Bookkeeping & Accounting Setup

QuickBooks: the most widely used option, which mostly matters because it means it's easiest to find a bookkeeper or CPA who already knows it. More expensive than the alternatives.

Wave: free for core bookkeeping/invoicing, paid add-ons for payroll and payment processing. A reasonable starting point if you're pre-revenue or very low transaction volume.

Xero: a clean, well-regarded alternative to QuickBooks, popular with bookkeepers who prefer its interface — similar price range to QuickBooks.

Your chart of accounts is the categorized list every transaction gets sorted into (income by type, expenses by category, assets, liabilities, equity). Most accounting software starts you with a reasonable default template for your industry — customize it, but don't over-engineer it on day one. You can always split a category later once you see you actually need the detail.

DIY bookkeeping is fine at low transaction volume if you're disciplined about doing it weekly, not "whenever tax season panics me."

A bookkeeper (not necessarily a CPA) handles ongoing categorization and reconciliation — worth it once volume gets tedious or error-prone to do yourself.

A CPA is worth involving for tax strategy (especially around the S-corp election decision from Stage 2) and for actually filing your business tax return — this is a different skill from bookkeeping, and a good bookkeeper will tell you when you've outgrown DIY tax filing.