# Interview 03: Sofia Partner in a two-person bookkeeping firm, 38 small-business clients, looks after 21 of them herself Date: 21 October 2026 · Video call · 55 minutes · Invented example interview --- Interviewer: Thanks for talking with me, Sofia. Can you tell me about your work? Sofia: Of course. My business partner and I run a small bookkeeping firm, just the two of us. We have thirty-eight clients between us, and I look after twenty-one of them from start to finish. Restaurants, a florist, a couple of physiotherapists, an electrician, a little architecture practice. Every month we close their books and send them their numbers. Interviewer: What happens at the end of the month? Sofia: Honestly? I spend the first week of every month chasing clients for receipts. I keep a spreadsheet of who still owes me what. Interviewer: Tell me about the spreadsheet. Sofia: It's one row per client and one column per month. In each cell I write what's still missing. "Card statement." "Three fuel receipts." "Invoice from the fish supplier." When something comes in I delete it. When a cell has been there for more than two weeks I make it red. Right now there are eleven red cells. Interviewer: How do you chase? Sofia: Email, mostly. I copy what's in the cell into the email, so they know exactly what I need. I don't say "please send your receipts", I say "I need the receipt for the 214 dollars at the hardware store on the 9th". The specific ones get answered. The general ones don't. Interviewer: Have you always done it that way? Sofia: No. We tried a client portal. Nobody logged in. We paid for it for a whole year. The idea was that clients would upload everything to one place and we'd stop chasing. But they forgot their passwords, and then they emailed the receipts to us anyway, with a little note saying "couldn't log in". So now we had receipts in the portal and in email, and we had to check both. Interviewer: What did you do in the end? Sofia: We cancelled it. Back to email and the spreadsheet. It's ugly, but my clients already know how to send an email. Interviewer: Let's go back to September. How did the chasing go? Sofia: September was bad. One of the restaurants changed managers, and the new manager didn't know he was supposed to send me anything. I didn't get a single document until the eleventh. By then I'd already sent him four emails. In the end I drove over there and took photos of the invoices on the office desk. Interviewer: You drove there? Sofia: I did. It was faster than waiting. That's the job sometimes. Interviewer: Once you have the documents, what's next? Sofia: I sort them. Everything goes into the client's folder for the month, and then into sub-folders by type: sales, suppliers, wages, the rest. Then I go through the bank statement line by line, and every line that has no receipt gets a question in my spreadsheet. That's how I know if I'm complete. I don't close a month until every line has either a document or an answer from the client. Interviewer: Has a month ever been closed with something missing? Sofia: Once, badly. In June we closed one of the restaurants and a big equipment invoice wasn't there. Nobody noticed. The payment was recorded, but there was nothing behind it, and it was coded to repairs when it was really a new oven. The accountant found it in their year-end review and asked us why. That's the one I still think about. Interviewer: Why do you still think about it? Sofia: Because that's the thing they pay us for. If the accountant finds our mistakes, what are we for? Interviewer: Tell me about recording the transactions. Sofia: We're on QuickBooks. I do most of the restaurants with bank rules, but restaurant suppliers are messy. The same supplier sells them food and cleaning products on one invoice, so I split every invoice by hand. It's slow, but if I don't, their food cost is wrong, and food cost is what they care about. Interviewer: And the reconciliation? Sofia: My partner and I check each other's reconciliations. I reconcile, she looks at it, and the other way round. It's not that we don't trust each other. It's that you stop seeing your own mistakes after a while. Interviewer: What happens when something doesn't match? Sofia: I write it down and come back to it the next morning with fresh eyes. Usually it's a transaction in the wrong month. A card payment on the thirtieth that the bank posts on the second. That one catches me at least once a month. Interviewer: How long do the mismatches take you? Sofia: The easy ones, ten minutes. The bad ones can eat a morning. The worst part is not knowing if it's going to be a ten-minute one or a morning one until you've found it. Interviewer: And at the end of the close? Sofia: My partner does most of the client meetings, so I send the reports and she handles the questions. Clients ask the same thing: why is the number different from last month? And for the restaurants the answer is usually one supplier, one month. We write a few lines with the reports now, so they have the answer before they call. Interviewer: How do you feel during that first week of the month? Sofia: Like a debt collector. I became a bookkeeper because I like numbers, not because I like nagging people. Some clients I've had for eight years, and I still send them the same email every month. Interviewer: If you could change one thing about the month, what would it be? Sofia: That first week. If every receipt arrived on its own, I could close twenty-one clients in the time I close fifteen now.