Why this matters
"Accounting help" is four different jobs: recording transactions (bookkeeping), filing returns (tax), paying people (payroll), and answering what-should-I-do questions (advisory). Shop without naming the job and you'll pay CPA rates for data entry, or hire a bookkeeper and discover in April that nobody was thinking about taxes.
What "done" looks like
- A one-page list of money tasks, sorted into bookkeeping, tax, payroll, and advisory
- Each task marked "I do it," "software does it," or "hire it out"
- Your entity type and rough monthly transaction count written down
How to do it
- List every money task from last month: invoicing, expense categorization, sales tax, payroll, estimated taxes.
- Sort them into the four buckets, bookkeeping, tax filing, payroll, advisory.
- Mark what software already covers. QuickBooks or Xero records transactions; Gusto or ADP files payroll taxes automatically.
- Flag penalty-carrying tasks, payroll taxes and annual returns justify paid help earliest.
- Write a shopping spec: "I need X monthly, Y annually, plus quarterly advice."
Common mistakes
- Hiring "an accountant" for everything and paying advisory rates for bookkeeping
- Assuming tax filing includes tax planning, most preparers only report what already happened
- Skipping the transaction count, which is the first thing any firm quotes from
Real-world examples
- Intuit sells bookkeeping (QuickBooks Live) and tax prep (TurboTax) as separate products, even the biggest vendor treats them as different jobs.
- Gusto and ADP file federal and state payroll taxes as part of the service, which is why payroll is commonly outsourced first.
- A common solo-founder pattern: software plus an annual tax preparer, adding a monthly bookkeeper as volume grows.
From a founder's point of view
Naming the job changes the conversation from "what do you charge" to "what do I need." It also exposes overlap: if software already files your payroll taxes, don't pay a firm for payroll again.
Rule of thumb
If you can't finish "I'm hiring someone to ___ every month," you're not ready to shop, you're ready to be sold to.
