Clean books for Silicon Valley businesses.

I clean up messy QuickBooks and keep your books tax-ready for your CPA to file.

You’ve been avoiding this for a while.

If you’re reading this, something’s probably wrong with your books. Maybe you fell behind during a busy year and never caught up. Maybe your last bookkeeper left things worse than they found them. Maybe QuickBooks has been throwing errors for months and you’ve stopped opening it.

I’ve seen worse. It’s fixable. And we’re not going to spend the first call talking about how it got this way — we’re going to spend it figuring out where you actually are and what it’ll take to get you current.

Messy books are not a moral failing. They’re a consequence of running a business while also trying to run a business

What I do.

QuickBooks Cleanup & Reconstruction

Your books are months or years out of date, or the data in QuickBooks doesn’t match reality. I go account by account ( reconcile, recode, fix ) until the file is trustworthy again.
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Ongoing Monthly Bookkeeping

Once your books are current, I keep them that way. Monthly close, reconciliations, P&L and balance sheet delivered by the 15th. Ongoing clients also receive the ClearFin Report each month.

Ecommerce Bookkeeping

Shopify, Stripe, PayPal, A2X, Square, Amazon, the integrations are powerful and also the single most common reason a small business’s QuickBooks is wrong. I specialize in making multi-channel revenue reconcile cleanly.
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Financial Analysis

Ongoing clients receive the ClearFin Report, a plain-language analysis of cash flow, expense trends, receivables health, and early warnings, with clear visibility into how actual results compare to your plans. No surprises when your CPA or investors need current, trustworthy numbers.

Who you’d actually be working with.

I’m John Adams. I’ve spent the last three years doing tax prep, bookkeeping cleanup, and forensic accounting work out of a Palo Alto CPA firm. Before that, an MBA and a decade of business operations work. I know what a P&L looks like from your side of the desk.

This is a solo practice on purpose. When you email, I’m the one who reads it. When you ask a question, I’m the one who answers it. I keep my client list small enough that nobody gets lost.

Learn More About my background

John G. Adams Jr., MBA at Palo Alto Bookkeeping desk

Bookkeeping for Early Stage Startups

If you’re pre-seed or seed and running on Mercury, Brex, Stripe, and Gusto, here’s what you get from me:
A chart of accounts built for investors, not just your CPA. SaaS, contractors, payroll, and founder spend each sit where a VC expects to find them.
Every account reconciled monthly. Mercury, Brex, Stripe payouts and fees, and Gusto payroll all reconciled, with every SAFE and convertible note on the balance sheet where it belongs.
A burn and runway number you can drop straight into your investor update, with the P&L and balance sheet behind it.

Serving Palo Alto and the Peninsula

I live and work in Palo Alto. Most of the work happens remotely because it’s faster for both of us, but if you’d rather sit down with your books in front of you, I’ll happily meet you. You work with me directly, not an offshore team or a support queue.
I also work alongside local CPAs. If you don’t have one yet, I can introduce you to one who fits your situation.
I Proudly serve Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Los Altos, Atherton, Redwood City, and the rest of Silicon Valley.

How we’ll work together.

1. Free 20-minute call.
Tell me where you’re at. I’ll tell you whether I’m the right fit or refer you to someone who is.

2. You grant me read-only QuickBooks Online Accountant access.
This takes you two minutes. It lets me actually look at your file so I can give you a real estimate instead of a guess. No data leaves your QBO, I’m just reading it.

3. Written engagement letter with a fixed cleanup estimate.
You’ll know the scope, the deliverables, and the price before any work starts. Cleanup engagements have a $2,500 minimum.

4. Cleanup executed with weekly progress notes.
I work in focused blocks and send you a short written update every week. No mystery, no “I’ll get to it.”

5. Ongoing monthly bookkeeping, or a clean handoff.
When cleanup is done, you can retain me for monthly work, hand the file back to your internal team, or take it to another bookkeeper. Ongoing clients receive the ClearFin Report each month, a structured financial intelligence deliverable that goes beyond the books themselves.

Questions I get a lot.

No. This practice is bookkeeping only. My deliverable is a set of tax-ready books that your CPA files from. If you don’t have a CPA, I work with a few local ones and can make an introduction that fits your situation.

No. Messy books are the reason most of my clients hire me. Whatever shape you’re in, years behind, reconciliations broken, expenses miscategorized for months, I’ve seen it and fixed it. You won’t get a lecture.

Yes, and those integrations are a specialty. Ecommerce books break in predictable ways: revenue double-counted between the gateway and the bank, merchant fees unbooked, sales tax not separated. I clean all of that up and set up the mappings so it stays clean.

New engagements typically begin within one to two weeks of the initial call, depending on current workload and the scope of the cleanup. Rush work is available at the rush rate for genuine deadlines.

Two paths. Most clients move to monthly bookkeeping with me so the file stays current. Others take the cleaned-up file back to an internal bookkeeper or a different provider, in which case I deliver a handoff memo documenting what I did and how the chart of accounts is structured.

Read-only access to your QBO file, granted through QuickBooks’ own invitation flow. It lets me review your books to quote accurately. I can’t withdraw money, pay bills, or change vendor records. You can revoke access at any time with one click.

Hourly work is billed every two weeks with a detailed time log. Retainer clients are billed on the first of the month. Cleanup engagements are billed 50% at signing, 50% at delivery. I accept ACH, check, and credit card.

Almost never. Most clients I’ve never met face to face. If you want an in-person working session in Palo Alto or on the Peninsula, that’s available. Otherwise, video calls and email are faster for both of us.

This service is built around QuickBooks Online. If you’re on something else, we can talk on the call, but if you’re not open to switching, it’s probably not a good fit..

Yes, and that’s usually how the relationship is structured. I keep the books; your CPA handles tax strategy and filing. Most CPAs appreciate getting a clean file from a bookkeeper they can talk to directly, it makes their job faster and your tax bill more accurate.

Let’s figure out where you actually are.

A 20-minute call costs nothing. At the end of it, you’ll have a clear sense of what cleanup would look like, what it would cost, and whether I’m the right person for it. If I’m not, I’ll tell you who is.

Book a 20-minute call