# Interview 01: Dana Freelance bookkeeper, 25 small-business clients, works alone Date: 14 October 2026 · Video call · 52 minutes · Invented example interview --- Interviewer: Thanks for making the time, Dana. To start, can you tell me a bit about what you do? Dana: Sure. I'm a freelance bookkeeper. I've been on my own for about twelve years. Right now I have twenty-five clients, all small businesses. A café, two hair salons, a couple of builders, a dog groomer, a bakery, that kind of thing. It's just me, no staff, no partner. I close everybody's books every month. Interviewer: Let's talk about the last month you closed. Which one was that? Dana: September. I finished the last client on the twelfth of October, which is late for me. I like to be done by the tenth. Interviewer: Walk me through it. Where did September start? Dana: Before the month even ends, really. Around the twenty-fifth I go through my checklists. Every client has their own checklist. It's one document per client and, honestly, it's the thing I'm proudest of. It says which bank accounts they have, which cards, whether they run payroll, whether there's a loan, sales tax, whether they pay suppliers in cash. So I don't have to think about what a client's close needs. I open the list and it tells me. Interviewer: How did you end up with those checklists? Dana: Pain. Years ago I closed a month for one of the builders and forgot his truck loan. Completely forgot it existed. The balance sheet was wrong for three months before I noticed. After that I wrote down everything for everyone. When something changes, a new account or a new employee, I add it to that client's list the same day. Now it takes me maybe two minutes per client to know what the month needs. Interviewer: And once the month is over? Dana: On the first, every client gets the same email. Here's what I need for September: statements for anything without a bank feed, receipts, sales invoices, anything unusual like a new loan. I have a template. I change the month and send twenty-five of them. Interviewer: How does that go? Dana: About half send everything in the first three or four days. The other half, I send a second email on the fifth. A third one on the eighth, and that one is less polite. For September I had four clients who still hadn't sent receipts by the tenth. Interviewer: Tell me about one of them. Dana: The bakery. The owner sent me forty photos of receipts on a Sunday night, each one in its own email. Forty emails. I downloaded them one by one, renamed them and dragged them into her folder. That alone was an hour. And three of them were the same receipt taken twice. Interviewer: What do you do with the clients who never send? Dana: Some months I close without them. I post what's in the bank and I keep a list of the missing receipts in my notes. The risk is it all lands on the accountant at tax time. That happened in April with the dog groomer. Eighty-some transactions with nothing behind them, and her accountant called me, not her. Interviewer: How did that feel? Dana: Embarrassing. It wasn't my fault, but it looks like my fault. My name is on those books. Interviewer: Once the documents are in, what happens? Dana: I check them against the checklist. Do I have every statement, every card, every loan. If something's missing I can see it straight away because the checklist says it should be there. Then I go into QuickBooks and work through the bank feed. Most of it the rules handle. The café buys milk from the same dairy every week, that codes itself. The odd stuff I do by hand. Interviewer: Have the rules ever gone wrong? Dana: Oh, yes. I had a rule that sent anything from the hardware store to materials, and one of the builders bought a fridge for his kitchen at home there. Personal. It sat in materials for two months. So now I look at every rule match over two hundred dollars before I accept it. Interviewer: Then the reconciliation? Dana: Then I reconcile every account against its statement. Usually it's fine. In September the café was off by three hundred and twelve dollars and I could not find it. I spent most of an afternoon on it. In the end the owner had opened a new credit card in August and never told me, and a payment to it came out of the business account. The card wasn't on my checklist, so I didn't know to ask for its statement. Interviewer: What did you do then? Dana: Emailed her, waited two days, got the statement, added the card to her checklist, and went back and fixed August as well. Fixing August meant reopening a month I had already sent her, which I hate. Interviewer: Why do you hate it? Dana: Because she'd already seen August. Now I'm sending her new numbers for a month she thought was finished, and I have to explain why. Interviewer: Tell me about the end of the close. Dana: Each client gets a profit and loss and a balance sheet, with a short email on top. Three or four lines, the things I'd want to know if it were my business. Most of them don't open the reports. They read my email. And when profit drops, they call me and want to know why. Interviewer: Tell me about the last call like that. Dana: One of the salon owners called in September because her profit was down two thousand dollars on August. It was because she'd paid her insurance for the whole year in one go. It took me twenty minutes to explain that it's not a loss, it's just timing. I've explained that same thing to her three times this year. Interviewer: If you think about the whole month, where does the time go? Dana: Chasing. Easily a third of my month is chasing people for receipts that are sitting in their car. The bookkeeping itself I'm good at. Interviewer: Have you tried anything else for the chasing? Dana: I tried text messages for a while, because people answer texts. They do answer, but then the receipts arrive in my texts and I lose them in there. So I stopped. I'm back to email only. Interviewer: Anything else you tried and dropped? Dana: Not really. I looked at a couple of apps, but I never set one up. I don't want to make my clients learn something new. Half of them barely open email. Interviewer: Last question. How do you want to feel when a close is done? Dana: Done. Like everything is in its place and nobody is going to call me with a surprise.