Fully Accountable - Outsourced Accounting

Directions Website

Fully Accountable - Outsourced Accounting Better Data for Better Decisions. Improve your bottom line with our eCommerce finance experts. Do you have a proactive accountant?

Fully Accountable- Your Back Office Solution

"Helping small businesses succeed." At Fully Accountable, we are your Trusted Advisor. We do not stop at a financial report, but provide forward-thinking analysis’ to help you make critical business decisions. Our team takes care of accounting, finance and human resources so you can focus on running your business. Our services include accounting functions from bookkeeper to CFO; ‘Your Back Office’ so you can manage everything from a user-friendly technology; and help attract the best team to create better opportunities for growth. Our mission is to help small businesses double in size, and we are continuing this by training accounting professionals with our FA Trusted Advisor Program to help their clients succeed.

09/25/2026

3 questions every business owner should ask their CPA before Q4 ends. 📋

1️⃣ Is our business structure still the right fit for where we're headed?
2️⃣ Which tax strategies have a year-end deadline, and which apply to us?
3️⃣ What deductions do we qualify for, and are we actually claiming them?

The strategies that lower next spring's tax bill have to be in place before December 31st. In this video, Rachel Phillips explains why these questions matter and why now is the time to ask.

Want to go deeper? Our free Q4 Tax Strategy Resource Guide covers the strategies, deadlines, and CPA-ready questions to help you plan ahead. Send us a message with "Q4" and we'll send it over. 📩

Your P&L says you're profitable. Your bank account says otherwise. Here's why.I see this constantly with founders: they'...
08/12/2026

Your P&L says you're profitable. Your bank account says otherwise. Here's why.

I see this constantly with founders: they're staring at a P&L showing a healthy margin, and they're also staring at a bank balance that makes them want to throw up. Both are true. Neither is lying to you.

Here's the disconnect. Profit is an opinion. Cash is a fact.

Your P&L is built on accrual accounting — it recognizes revenue when you earn it and expenses when you incur them, not when money actually changes hands. That's not a flaw, it's the point. It's designed to show you the economics of your business over time.

But it also means your P&L has no idea:

→ That you just paid $80K in cash for equipment that's only hitting your P&L as depreciation over 5 years

→ That you're carrying $150K in receivables from clients who take 60-90 days to pay

→ That you just paid down $40K in principal on a loan — which never touches your P&L at all → That you prepaid your annual insurance and software renewals in Q1

→ That inventory you bought is sitting in a warehouse instead of in your bank account

Every one of those is a real cash outflow. None of them is an expense on your income statement.

So you end up with two businesses living in the same company: the one your P&L describes, and the one your bank account is actually experiencing in real time.

The fix isn't a better P&L. It's building a habit most profitable-but-broke businesses skip entirely: a rolling cash flow forecast, updated weekly, that tracks what's actually coming in and going out — not what accounting rules say should be recognized when.

I build these with clients constantly, and the reaction is always the same: "I had no idea we were this tight until I saw it laid out week by week."

Profitable is what your P&L says about the past quarter. Solvent is what your bank account says about next Tuesday. You need to be managing both — separately.

If you're only looking at one of these statements to run your business, you're flying half-blind.

Unpopular opinion: if you're starting your Q4 planning in October, you've already lost the quarter.I've sat in enough fi...
08/04/2026

Unpopular opinion: if you're starting your Q4 planning in October, you've already lost the quarter.

I've sat in enough finance seats to see the pattern every single year.

The founders who scale profitably in Q4 aren't the ones with the best product launch in November. They're the ones who sat down in August and asked three unglamorous questions:

→ What's our actual cash runway through January, not just "we're fine"?

→ Which clients/customers/products are we over-indexed on, and what happens if one leaves or we stop selling that product?

→ What are we going to say no to, so Q4 doesn't become a scramble to say yes to everything?

Meanwhile, the founders who are "surprised" by a cash crunch in December? They were making decisions in October with September's numbers, hoping Q4 revenue would bail them out.

It rarely does. Revenue is the easiest lever to pull mentally and the hardest one to pull in reality on a 60-day timeline.

Here's the uncomfortable truth I tell clients: hope is not a financial strategy, and neither is "we'll figure it out when the orders come in."

The businesses that actually scale profitably in Q4 did the boring work in Q3:

➡️ Rebuilt the cash flow forecast with real assumptions, not optimistic ones
➡️ Identified which expenses were fixed vs. which were "we've just always paid for this"
➡️ Had the hard conversation about hiring/inventory/spend BEFORE the pressure hit
➡️ By the time October rolls around, they're executing a plan. Everyone else is triaging.

If your financial planning for Q4 hasn't started yet, it's not too late — but it's later than you think. And the gap between "prepared" and "reactive" this quarter usually shows up directly in your bottom line by January.

What's one thing you wish you'd looked at earlier this year, financially speaking?

Cash flow problems and profitability problems are not the same problem. Most founders treat them like they are — and it ...
07/22/2026

Cash flow problems and profitability problems are not the same problem. Most founders treat them like they are — and it costs them.

I've sat across the table from hundreds of business owners who tell me "we're profitable, so we're fine." Then three weeks later they're calling me in a panic because payroll is due and the bank account is empty.

Here's the disconnect: Profit is an opinion. Cash is a fact.

Your P&L can show a 20% net margin and you can still be unable to cover next Tuesday's payroll. That's not a contradiction — it's just how accrual accounting works. You recognized revenue the moment you invoiced. The cash from that invoice might not land for 45, 60, even 90 days.

A few numbers worth sitting with:
→ 82% of small business failures are tied to cash flow mismanagement or poor cash flow understanding — not lack of profit (U.S. Bank study, often cited, still holds true in every P&L I review).

→ The average B2B invoice in the U.S. is paid in 34-40 days past terms when you factor in real-world collections, not the 30-day terms printed on the invoice.

→ A business growing revenue 20% year-over-year often needs 20-30% more working capital just to fund the receivables and inventory gap — growth is a cash flow event, not just a profitability win.

→ I regularly see companies with 15%+ net margins carrying less than 2 weeks of operating cash on hand. That's not a profitability problem. That's a forecasting problem.

Profitability answers: "Is the business model working?" Cash flow answers: "Will we still be here in 60 days?"

Both questions matter. But only one of them can shut you down on a random Thursday.

If you only build one financial habit this year, build a rolling 13-week cash flow forecast. Not a budget. Not a P&L. A week-by-week view of what's actually coming in and going out.

Profit is the scoreboard. Cash is oxygen. Stop managing the scoreboard and start managing the oxygen.

Cash flow reporting is not your P&L net margin.I say this to founders at least once a week, and I still watch it land li...
07/17/2026

Cash flow reporting is not your P&L net margin.

I say this to founders at least once a week, and I still watch it land like new information every time.

Here's the confusion: your P&L says you made $80K net margin last month. Your bank account says you have $12K. Both are true. Neither one is lying to you. They're just answering different questions.

Your P&L answers: "Was this a profitable month, on paper?" Your cash flow answers: "Can I make payroll on Friday?"

Those are not the same question, and businesses don't fail from a bad month on the P&L. They fail from running out of cash while the P&L still looks fine.

Here's where the gap actually comes from:

→ Revenue recognition timing. You invoiced $50K this month. You collected $18K of it. Your P&L counts the $50K. Your bank account only knows the $18K.

→ Non-cash items sitting inside net margin. Depreciation, amortization, accrued expenses — all real on the P&L, all invisible in your checking account.

→ Debt principal payments. That loan payment you're making every month? The interest hits your P&L. The principal doesn't touch it at all — but it absolutely touches your cash.

→ Capital expenditures. You bought equipment. It's an asset on your balance sheet, depreciated over years on your P&L. But you paid for all of it, in cash, this month.

→ Timing of AP and AR. Net margin doesn't care when you collect or when you pay. Your bank balance cares about nothing else.

This is exactly why I tell clients: net margin tells you if the business model works. Cash flow tells you if you survive long enough to prove it.

If you are only looking at your P&L, you are flying with half the instrument panel. You need a rolling cash flow forecast — not a report of where cash was, but a forward view of where it's going — sitting next to that P&L every single month.

Profitable and out of cash is a real category. I've sat across the table from more founders in that exact spot than I can count.

Know which number you're actually looking at before you make a decision based on it.

Most business owners think they need a CFO.What they actually have is a bookkeeper who's really good at their job — and ...
07/15/2026

Most business owners think they need a CFO.

What they actually have is a bookkeeper who's really good at their job — and a set of problems no bookkeeper was ever hired to solve.

Here's the test I give founders when they're not sure which one they're missing:
If your question starts with "what happened" — that's bookkeeping.

→ What did we spend on payroll last month?
→ Are the books reconciled?
→ Why doesn't this invoice match the deposit?

If your question starts with "what should we do" — that's CFO work.

→ Can we afford to hire two more people in Q3?
→ Should we raise prices, or is our margin problem actually a cost problem?
→ We have cash in the bank — are we actually profitable, or just not broke yet?

A bookkeeper can tell you exactly how much cash you have today. A CFO tells you whether that number is a green light or a warning sign.

The mistake I see most: founders wait until they're already in trouble to ask the second kind of question. In the businesses I've worked with, by the time a founder brings in CFO-level support reactively, margin has usually already slipped 3-5 points from where it was six months earlier — and nobody noticed, because the books were accurate the entire time.

That's the part people miss. Clean books and a healthy business aren't the same thing. I've seen companies with pristine reconciliations sitting on 45 days of runway, because nobody was translating "the numbers are correct" into "here's what the numbers mean for next quarter."

The founders who catch this early — who bring in forward-looking financial support even 10 hours a month — typically see it in their cash position within one to two quarters. The ones who wait usually don't feel the gap until it shows up as a payroll scare.

You don't need a full-time CFO to close this gap. You need someone asking the forward-looking questions on a regular cadence.

So ask yourself right now: in the last 90 days, has anyone told you what to do next — or just what already happened?

If it's the second one, you don't have a financial strategy problem. You have a financial strategist problem.

I've worked with a lot of burned-out founders, and the exhaustion almost always traces back to the same root cause: they...
07/09/2026

I've worked with a lot of burned-out founders, and the exhaustion almost always traces back to the same root cause: they don't actually know their numbers.

I don't mean they lack a bookkeeper. I mean they couldn't tell me their cash position without digging through three different tabs, couldn't break down gross margin by service line, and were making six-figure calls based on a bank balance instead of a forecast.

Here's what that costs:
→ 82% of small business failures trace back to cash flow problems, not lack of profitability (U.S. Bank study). Founders aren't running out of ideas. They're running out of visibility into cash they didn't see coming or going.

→ Businesses with a rolling 13-week cash flow forecast catch a shortfall an average of 4-6 weeks before it becomes a crisis. Without one, you find out the week payroll is due.

→ In almost every turnaround I've been part of, the founder was working 60-70 hour weeks trying to compensate for financial blind spots with hustle. More hours never fixed a visibility problem. It just delayed the reckoning.

The pattern is always the same: burnout doesn't show up because founders are working too hard. It shows up because they're carrying financial uncertainty in their heads instead of in a system built to hold it.

The fix isn't more hours. It's a system that tells you, in under 10 minutes, exactly where you stand: cash today, cash in 13 weeks, margin by line, and the 3-5 numbers that actually predict trouble before it arrives.

This is exactly what a fractional or outsourced CFO builds for you:
→ A rolling 13-week cash flow forecast, updated weekly, so you see a shortfall a month out instead of the day before payroll.

→ Margin visibility by service line or product, so you know which parts of the business are actually funding the others.

→ A short list of leading indicators — not 40 metrics, 3-5 — reviewed on a set cadence so problems surface while they're still cheap to fix.

→ A monthly close and reporting rhythm you can actually trust, so decisions are based on where the business stands today, not where it stood two months ago.

None of this requires you to become a finance person. It requires someone who already is one to build the system and sit in it with you. That's the whole job: turn financial uncertainty into a small set of numbers you can check in ten minutes and trust.

You didn't start your business to become its full-time financial analyst. But until someone builds you that visibility, you don't have a choice. If you're a founder reading this at 11pm trying to reconstruct your cash position in your head — that's not a discipline problem. That's a systems gap. And it's a solvable one.

Let's put actual numbers on "we'll figure out Q4 later."Say you're running an $8M business. That's roughly $667K a month...
07/08/2026

Let's put actual numbers on "we'll figure out Q4 later."

Say you're running an $8M business. That's roughly $667K a month in revenue. Now let's look at what "not planning" really costs at that size.

THE CASH GAP. If Q4 revenue dips even 10% seasonally (common in a lot of industries) while expenses stay flat, that's a $67K/month swing. Multiply that across a slower November and December, and you're looking at a $130K–$150K cash gap you didn't see coming — right when payroll, bonuses, and vendor payments all hit at once.

THE TAX BILL. On $8M in revenue, even a modest net margin of 10% puts you at $800K in taxable income. A few smart Q4 moves — retirement plan contributions, equipment purchases under Section 179, entity structure review — can easily shift $50K–$100K+ in tax liability. Wait until January and that money is just... gone. Not deferred. Gone.

THE PANIC DECISIONS. I've watched owners realize in mid-December they're $80K short of where they need to be. The "fix" is almost always expensive: a rushed high-interest line of credit, a hiring freeze that stalls growth, or across-the-board discounting to force in revenue — margin you'll never get back.

Here's the math that matters: spending a few hours now on a 13-week cash flow forecast and a Q4 tax planning session costs you basically nothing. Not doing it can cost an $8M business six figures in avoidable cash strain, tax leakage, and panic-driven decisions.

Planning doesn't eliminate hard choices. It just means you're the one making them — on your timeline, with real numbers in front of you, instead of a bank balance forcing your hand in December.

If you don't know your Q4 cash position or your current-year tax exposure right now, that's this week's to-do — not November's.

What's the number that would surprise you most if you looked today?

We're officially halfway through 2026.Ask most business owners if they're on track to hit this year's goals, and you'll ...
07/02/2026

We're officially halfway through 2026.

Ask most business owners if they're on track to hit this year's goals, and you'll get a shrug. Or a confident "yes" that isn't actually backed by numbers.

I've sat across from hundreds of business owners, and the pattern is always the same: the ones who feel most uncertain aren't uncertain because business is bad. It's because they don't actually know what the numbers say.

They know their bank balance today. That's about it. No gross margin. No sense of whether revenue is really trending up or just feels busy. No idea what cash looks like 90 days out. Then Q4 hits and there's no runway left to make the moves they wanted to make.

June 30th isn't just the middle of the calendar. It's a checkpoint, and the best one you'll get before the year runs out on you.

Here's how to get on track, starting now:
1️⃣ Pull your real numbers. Compare January–June actuals to what you actually budgeted, not what you hoped for.

2️⃣ Get honest about the gap. Ahead, behind, or flat? Don't round up. A 20% revenue gap doesn't close itself.

3️⃣ Check cash, not just revenue. Profitable on paper means nothing if you're cash-strapped from slow-paying clients or debt service. Build a 13-week cash flow forecast if you don't have one.

4️⃣ Sort controllables from noise. Some of your gap is market conditions. Some is stale pricing or a cost that crept up. Focus your energy on what you can move in 90 days.

5️⃣ Set 90-day targets. "Hit the year-end goal" is too far away to act on. Break it down to what needs to be true by September 30th.

6️⃣ Get a second set of eyes. You're too close to your own business to see it clearly. The right advisor turns "I think we're okay" into a real plan.

Being behind at the halfway mark isn't a crisis. Not knowing you're behind is. The businesses that finish strong are the ones that catch it in July, not December.

Pull the numbers this week. Not next month.

Where are you seeing gaps, or wins, so far this year?

Revenue was up in Q2.So why does Q3 feel like the wheels are coming off?I've sat across from enough business owners to k...
06/23/2026

Revenue was up in Q2.

So why does Q3 feel like the wheels are coming off?

I've sat across from enough business owners to know this moment well. The top-line number looks great. The team celebrated. And now it's July and something feels off.

Here's what actually happened:

Revenue went up — but so did everything it took to generate it.
• Headcount to support the growth
• Ad spend to drive it
• Fulfillment, delivery, inventory — all scaled with volume
• Tools, contractors, and software that crept up quietly

The P&L shows a win. The bank account tells a different story.

This is the part no one prepares you for. Growth is expensive — and it doesn't wait for the revenue to arrive first. You spend to acquire. You spend to deliver. You spend to retain. The cash goes out the door today. The revenue shows up whenever it shows up.

Q3 is when that gap gets loud.

The summer slowdown hits. The pipeline that felt solid in May starts looking thin. The cost structure you built to support Q2 volume doesn't automatically right-size itself. And Q4 — the quarter that could turn this around — is still 90 days out.

If you're feeling it right now, you're not failing.

You're just seeing your business clearly for the first time — without a strong revenue month covering the noise.

The owners who come out of Q3 in good shape? They planned for it before Q2 even closed. Margin was protected. Cash was managed. The growth was clean.
That's not just bookkeeping. That's financial leadership.

Revenue going up and the business getting stronger are not the same thing. A great financial partner knows the difference — and builds the strategy around it.

Address

2725 Abington Road
Fairlawn, OH
44333

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Fully Accountable - Outsourced Accounting posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share