city, Clayton, University City, Webster Groves, Kirkwood, Chesterfield, Creve Coeur, Maplewood, Florissant and St. Charles County, plus the Metro East on the Illinois side.
Bookkeeping runs virtually by nature, so location matters less here than it does elsewhere. Being local matters when you want to sit across a table and go through the numbers, and Edwardsville is a short drive from most of the metro.
How to Get Started
Book a 30-minute call through our contact page. We will look at the current state of the books, tell you what catch-up work is realistically involved, and quote a monthly number. If your existing setup is fine and you do not need us, we will say that too.
For the wider picture, see our St. Louis CPA services page or our monthly accounting overview.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you catch up books that are months behind?
Yes, and it is one of the more common ways clients start with us. We quote catch-up separately, get the file current, then move to a monthly cycle.
Do I need to switch accounting software to work with you?
No. We work in QuickBooks Online and Xero, and if you are on either of those we simply pick up where you are.
Is a CPA actually reviewing my books?
Yes. The monthly work is reviewed by a CPA rather than being handed off entirely to a data-entry process, which is what catches the errors that would otherwise surface at tax time.
Do you handle payroll too?
Yes, payroll processing and the associated filings can be included in the monthly engagement.