The accountant you need once a quarter

A bookkeeper posted advice for starting entrepreneurs in the Netherlands. Short and practical:

Set up your own online administration — e-Boekhouden, SnelStart, Moneybird. Connect your bank. Create your invoices from inside the bookkeeping package, not in Word or Excel. Then have a bookkeeper review the books once a quarter and at year-end.

That’s it.

It sounds obvious but it isn’t. Most people I talk to are either doing everything themselves with no structure at all — spreadsheets, separate invoice files, bank statements downloaded and matched by hand — or they’ve handed everything to an accountant and have no visibility into their own numbers between invoices.

The middle model is better for most small businesses. You handle the daily flow. The bank connection brings in transactions automatically. Invoices go out from the bookkeeping system so they’re already in the right place. Quarterly, someone who actually knows what they’re doing looks at it and catches what you’ve missed.

The automation part — the bank connection, the invoice integration — reduces how much manual handling the daily work requires. It doesn’t remove the need for professional judgment. It changes how often you need it.

This is roughly what I help clients set up. Not an enterprise system. A clean, connected baseline: payment processor linked, bank feed active, invoice flow structured. Once that’s running, the quarterly review takes an hour instead of a day because nothing needs reconstructing from scratch.

The accountant you need once a quarter is much cheaper than the mess you’re paying to untangle at year-end.

Set up the structure first. The review cost takes care of itself.