Advice on bookkeepers
Hi all, looking for advice on hiring a good bookkeeper for my restaurant. I also have a full time job and just can't keep up with the categorizing. My partners are not skilled in this kind of work.
I had hired one firm and they wanted me to categorize my expenses myself. They said they couldn't know if my purchase from Walmart was supplies or food, for example. They categorized charges from my food distributors as CoG Sold - Food or CoG Sold - Alcohol based on the name on the bank transaction. They didn't ask me for invoices or receipts.
When I asked for a workflow to provide receipts, they told me that I could add the receipts quickly on the transaction through the QuickBooks app, but that seems to require the categorization to be added to accept and save the receipt. They sometimes need to be split across different categories.
I did quite a bit of categorizing for 2025 based on what they told me. We opened in December and just had a few months of opening expenses behind that, so it's not an enormous amount of work, but not only was I not sure of my choices, I had the distinct feeling like I was doing exactly the work I hired them to do.
This seems very wrong to me.
Does this align with your bookkeeping experience? Any advice for finding a good restaurant bookkeeper?
Apologies in advance if this is the kind of question that gets asked constantly. I just discovered the sub.