🧾 Coaches: Don’t Let Your Books Blindside You This December

The Moment Every Coach Dreads

When she messaged me in November, she said:

“I think I’m fine... but my books haven’t been reconciled since July. My accountant just asked for my P&L, and I noticed there’s a $75K balance sitting in my ‘Ask My Accountant’ account.”

She wasn’t fine.

She was running a thriving coaching business, with multiple offers, solid monthly revenue, and clients coming in consistently, but she had no clear picture of which offers were actually profitable.

Income and expenses were blended; nothing was tracked by project. The programs that felt like top performers could’ve been quietly draining cash.

And cost tracking? Basically, it’s nonexistent.

Receipts scattered across inboxes, Stripe, Venmo, and crumpled paper in her bag. Contractor payments are missing details. The 1099 season is approaching fast, with no system to track who’s crossed the threshold.

Tax season was weeks away, and she was guessing.

The Real Problem Wasn’t Her Books — It Was the System

Most coaches think, “I just need my books caught up.”
But after years of cleanup work, I can tell you:

👉 It’s not only about missing transactions.
👉 It’s also about broken structure.

When there’s no consistent monthly process, even the best bookkeeper can leave you with mismatched accounts and a false sense of accuracy.

That’s why I built my Catchup & Cleanup process, to fix the root cause, not just the reports.

Step 1: Clean Up & Clarify

Here’s what I see most often when I step inside a client’s books:

The "Ask My Accountant" account is overflowing. Thousands of dollars sit in limbo, waiting to be categorized and allocated. It's like the junk drawer of bookkeeping, and it quietly breaks your reporting accuracy.

Bank and credit card accounts aren't reconciled. At some point, they were reconciled months ago, but never "locked," meaning that numbers that once matched no longer do.

Stripe, PayPal, or Square accounts are unreconciled. Refunds, Chargebacks, and fees are either missing or recorded incorrectly, which can make income appear higher than it actually is.

Loans entered wrong. Payments hit the books without a loan liability set up, which throws off both cash and debt reporting.

It's not just messy, it's misleading. And misleading data leads to bad decisions

Step 2: Spot the Leaks

Once everything’s accurate, we can finally see where the money is actually going, and that’s where the magic happens.

In this client’s case, here’s what we found:

• Multiple unused subscriptions are still being billed monthly, including three project management tools, two CRMs, and duplicate hosting services.

• Overlapping tools that could easily be replaced by one platform (yes, I may have mentioned that FG Funnels 👀 could replace three or four).

• Recurring contractor invoices that hadn’t been matched to completed work, simply because there was no review-and-approval system.
  

When we tallied it up, she was leaking $750–$1,000/month — not because she wasn’t making enough, but because her systems weren’t efficient.

Step 3: Systematize for Sanity

Once her books were accurate and her tools cleaned up, we built simple guardrails:

✅ Monthly reconciliations locked after each close
✅ Simplified software stack for clarity
✅ Shared dashboard showing real-time profit, taxes owed, and loan balances

Now, instead of avoiding her numbers, she checks them weekly, and actually feels calm doing it.

When she texted me the day she sent her books to her CPA, she said:

“Last year, I was crying over spreadsheets. This year? No stress, no second-guessing, just clean, accurate numbers I could trust.”

The Takeaway

Your books don’t just need to be up to date, they need to be trustworthy.

Because when your accounting system is off by even a few hundred dollars, those errors compound. By the time tax season rolls around, you’re paying for confusion you didn’t cause.

You don’t need to panic. You just need clean data, clear systems, and a financial partner who can help you see what’s really going on behind the numbers.

💬 Ready to Head into January with Peace of Mind?

We’ll clean up the data, lock down your systems, and get you ready for tax season, before the clock runs out.

Because your peace of mind is worth more than another spreadsheet.