About
I'm Margie.
Accountant.
Guitar repair shop owner.
That combination is unusual. It's also exactly why I can help your shop in ways a generic bookkeeper can't.
- Public Accounting Background
- Guitar Repair Shop Owner
- Florida Sales Tax Specialist
- Cleanup & Catch-Up Expert
- luthiOS Founder
Who I am
The accountant who also helps run a guitar shop.
I'm a bookkeeper and accountant with a public accounting background — the kind where you're brought in to fix things that have gone sideways. Messy books, years of backlog, accounts that don't reconcile, sales tax that's never been filed correctly. Cleanup work is something I genuinely like doing. Most accountants dread it. I find it satisfying.
I also own and operate Reflection Guitars with my luthier husband, a full-service guitar repair shop. I run the back office. I deal with customers. I know the industry because I'm in the industry.
"When I look at a guitar repair shop's books, I already know what I'm looking at. I don't need you to explain your business to me."
That matters more than it sounds. Most bookkeepers working with repair shops spend the first few months learning the industry. I never had to. That means we get to actual work faster, make fewer wrong assumptions, and have conversations that are about your numbers rather than about what a pickup is.
The accounting background
I came up doing cleanup
My public accounting background was heavy on remediation work — coming into situations where the books hadn't been touched in a year or two, or where a previous bookkeeper had been miscategorizing transactions, or where a business owner had been doing their best in a spreadsheet and it had slowly gotten away from them.
That background shapes how I work with repair shops. I'm not here to judge what state your books are in when we start. I've seen worse, and more importantly, I know exactly how to get from wherever you are to somewhere clean and clear.
What I'm good at
Finding what's wrong before it finds you
Sales tax misclassification. Uncategorized or unreconciled transactions that have been sitting for years. Expense accounts that caught everything because nobody set up the chart of accounts correctly. I look for these specifically.
Why it matters for repair shops
Small shops have thin margins for error
A multi-year sales tax liability doesn't care that you're a solo operation. Getting things right proactively — even if it means dealing with some uncomfortable history — is always cheaper than cleaning it up under pressure.
Why guitar repair shops specifically
Because nobody else is doing this well
Guitar repair shops are a niche industry. You're a service business with parts sales. You sometimes do warranty work. You might take consignment. Your revenue might come from four different payment processors.
Generic bookkeepers get things wrong in repair shops not because they're bad at their job — but because repair shops don't map cleanly to the templates they use. The sales tax question alone is something most bookkeepers will either get wrong or simply tell you to figure out yourself.
- 01
I know the revenue model. Labor, parts, setups, builds, consignment, lessons. I know how to account for each one correctly.
- 02
I know the sales tax exposure. Florida is my deep expertise. For other states I research your specific jurisdiction. I don't guess on sales tax.
- 03
I know the expenses. Your vendors are my vendors. So I know how to categorize them.
- 04
I know the tools you use. Square, Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, cash. Multi-platform revenue reconciliation is standard for repair shops. I'm set up for it.
Beyond bookkeeping · Coming soon
I'm also building luthiOS
luthiOS is shop management software built specifically for guitar repair shops and luthiers — job tracking, client-facing portals for status updates and easy rebooking job cost tracking, parts ordering, business stats, & more. Run your entire shop operations from your phone.
Founding Fret Not clients get early beta access. Your financials and your shop operations, finally built to work together.
Learn more about luthiOS →Let's talk about your shop.
Free 20-minute call. No pitch, no pressure. Just a straight conversation about what your shop needs.