Why I Still Do the Books

In college, I got a C in accounting. Barely. The whole “debits and credits” thing made zero sense to me. Gross margin? Net margin? EBITDA? No clue. It was all mystifying and deeply frustrating.

These days, I run a company—with payroll, contractors, invoices, the whole thing. And somehow, despite the advice of every smart person I trust, I still do the books myself.

I’m stubbornly holding on because I don’t believe there’s a better way to know if your business actually works.

I’m not suggesting everyone should cling to bookkeeping forever. It’s slow. It’s tedious. It’s objectively a bad use of time when you’re scaling. But man, you really get to know every nitty gritty detail about what’s going on when you’re the one in the weeds with the numbers.

When I started digging into our books, margins were the first thing I began to really understand. Gross and net margin stopped sounding like MBA jargon and started showing up everywhere—in staffing decisions, in software creep, in how we price new services. I always thought I understood business, but I didn’t fully grasp what drove those numbers. Now I do. And more importantly, I can see it happening in real time.

For example, when we go over the contracted hours for a client without getting approval first, I know exactly what happens to our margin. Our team gets paid for the work (as they should), and the client invoice stays the same (as it must). It’s not a crisis, but it’s a quiet hit. Easy to miss, and easy to repeat.

Or, if we discount work to win a deal without adjusting scope or expectations, we feel that cost twice. First in lower revenue, and again when the delivery effort stays the same. The top line shrinks, but the workload doesn’t, and the margin erodes.

Those are the decisions that, repeated enough, reveal whether the business is viable or just busy. The point isn’t to eliminate every hit to margin. That’s unrealistic and will drive everyone around you insane. But those small hits aren’t random—they’re signals.

Managing our books has made me paranoid in the best possible way. It’s made me faster at pattern recognition, more thoughtful about client agreements, and more precise when creating new processes. Not because I aspire to be a CPA, but because the numbers whisper back stories about how well (or poorly) we’re running the business.

One day, I’ll hand it off. Maybe soon. But not until I’ve internalized those whispers enough to hear them while we’re working, not just when we’re closing the books.

That’s the difference between running your business and just hoping it works.