About
Who you'd be working with
I'm John Freed. I've done full-cycle bookkeeping for more than six years — around thirty businesses across retail, e-commerce, and services, working both directly with owners and behind CPA firms during tax season.
Most of that is the ordinary monthly rhythm — categorize, reconcile, close, deliver, answer the owner's questions, do it again next month. That's the work I'm actually building this practice around, because it's what changes how a business runs.
I'm also comfortable with the ugly end of it, which not every bookkeeper is: records that were never really kept, delinquent sales tax filings, systems abandoned halfway. I've rebuilt books to the point where a CPA could file from them and cleared the penalties that had piled up in the meantime. If that's where you are, it's a starting point, not a problem.
Before going out on my own I spent a year as an Accounts Payable Analyst at a roughly $500M nonprofit health system, handling about a third of its total AP volume under real internal controls, and led vendor data validation through an ERP conversion. That's where I learned that the controls are the job — not paperwork wrapped around it.
I hold an A.A. in Accounting and a B.A. from Bowdoin College, and I'm a certified QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor. My practice is moving toward tax work, so the books I keep are built from the start to hold up when a return gets prepared from them.
Track record
Recent work
Wellness apparel & jewelry retailer
Selling online and through vending. Multiple sales channels feeding one set of books, inventory to keep straight, and merchant deposits that never match the sales they came from.
Pacific Northwest sock company
Retail and wholesale under one roof — two revenue streams with different margins, different payment terms, and different sales tax treatment, kept cleanly apart so the owner can see which one is actually carrying the business.