I'm Margie. Recovering corporate accountant, current guitar repair shop co-owner.
I do the books and streamline operations while my husband does the lutherie. Eight years in corporate and public accounting helped me build a system that actually makes sense to him, and that is the same system I set up for other shops.
My husband Josh runs Reflection Guitars out of our home: setups, fretwork, electronics, the occasional refinish. He does the bench work. I do everything behind it (books, sales tax, vendor accounts, budgeting), so he can spend as much time as possible at the bench and as little as possible on admin. He still writes his own estimates & invoices, but our shop software, luthiOS, means he does it at the bench in real time from his phone instead of sitting down at a computer at the end of the week.
Before that I spent my career in public & corporate accounting, specializing in cleanup and remediation work. The kind where you get brought in because the books have not been touched in two years, or everything was previously miscategorized, or someone was doing their honest best in a spreadsheet until it got away from them. Most accountants dread that work. I actually kinda like it.
Putting those two things together is the whole idea here. When I open a repair shop's books, I already know a lot of what I am looking at. I do not need you to explain what a refret is, or why your StewMac order and your AllParts order get coded differently (equipment versus job parts), or why four different payment platforms show up in your deposits.
That is not a small thing. Most bookkeepers working with a guitar repair shop need to spend the first few months learning the niche. We get to skip that part!
If your books are a mess, that is the normal starting point
I am not going to judge what state things are in when we start. I have seen worse, and more usefully, I know the route from wherever you are to something clean.
What I look for first
Balance sheet accounts that were never reconciled. Sales tax that was never set up right. Transactions sitting uncategorized for years. A catch-all expense account absorbing everything because the chart of accounts came from a standard template instead of being customized for your shop. These are specific things with specific fixes, and I go looking for them.
But clean books are worth more than staying out of tax trouble
The compliance side matters: sales tax liabilities do need to be calculated on the correct type of income and remitted on time, and coding expenses properly is what makes them deductible.
But your books should also be something you actually understand and analyze often. It can show you what a setup really nets you once consumables are counted, whether parts are earning a margin or just passing through, which service isn't earning you quite the hourly wage you thought. Those are business decisions, and the numbers can answer them, but only if the setup (see what I did there?) makes sense and is consistently updated, month after month. I know this part is hard to keep up with when your bench has a backlog. Enter, me.
I'm also building luthiOS
luthiOS is shop management software for guitar repair shops and luthiers. An online intake form handles scheduling (and rebooking for returning customers) and drops straight into your job queue. Estimates and invoices get built inside the app, at the bench. And Pulse shows you real-time financial data on the shop without waiting for a month-end report.
It exists because we needed it and nothing else fit. The beta is currently open only to Fret Not clients, a small group I can actually support properly, so your operations and your books end up running off the same data from day one.
Let's talk about your shop.
A low-pressure intro call to see if we're a good fit.