We're not a firm. We're not an agency. We're the folks your cousin's bookkeeper calls when she's in over her head.

How it started

Around 2003, a handful of us had all landed in the same awkward spot — semi-retired, working part-time, still loving the work but tired of the agency meat-grinder. The placements coming through the big staffing shops paid pennies on the hour we were billed out at, and half the time we were being shipped across the Lincoln Tunnel to clients we could barely get to by eight in the morning.

One slow Thursday at a diner near the Paramus mall, three of us wrote the rules down on a napkin: stay in North Jersey, charge what's fair and hand it straight to the member doing the work, only take clients somebody in the network could vouch for, and keep the whole thing small enough that everybody knew everybody else's name.

How it works now

Membership is capped at forty. We meet four times a year, usually over a pot-luck dinner, and we keep a quiet little shared calendar of who's available, who's buried until April 16th, and who's off visiting grandkids in Florida. When a local business reaches out through a trusted introduction, our rotating coordinator matches them to a member whose skills and geography fit the ask.

The member and the client agree on rate and scope directly. The co-op takes a small flat coordination fee once a year per member — that's it. No percentage skim. No exclusivity contracts. No non-competes. If you become a member's regular client later on, good. That's the idea.

The work we actually do

Most of our placements are short: a week here, six weeks there. Common asks include covering a bookkeeper's maternity leave at a small law office, catching up a year of neglected books for a restaurant that finally got serious, standing in as interim accounting manager at a family manufacturer during an ownership transition, or running the 1099 process for a construction outfit that would rather eat drywall than deal with forms.

A good chunk of the work is in QuickBooks (Desktop and Online), some in Sage, a stubborn few still on older systems that shall remain nameless. Everybody in the network has done payroll, reconciliations, sales tax, and year-end close at least a hundred times. Several members sat for the CPA exam back when it took two full days and a sharpened pencil.

What we believe, if that's not too grand a word

Small local businesses are the backbone of every Main Street in this part of the state, and the people who keep their books deserve to be paid like professionals and treated like neighbors. That's pretty much the whole philosophy. Everything else is just follow-through.