Bookkeeping for businesses in Downey, CA

Short answer: A bookkeeper for Downey, CA businesses keeps the books for retailers, restaurants, medical and therapy offices and contractors in QuickBooks, Xero and more. Sales tax is kept out of revenue, card and cash deposits tie to your sales reports, and gross receipts are easy to pull for the city license. You get monthly reports and a short question list.

How Downey makes a living

Downey has an aerospace past. The city credits Vultee Aircraft and later Rockwell International with much of its early growth. Today its largest employer, according to the city, is Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center. Firestone Boulevard is the main commercial corridor, and shoppers come for Stonewood Center, Downey Landing on Lakewood Boulevard and the Promenade at Downey.

Around those anchors you find the businesses that keep a mid-size city running: restaurants and cafes, salons, dental and therapy offices, auto shops, insurance agents, contractors and family retail. Most of them take cards, many take cash, and a good share collect sales tax.

What Downey owners usually need

• Sales tax collected at the register posted to a liability, not counted as sales.
• Card processor deposits matched to daily sales, with fees shown as an expense.
• Insurance and patient payments for medical offices recorded by source.
• Gift cards, deposits and layaway held as liabilities until the sale is complete.
• Payroll from your provider booked by wages, employer taxes and benefits.
• Year-end 1099s for contractors and other vendors you paid.

What Downey owners ask us for

• Medical practice bookkeeping: The city names Rancho Los Amigos as its largest employer, and dental and therapy offices are part of the Downey mix. Recording receipts by insurance payer and by patient makes slow payers easy to spot.
• Bookkeeping cleanup: Downey measures many license taxes on gross receipts that leave out taxes collected from customers. When sales tax has been coded as sales, a cleanup splits it out so the reported figure is right.
• Small business bookkeeping: Salons, auto shops and family retail on Firestone Boulevard take cards, cash, deposits and layaway. Each is recorded so the money you hold for customers is not mistaken for income.

The Downey business license

Downey requires a business license to do business in the city. The city lists home occupations and contractors based outside Downey among those that need one. Applications and renewals go through the city's online business registration portal. Annual license taxes are due January 1, and renewals must be received by January 31 to avoid penalties.

For many businesses the tax is measured by gross receipts. The municipal code defines gross receipts without deducting the cost of goods, materials or labor, while cash discounts and taxes collected from customers are left out. New applicants estimate their first year's receipts. If sales tax sits inside your sales account, the figure you report can come out too high, so keep the two apart.

Rates, exemptions and deadlines can change. Check with the City of Downey business license staff before you apply or renew.

A typical cleanup: sales tax mixed into sales

Picture a gift and home goods shop on Firestone Boulevard. The POS deposited one lump sum each day, and the old bookkeeper coded the whole deposit to sales. Sales tax, card fees and gift card sales all disappeared into that one number. Each quarter the owner paid the CDTFA from the checking account and called it an expense. The city renewal asked for gross receipts, and no one was sure which number to use.

The cleanup starts with the POS daily summaries. We split each day into taxable sales, nontaxable sales, sales tax collected and gift cards sold, and we gross up deposits so card fees show as their own expense. Sales tax payments are moved to clear the liability they belong to. Then we tie the books to the filed sales tax returns. The result is a sales figure you can use for the city license and a liability that matches what you owe the state.

How it works

1. Call Spend a few minutes telling us about the business, the POS or practice software and the books.
2. Link accounts Bank, card and processor accounts are connected, and we get your sales and payroll reports.
3. Catch up Old months are fixed first, with sales tax and deposits matched to their source.
4. Stay current Every month you receive reconciled books, a profit and loss, a balance sheet and a few questions.

Nearby

We also work with businesses in Norwalk, Bellflower, South Gate, Pico Rivera and Santa Fe Springs.

• Commerce
• Vernon
• Santa Fe Springs
• Whittier

Bookkeeping services in Downey

• Bookkeeping cleanupWhen the books exist but nobody trusts them, cleanup finds what went wrong and fixes it at the source.
• Catch-up bookkeepingMonths behind, or a full year, the missing months get entered and reconciled from your statements.
• Emergency bookkeepingA deadline that will not move and books that are not ready. Here is how the work gets ordered.
• Monthly bookkeepingEvery month categorized, reconciled and closed, so the numbers you look at are numbers you can trust.
• QuickBooks cleanupA QuickBooks file that no longer matches the bank, fixed account by account and month by month.
• QuickBooks bookkeepingQuickBooks Online kept the way it was meant to be used, so the reports it gives you are right.

Questions