Tranova Consulting · Orange County, California
You don't need to hire a bookkeeper.
We close the books for $1M–$3M businesses — every month, on a fixed date, for a fraction of what the hire costs.
Ten years of outside clients: a construction company, five auto finance companies, an auto dealership, a repair shop, a security firm. Plus eighteen years running businesses, which is a different thing from only keeping books for them.
Is this you
Most people call us in one of five situations.
- Your bookkeeper just left. You're about to post the job, and you already know what the last search cost you.
- A lender wants statements. Three years plus something interim, dated within sixty days, and you can't produce it.
- Your CPA can't file. Not because of the return — because the months were never closed.
- You're profitable on paper and short in the bank. Nobody can tell you where it went.
- You're further behind than you'd like to admit. Months. Maybe years.
What you get
The whole month, closed.
Monthly close
Bank and credit card reconciliations, accounts payable and receivable, payroll coordination, the general ledger actually maintained — and the month closed on a date you can put in a calendar.
Financial statements
Profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow. Delivered with a call, not emailed as a PDF you never open. Audit-ready, lender-ready, and clean enough for your CPA to work straight from.
Clean-up and catch-up
However many months or years are missing, reconstructed from source documents — bank statements, card statements, loan documents — not from whatever the last person left in the file.
Controller and CFO work
Budgeting, forecasting, cash-flow planning, KPI and variance reporting, lender packages. The work an owner needs and a bookkeeper isn't hired to do.
How it works
Four steps, and you know the price before step three.
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A call, and a look at the file
Thirty minutes, no charge. We open the books and tell you honestly what shape they're in. Three years behind is a Tuesday for us — we have never once been shocked.
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A fixed-fee quote, in writing
Clean-up and monthly, both priced before anything starts. No hourly meter, no surprise invoice at the end of a bad month.
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We close the first month
You get statements and a call to walk through them. If something in the history is wrong, you hear it from us first.
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Then it just happens
Same close date, every month. The thing you were going to hire someone to make sure of.
Pricing
Published, because you shouldn't have to book a call to learn a number.
Straightforward books. One or two bank accounts, modest transaction volume, no inventory.
Where most $1M–$3M businesses land. Multiple accounts, payroll, real volume, monthly statements and a call.
Multiple entities, inventory or job costing, heavy volume, or a faster close.
Everything above, plus forecasting, budgets, KPI reporting and lender packages. Controller-level work without the salary.
Clean-up is quoted separately, typically from $250 per month of backlog, as a fixed fee once we've seen the file. What moves the monthly price: transaction volume, how many bank and card accounts, how many entities, payroll headcount, whether there's inventory or job costing, and how fast you need the close.
The arithmetic
What the hire actually costs.
The salary is the part people quote. It isn't the part that gets you.
| Line | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | 65,000 | 85,000 |
| Employer payroll taxes | 5,400 | 7,100 |
| Health benefits | 5,000 | 18,000 |
| Workers' comp, insurance, equipment, software | 1,800 | 5,400 |
| Paid time off and holidays | 800 | 6,500 |
| All-in, per year | 78,000 | 122,000 |
| Engagement | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly close, standard | 1,650 | 19,800 |
| Monthly close, complex | 2,450 | 29,400 |
| Controller package | 3,000 | 36,000 |
Employer-cost range built from published 2026 Orange County salary data for full-charge bookkeepers plus statutory employer payroll taxes, typical employer-paid health premiums, workers' compensation, equipment and software, and accrued paid time off. It excludes recruiting cost and the time you spend managing the role. Your own numbers will differ — these are ranges, not a quote, and the figures on this page are list prices rather than a promise of savings in any particular case.
Your money
We never touch it.
The most common way a small business loses money to its bookkeeper is that one person both records the money and reconciles it. We structure the engagement so that is never true here, and we'd rather tell you that before you ask.
- Read-only bank and card access. We cannot move money.
- No check-signing authority and no ability to initiate a payment.
- You approve every disbursement.
- Every account reconciled monthly, to the statement, every month.
- The QuickBooks file is in your name, on your subscription. Your logins stay yours.
- If you leave, you keep everything — the file, the history, the documentation — plus a handoff call.
Who we are
A bookkeeping and controller practice, and nothing else.
Tranova Consulting has kept books for outside clients for ten years — a construction company, five auto finance companies, an auto dealership, a repair shop, a security firm. Different industries, all of them with the kind of complexity that breaks a general-purpose bookkeeper: floor plans, contracts in transit, job costing, portfolios of loans, multi-state payroll.
Behind it is eighteen years of running businesses, not only of keeping their records. That is the difference between someone who can tell you the number and someone who can tell you what to do about it.
We are not a CPA firm and we do not prepare tax returns. We close your books so your CPA can work from them, and we will introduce you to one if you need one. We treat that as a boundary rather than a gap: your month-end is never an afterthought to somebody else's filing season.
Straight answers
The questions people actually ask.
Are you a CPA?
No. Tranova Consulting is not a CPA firm and is not licensed by the California Board of Accountancy. We do not perform audits, reviews or compilations, and we do not issue opinions on financial statements. What we do is keep the books correct and close them on schedule — which is a full-time job that a once-a-year filing practice is not set up to do.
Do you do my taxes?
No. Tax return preparation is referred to independent licensed CPAs and registered preparers. We hand your CPA a closed, reconciled set of books, which is usually the difference between a straightforward filing and an expensive one.
My books are a disaster. Is that a problem?
It's the normal starting point. Most engagements begin with a clean-up, and the worst ones are the most valuable to fix. You will not get a lecture, and you will get a fixed price before any work starts.
Can't my CPA just do this?
Two different jobs on two different clocks. Your CPA files once a year; nobody is closing the month. And bookkeeping billed at a tax practitioner's hourly rate is the most expensive way there is to buy it. The arrangement works best when we do the books and your CPA does the return — most of our clients keep the CPA they already have.
What software do you use?
QuickBooks Online for most clients, Xero if that's where you already are. We work inside your subscription, in a file registered to your business. We are also building our own tooling to run engagements more consistently — it is not finished and nothing about your books depends on it.
Why not just use AI?
Categorising transactions is the part software already does well, and we use it. The part it does badly is the part that matters: knowing that a deposit is a contract in transit rather than revenue, that a card payment was a vehicle purchase, that a balance has been carried wrong for two years. Someone has to be accountable for the number. Software does not take that call, and it does not sign anything.
What if I want to leave?
You take everything. The file is yours and always was, the logins are yours, and you get a handoff call with whoever comes next. No exit fee, no data held hostage, no notice period longer than a month.
Next step
Send us the state of it.
Thirty minutes, no charge, and a straight answer about what it will take. If the answer is that you don't need us, you'll get that instead.