External Controller
A second set of eyes on your books. We review and oversee the work your in-house team is doing, catch errors before they compound, and make sure your financial reports actually reflect reality.
What This Looks Like
You have someone handling the day-to-day bookkeeping. Maybe it’s an office manager, maybe a part-time bookkeeper, maybe your spouse. They enter transactions, pay bills, and keep things moving. But nobody is checking their work. Nobody is looking at the bigger picture to make sure the numbers actually make sense.
That’s where an external controller comes in. We review what your in-house person is doing on a regular basis. We reconcile accounts, look for misclassifications, and produce financial reports you can trust. Think of it as quality control for your accounting, done by a CPA who understands how construction and trade businesses actually operate.
Review and Reconciliation
Review and Reconciliation
We go through your books each period and verify that bank accounts are reconciled, transactions are categorized correctly, and nothing has fallen through the cracks. If your in-house person miscoded a $15,000 equipment purchase as a repair expense, we catch it before it affects your reports and your tax return.
Financial Reporting
Financial Reporting
We produce monthly or quarterly financial statements that give you an accurate picture of where your business stands. Profit and loss by job or division if needed. Balance sheet review. The kind of reports that help you make real decisions instead of guessing based on your bank balance.
Why This Matters
Most trade businesses that grow past a certain point hire someone internal to handle the books. That person might be great at data entry and paying vendors on time. But they may not have the accounting background to catch classification errors, handle accruals properly, or flag something unusual before it snowballs into a real problem.
Small mistakes add up fast. A few miscoded expenses here, a missed reconciliation there, and by the end of the year your financials are unreliable. That means your tax return is built on bad data. That means you might be overpaying on taxes or missing deductions you were entitled to. And if you ever need to show clean financials to a bank or bonding company, you are starting from scratch.
No One Checking the Work
No One Checking the Work
When one person handles the books with no oversight, errors go undetected for months. A vendor gets double-paid and nobody notices. Revenue gets recorded in the wrong period. Job costs get lumped together instead of tracked separately. By the time someone spots the issue, cleaning it up is expensive and time-consuming.
Reports You Cannot Trust
Reports You Cannot Trust
If you are making decisions based on financials that haven’t been reviewed by someone with real accounting experience, you are flying blind. You might think a job was profitable when it wasn’t. You might think you have more cash available than you do. Bad numbers lead to bad decisions, and in contracting the margins are too tight for that.
What Changes
Your in-house person keeps doing what they do. They handle the daily work. We come in periodically and make sure everything is accurate, properly classified, and reconciled. When we find issues, we fix them and communicate what happened so they can avoid repeating the same mistakes.
You end up with books you can actually rely on. When tax season arrives, the data is clean and ready. When you need a profit and loss report for a bonding application or a bank loan, it’s already done right. And when you have a question about where your money is going, the answer is sitting in reports that reflect what actually happened.
Confidence in Your Numbers
Confidence in Your Numbers
You stop wondering if the books are right. You know they are because a CPA with over ten years of experience working with trade businesses is reviewing them regularly. When you look at a financial report, it means something. When you ask whether you can afford to buy that new truck or take on a bigger project, the answer is based on real numbers.
A Stronger In-House Team
A Stronger In-House Team
Your bookkeeper or office manager gets better over time because someone is reviewing their work and providing feedback. They learn what proper job costing looks like. They learn how to handle the transactions that used to trip them up. You get more value from the person you already have on staff without replacing them.
Long Beach's CPA for Contractors and Trades
The Next Step:
A Quick Conversation
Tell us about your business and where you need help. We'll ask a few questions, let you know what we can do, and give you a quick quote.