Monthly bookkeeping for small businesses around Renton and King County. Your accounts reconciled, your statements in your inbox on a set date, and someone who actually answers when you have a question. If you're behind, I'll catch you up first — then keep you there.
Who calls me
It worked at ten transactions a week. At two hundred it doesn't, and you still can't say which products actually made money last quarter. The books have become a second job you didn't ask for.
New UBI, new bank account, no system yet. Set it up correctly in the first month and you never have to unpick it later — this is the cheapest time to get it right.
Last year never got closed and your CPA is waiting. We fix that as a one-time project with a fixed price and a finish line, and then you're on the monthly schedule like everyone else.
Services
Scoped in writing before we start, so you always know what's included and what isn't.
How it works
Four steps, in this order. No surprises and nothing billed before you've agreed to it.
Twenty minutes. What you're running, what shape the books are in, what's actually keeping you up. If I'm not the right fit I'll say so and point you somewhere better.
No charge · 20 minutesYou give me read access, and I tell you plainly what I find — how far behind things are, what's going to take work, and what it'll cost as one flat monthly number plus a fixed cleanup quote if you need one.
No charge · 4 business daysAn engagement letter that spells out the scope, the fee, the delivery date, and what I'm not doing. You sign it before I touch anything. Documents come through a secure portal — never email.
Before any work startsCleanup first if there is one. After that your books close on the same date every month and your statements land in your inbox. You stop thinking about it, which is the entire point.
Ongoing · monthlyAbout
I'm John Freed. I've been keeping books since 2020, and the two clients I took on that year are both still with me — six years on. That's the part of my record I'd point at first, because keeping a client is harder than winning one.
I've also worked at volume. Six months inside a CPA firm out of state put me across roughly thirty small business books in one stretch — retail, e-commerce, services. That's a lot of different charts of accounts in a short time, and it's where I got quick at reading someone else's system and finding what's wrong with it.
What I'm building here is the ordinary monthly rhythm — categorize, reconcile, close, deliver, answer the owner's questions, do it again next month. A clean set of books every month is what actually changes how a business runs, and it's the work I want.
I'm also comfortable with the ugly end of it, which not every bookkeeper is: records that were never really kept, delinquent sales tax filings, systems abandoned halfway. I've rebuilt books to the point where a CPA could file from them and cleared the penalties that had piled up in the meantime. If that's where you are, it's a starting point, not a problem.
Alongside the client work I've spent time inside finance departments rather than beside them. For over a year I carried the full accounting cycle at a medical distributor doing around $3M a year — inventory, AP, AR, payroll, month-end close and accruals, plus sales tax filings in Washington and Colorado. Assistant title, staff accountant's workload. Before that I was an Accounts Payable Analyst at a roughly $500M nonprofit health system in Alaska, running about a third of its total AP volume under real internal controls and leading vendor data validation through an ERP conversion. That's where I learned that the controls are the job, not paperwork wrapped around it.
I hold an A.A. in Accounting and a B.A. from Bowdoin College, and I'm a certified QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor. I've also completed the 150 credit hours of coursework toward the CPA. My practice is moving toward tax work, so the books I keep are built from the start to hold up when a return gets prepared from them.
Track record
Clients since 2020
Selling direct online, in person, and wholesale to retailers. Several sales channels feeding one set of books, imported inventory to track, merchant deposits that never match the sales they came from, and out-of-state sales tax filed from Washington.
Retail and wholesale under one roof — two revenue streams with different margins, different payment terms, and different sales tax treatment, kept cleanly apart so the owner can see which one is actually carrying the business.
Straight answer
Most of this trade is vague about scope until the invoice shows up. Here's mine, up front.
Get in touch
Fill this in and I'll come back with a time. Tell me what you're running and what shape the books are in — if someone else is a better fit, I'll say so.
Freed Bookkeeping