If you only look at your numbers once a year, you’re trying to run a business based on financial guesses. Guessing wrong can cost you dearly.
Monthly accounting is different. It turns your numbers into a tool that saves you time and money.
Annual tax survival mode is sometimes enough to keep the IRS off your back, and it can seem like a cost-effective decision. But the reality is that it will cost you a lot more in the long run.
Here’s how monthly accounting works to improve your profits.
You Find Problems Faster — Fraud, Waste, and Leaks
Most business problems don’t start big. They start small. Quiet. Easy to miss.
- Techs working unapproved overtime
- Vendors raising prices when you aren’t paying attention
- A bookkeeper making “adjustments” no one reviews.
- Materials running 8–10% over estimates.
If you wait until tax time, you’re looking at something that happened 6–12 months ago. By then, the damage is done. Monthly accounting puts a spotlight on those leaks while they’re still fixable. Here are some examples: Services you meant to cancel, vendors who overcharged you, unpaid taxes that are racking up penalties, even employees embezzling cash or company resources.
Trying to find these problems without monthly accounting is like searching for a needle in a haystack. And if there’s fraud? The longer it goes unnoticed, the bigger it gets. Regular review alone reduces the risk of fraud because people know someone’s watching.
Simple truth: You can’t control what you can’t see.
No More Tax Surprises
Having to wait until March or April to find out how much you owe in taxes is something you can decide to be done with.
With monthly accounting + tax projections we can keep you on track with your tax payments. That’s because we have real info to adjust mid-year when things are going better or worse than expected.
Just getting significantly off track with taxes is the start of a financial tailspin that puts many people out of business. Every accountant has seen this happen over and over. We want to make sure it doesn’t happen to you!
Instead of writing a five-figure check in April and saying, “I didn’t see that coming,” you’re planning throughout the year.
We adjust your withholding and payments so there’s nothing for you to lose track of. We help you make strategic purchases at the right time. Business owners who sleep well at tax time aren’t just lucky. They have a plan to avoid tax surprises.
Better Business Decisions
Most owners make decisions based on instinct. And instinct matters. Experience matters. But as your business grows, things get more complicated and your gut feeling will become unreliable when it comes to financial projections.
For example: A plumbing company thinks they’re killing it because revenue is up 20%. But monthly accounting shows:
- Material costs up an extra 7%
- Labor up an extra 5%
- Gross margin down 12%
They’re actually working harder for less money.
As your business grows, being busy is not enough. Believing that hard work automatically leads to profit is the kind of thinking that has driven many entrepreneurs straight into burnout — or worse, a heart attack. When you review monthly financials, you can answer real questions:
- Can you afford this new equipment?
- Should you raise prices?
- Can you afford to hire?
- Is that new shop or location a smart move—or a gamble?
The numbers remove emotion. They give you clarity. And clarity leads to better decisions.
You Know the Score of the Game
We all want to win at business, and money provides a clear scoreboard.
If you don’t know the score, how do you know if you’re winning?
Too many owners judge success by:
- How busy they are
- How tired they feel at the end of the week
- New deals that they were excited about closing
That’s not the real score. These things are not the end goal! On top of that, they are colored by emotion and subjectivity.
Some people think the score is the cash in their bank account. But the cash in your bank account at any given moment is not the true performance of your business, it changes every time you move money personal spending.
You get the real score when you know how much profit and salary you earned and how much you get to keep after tax. If you only find that out once a year, you’re at a huge disadvantage. Your competition knows whether this is the game winning field touchdown or not. But with no scoreboard, you have no idea how much this next play matters. It’s like the difference between throwing the ball around with friends and playing in the regular season. When you and your team start keeping score, you will up the intensity of your game.
When you start seeing your numbers every month, something shifts…
- You get sharper
- You start asking better questions.
- You start caring about efficiency.
It becomes a challenge: “How do we improve profit 2% this quarter?” That 2% could easily mean an extra $15,000–$25,000 a year in many businesses. Same company. Same revenue. But now you’re playing the game. Knowing the score creates motivation. It creates focus. It turns the business from a murky mess into a system that you can improve.
It Saves You Time and Taxes
When you only look at your numbers once a year, your tax return becomes a report card from last season. You can’t change it. You can only react to it.
Let’s talk about time. Every owner who waits until year-end knows the drill: digging through receipts, chasing statements, answering a hundred emails from the accountant, trying to remember what that $4,200 charge was from nine months ago.
That’s hours, sometimes days, of sifting through paperwork.
- What’s your hourly rate?
- What’s that great idea that you haven’t been able to make time for?
You have better things to do like sending out those proposals, managing your crew properly, and making sure you are collecting from your customers. When everything is handled monthly, year-end becomes simple. No scramble. No lost weekends. Just clean numbers and putting another tax filing behind you faster.
Ok, maybe you have all the time in the world… Monthly accounting can actually lead to huge tax savings. But you have to act before the end of the year.
That’s why at Bearden Stroup we go through our standard tax planning process with every monthly client every year. We care about reducing your taxes.
There are critical tax planning levers that can’t be pulled if you wait too long.
- For example, many times, we have halted owner payroll in Q4 because it was costing thousands of dollars of unnecessary payroll taxes (we showed them how to pay their bills with less tax incurred).
- Did you know that most business retirement plans (like SIMPLE IRA and 401K) have to be set up by October 1st?
- Did you know that you can change your tax status to be an S Corporation or partnership mid-year? These kinds of tax elections can be a complete game changer.
- What about knowing whether you should wait until January to wrap up a big job, or whether you should collect in December because you are still in a good tax bracket?
On all these issues and so much more, there is nothing you can do once it’s too late. By March or April, that ship has sailed. How much money has been leaking out of your pocket due to poor tax planning? How much have you lost in missed opportunities?
Monthly accounting allows you to flip all that around. We have real data. You can get quality tax advice. You know where you stand and that you keep more of your earnings.
The Bottom Line
You can run your business one of two ways.
- You can look backward once a year and hope things worked out.
- Or you can look at the numbers every month and stay in control.
Monthly accounting is much more than nice reports. It’s about control. Control over waste. Control over cash. Control over your time and energy.
If you’re serious about building a business that actually pays you well — not just keeps you busy — then this is the shift.
No more scrambling at year-end. No more guessing what you owe. No more wondering if you’re really making money.
You deserve to know the score.
You deserve to keep more of what you earn.
If you’re ready to stop operating in the dark and start running your business with clarity, let’s talk about monthly accounting.
It will save you far more than it costs you. If you want to take your business to the next level, it’s the upgrade your business has been waiting for.
Schedule a free meeting with us today.