The Bookkeeper's Sale-Side Playbook

When a client sells, a buyer's diligence team goes through your books line by line. They ask why rent is below market. They ask you to defend the owner's salary as market rate. They find the personal expenses, all of them, and they attach a dollar amount to every answer you can't support.

I know because I sat in that chair. There was no manual written for the bookkeeper on the seller's side, so I wrote one.

Ten chapters, first conversation through diligence defense: recognizing a sale-bound client · the first sale-prep conversation · scoping and pricing the engagement · the QoE-readiness assessment across eight domains · the seven categories of mess · owner compensation normalization · personal expenses and related-party transactions · building and defending the add-back schedule · running sale-prep as a service line.

Included, and this is most of the value: an 18-tab Templates Pack (QoE readiness scorer, add-back schedule with methodology footnotes, personal expense log, related-party log, customer concentration, working capital tracker, diligence Q&A log, closing checklist, fee calculator), plus the engagement letter, the scoping questionnaire, the owner conversation scripts, the proposal template, and the add-back methodology memo template.

Here's what the schedule is for. A well-documented add-back is worth the multiple, not the dollar. Find $60,000 of defensible owner comp normalization, personal expenses, and one-time items on a business trading at 3.5x, and you moved the sale price by $210,000. Get the documentation wrong and the analyst takes it back out.

That is the work. This is how it's done.

Instant download. Every template is yours to use with every client.