Ironwood Consulting
We keep the books, and read them.
Ironwood Consulting does the financial and operating work for owner-run businesses — the books, the monthly close, the payroll run, and the monthly conversation about what the numbers actually mean.
What this is, and who it is for
Ironwood Consulting is the division that holds client engagements. It does the accounting work, and it looks at how the business actually runs, not only at what the books say afterward.
It is for the business that has outgrown a spreadsheet and a shoebox and is nowhere near a finance department. One owner, a crew or two, real payroll, real receivables, and a stack of month-end work that gets done last because everything else came first.
The help available at that size is usually a bookkeeper who files and never explains, or a CFO priced for a much larger company. This is the middle.
Four services
What the work is
Evaluation and optimisation
We come in and look at how the business actually runs — pricing, the order of work, where cash gets stuck, and which jobs make money rather than only looking busy. Then you get a plan: what to fix, in what order, and where the AI team can take work off your plate.
Compass turns the evaluation into a dashboard — where the business stands, what to fix first, and whether it moved.
Bookkeeping
Categorised transactions, reconciled accounts, and a close that happens on a schedule instead of in March. Your bank feeds come in automatically. Bills and invoices, journal entries, and the receivables you have stopped chasing.
Behind on a year of it? That is a job we take on its own.
We keep the books your CPA files from, and we help you set money aside for what they tell you is owed. We do not do your taxes — your CPA does that, and we make their job easier.
Payroll
We run your payroll. You send us the numbers, or we pull them from the time-clock system you already use. We set your employees up, get direct deposit working, and run each payroll when it is due.
The accounting program is the payroll provider — it calculates the payroll taxes, sends the payment, and handles the filings. We are not the provider, and we do not do tax work of any kind. If you need a firm that files your returns, that is not us — and it is better to find that out here than on a call.
Fractional CFO
Every month, someone sits with your numbers and tells you what they mean: what changed, what it cost, and what to do about it before it becomes next quarter’s problem. Not a report you interpret alone.
How the work runs
How the month gets closed
The monthly note from Ironwood is written by a person. Not generated, not assembled from a template and sent unread. Read, thought about, and written by someone who looked at your accounts.
The moment that note is produced and shipped without anyone reading it, this stops being fractional CFO work and becomes a report. That is the line.
Some of the work underneath it is done by a system we built and run ourselves. It has one job, and it is named for it.
Ledger
Categorises the month’s transactions, reconciles the accounts, and closes the month.
A person still reads the close before anything is said about it. Ledger does the ledger work; the judgement is not automated.
Work here starts with a conversation. Tell us what is going on in the business and we will tell you where we would start.
Ironwood Consulting is one of two divisions of Ironwood Operations Group. Why a firm that runs its own businesses is the one keeping your books is on the about page.