One Firm, One Fee, and Every Part of the Period Covered
Full cycle is an industry phrase, and like most industry phrases it hides a simple idea. Any single piece of your books can be called bookkeeping. Issuing invoices is bookkeeping. Reconciling one account is bookkeeping. Full cycle means somebody is responsible for all of it, for the whole period, every period.
Our founder puts it plainly:
Full cycle means I do everything your books need. Reconciliations, credit cards, payables, receivables, payroll, and all the compliance that comes with them, for every accounting period you have.
It runs around $1,000 a month for most incorporated businesses and sits at the centre of our accounting service in BC.
What is actually inside the cycle
One package, for the whole period:
- Bank, credit card, and loan accounts reconciled, with every transaction categorized
- Accounts payable and accounts receivable kept current
- Payroll runs and the CRA remittances that follow them
- GST and PST calculated and filed on their own schedules
- Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow delivered on a fixed date
- The year closed and the corporate return prepared
Read separately, those are our bookkeeping, payroll, and tax preparation services, and each one stands on its own. Full cycle is the version where a single firm carries all of them across the same period, for one fee.
Payroll belongs inside the cycle, not beside it
Most of the industry treats payroll as a separate product, because it is fiddly, deadline-driven, and unforgiving. It gets quoted separately, billed separately, and often handed to a different provider entirely.
We take the opposite view. Payroll is part of full-cycle work, since the same wages drive your books, your remittances, your T4s, and your WorkSafeBC assessment. Splitting it across two providers means two versions of the same numbers, reconciled by nobody, and it shows up at year-end when the slips will not tie to the ledger. When it is all one engagement, the payroll figures your accountant relies on are the ones your bookkeeper produced.
Nobody here gets to say that was the other one’s job
The genuinely expensive failures are rarely a mistake inside one task. They are things that were nobody’s task. The bookkeeper assumed the accountant filed it. The payroll provider assumed the bookkeeper booked it. Everyone was technically right about their own scope, and the CRA letter still has your company name on it.
One firm handling the whole period removes that argument entirely, because there is only one place for it to sit. In practice, that shows up as knowing who to email and getting an answer within one business day, whether the question is about a supplier payment, a remittance, or a line on your statements. There is no triage step where you work out which of your providers owns the question.
Every hire adds more compliance than bookkeeping
Owners plan for the wage when they hire. Almost nobody plans for the rest of it. One new person adds a payroll record, source deductions with their own deadlines, a T4 at year-end, a WorkSafeBC payroll figure, and eventually an ROE. That is five recurring obligations attached to one salary line.
Coquitlam illustrates the pace of it. The city holds more than 8,000 businesses, and new ones there created over 3,000 jobs across two recent years. Every one of those jobs landed on an employer who had to work out the same stack, in a lot of cases for the first time. The work does not scale in proportion to your transaction volume. It scales with the number of separate obligations you now carry, which is exactly the point at which handling it in pieces stops being cheaper.
The file stays yours
Full service should not mean full dependency. We work inside your own QuickBooks Online or Xero file, in your name, and you keep the login. You can open your books on a Sunday night without asking anyone, and if you ever decide to leave, the file and its entire history go with you.
Owners are right to ask about this before they hand anything over. Being locked inside somebody else’s platform, or inside software you resent paying for, is a familiar enough feeling that it now shapes who people are willing to hire. A bookkeeper should be hard to leave because of the work, not because of where your records live.
Full-Cycle Bookkeeping FAQs
Monthly bookkeeping is the core recording work: reconciliations, categorization, payables and receivables, and your statements on a set date. Full cycle is that plus everything else the period generates, including payroll and its remittances, sales tax filings, and the year-end close. If you have employees and a corporation, the second is usually what you actually need.
A full package typically runs around $1,000 a month, and our floor for any engagement is $500 a month, or $500 a quarter for a smaller corporation. The figure is fixed and quoted before we start, so the number you agree to in month one is the number you are still paying in month nine. Work well outside the package is $120 an hour, told to you first.
Cycle means your accounting period, which can be a month, a quarter, or a year. For corporations we recommend monthly, because a monthly rhythm spreads the work evenly and means you can act on your numbers while they still describe the current situation. A yearly cycle only tells you how last year went, and by then nothing about it can be changed.
Not necessarily. We prepare T2 corporate returns at $1,500 to $2,500. If you already have a CPA you trust and want to keep, we hand them a closed, reconciled year-end package instead, which is the version of your file they would rather receive anyway and usually the version they bill least for.
Then take the part you want. Bank reconciliation, accounts payable, accounts receivable, catch-up work, and payroll all exist on their own, and our bookkeeping service covers them individually. Full cycle is worth it when the pieces have started overlapping and coordinating them has become a job in itself.
