For contractors and trades · /contractor
Materials, subs and job costs, and invoices that went out late. One version tells you which jobs made money. The other tells you what cleared the bank.
Ridgeline Builders is invented and every figure here is invented.
A different way to keep the books
Most finance tools come from people who never sat through a month-end close. Most firms send a report weeks after the month is over. Luca is one accountant who does both, so your books run in real time on the QuickBooks you already have, and close by the 5th.
Real time, not in arrears
A layer on top of your QuickBooks keeps the numbers current every day, so you are not reading what happened three weeks ago.
Everything in one place
Live reports, the weekly cash forecast, your documents, the conversation, and Ask Luca on your real books any hour. One portal, not five tools.
Kept by someone who did the work
The method ran by hand for years before it became software, so a person who knows accounting closes your books, not a tool guessing at them.
It is all here, on this page, before you talk to anyone.
Adriel Kornschuh · ex-EY · accountant, fractional CFO, and the one who built Luca.
Bookkeeping, monthly reporting and CFO level cash work, one flat fee, one name on all of it.
Every month, on your own QuickBooks, with the close checklist visible so you can see it happen.
What changed, why, and what to watch, in plain English. A branded PDF you can forward to anyone.
An 8 week cash forecast that updates with every sync, so the next payroll is never a surprise.
Receivables and payables run for you: invoices go out, bills get scheduled, collections get chased.
Your numbers in real time, every report self service, and Ask Luca answering from your actual books.
One thread with your accountant. Questions come ranked by the money they move and close in one pass.
Your logo, not ours: the quarter against the one before, cash a quarter out, plan against actual, and the decisions that need a call.
Plug and play on the QuickBooks you already have. Nothing to install, nothing to migrate, nothing new to learn.
The hire, the second truck, the inventory order. You did not say no. You waited for the month to close, and by the time it did the question had answered itself. A bank balance cannot tell you what is already committed.
The arrangement that worked at five people does not work at thirty. Volume grows, the close slips, and the uncategorized pile becomes the reason nobody trusts the P&L. Nobody decided this. It accumulated.
A bookkeeper records and a fractional CFO interprets, hired separately, meeting separately, each one able to point at the other. Add what you pay both and compare it to one flat number with one name on it.
Find out which of these three is already happening to you. The diagnostic reads your file and grades it 0 to 100, before you commit to anything.
Not a screenshot. The actual portal a client opens, running here, with the same five sections and the same Northwind Studio figures as the rest of this page. Click any section to open it.
Two questions are waiting on you. Each one is a single line, and answering them is what lets me close October on time.
Northwind Studio's books. The sections, the cash table and the written report are the components the product renders, not a picture of them.
Open the whole thingEvery bookkeeping tool can email you a list of transactions it does not understand. What happens next is where the month is won or lost.
You write “that was the Lisbon pitch trip”. An AI reads it and proposes the account, the class and the memo, ready for your accountant to check and post in one click. Nothing reaches QuickBooks unreviewed. Everywhere else your sentence is free text a human has to read, interpret and retype.
Each unanswered question shows how long it has been waiting and what it is holding up. Nothing sits in a queue quietly. You can see, and so can I, exactly which answer the close is stuck behind.
Questions are ordered by how much money they move, not by when the transaction happened to sync. Small noise gets a reasonable default and a note. Your attention goes where it changes the numbers.
2026-09-14 · Expense · TAP Air Portugal · Uncategorized Expense
Three steps, one pass, no email thread. Elsewhere step three is a person reading your sentence and retyping it.
Or open a live portal below and answer a question yourself. Nothing to install, no card, no email gate.
Every transaction gets a proposed category, the reasoning behind it in one line, and a green, amber or red confidence mark. Green posts. Amber we check. Red becomes a question for you, and only if the amount justifies asking.
Green
Matches a vendor with history and a stable account. Posts on sync.
Amber
Plausible but unusual for the amount or the period. We review it before the close.
Red
Only you know the answer. It becomes one question, ranked by amount.
2026-09-14 · Bank feed · no vendor history
2026-09-09 · Contract labor · 1099 vendor
2026-08-28 · Software and subscriptions
Generated from what is actually in your file. Bank tie-outs sit next to the books balance. Flux analysis names the accounts that moved and why, before you ever see the report.
Design tool seats stepped up when the new designer joined last month.
A freelance producer came on for the Harborview project.
The real checklist item labels this file uses, and a flux analysis example, mid-close.
Every account that moved gets a reason, written from the transactions behind it. Nothing lands in your report unexplained.
Type the statement balance, see the difference. Zero means reconciled, and the PDF statement can be read for you instead.
The annual policy and the prepaid retainer get spread across their months, drafted straight into QuickBooks.
How the month landed against the plan, biggest gaps first, so the commentary has something to say.
Not a PDF that lands once a month: log in whenever you want and the numbers are current. The portal opens with what is expected of you, including when the answer is nothing. Then cash, then which figures are still provisional, then the thread, then Ask Luca.
Two questions are waiting on you. Each one is a single line, and answering them is what lets me close October on time.
Real portal, embedded and live. Northwind Studio is invented for the demo.
Monthly or quarterly, side by side, cash or accrual, with or without a comparison. Download as PDF or Excel. Your tax preparer and your lender read the same numbers I do.
| Retainer fees | $226,715.81 | $2,091,677.13 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project work | $84,989.95 | $734,427.35 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Total Income | $311,705.76 | $2,826,104.48 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Salaries and contractors | $140,614.46 | $1,403,493.88 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Freelance production | $28,549.44 | $251,526.34 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Software and subscriptions | $12,688.70 | $127,122.91 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Rent | $20,874.91 | $209,131.01 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Advertising | $9,585.70 | $96,031.06 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Travel and meals | $5,865.53 | $58,761.99 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Insurance and professional fees | $6,940.22 | $69,537.02 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Total Expenses | $225,118.96 | $2,215,604.21 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Net income | $86,586.80 | $610,500.27 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The real report table: every pill switches the report, sections collapse, columns resize and sort. Same demo numbers as the rest of this page.
Open the industry that looks like you. Click into it, open the report, read the questions the bookkeeper is waiting on.
Twenty-two people, retainers and project work, contractors on 1099, clients paying net 45.
Job based work, materials and subs, invoices that go out late and get paid later.
Platform payouts net of fees, inventory on the balance sheet, thin margins that only show up if the books are right.
All three companies are invented and every number in them is invented.
Luca reads your QuickBooks, grades the state of the books and hands you an ordered cleanup plan. No commitment. Try the short version first.
Answer the four questions and the grade fills in as you go.
Records the month. Does not tell you what it means, and at 10 to 40 people the volume stops fitting in their hours.
Reads the month, in a meeting, from books they did not close and cannot fully vouch for.
The same person who closed the books writes the commentary and answers the questions. One flat number, no coordination cost.
Four sizes, one way of working. Every size gets the same close, the same portal and the same standard; the price follows how much book there actually is.
Books closed and reconciled every month, for a small business with simple books.
Clean books and a real report, when invoicing and bill paying are already handled.
Everything in Essentials, and Luca runs your receivables and payables too.
Everything in Core, run weekly instead of monthly. Bills paid, collections chased, scenarios modeled.
Several entities, or reporting to a board or a lender? CFO scope starts at $5,000/mo: everything in Partner, plus multi-entity books, consolidated reporting and board or lender packages on demand. The exact number comes from the diagnostic.
The diagnostic is free, and it is also how the size gets confirmed: your real transaction volume decides, not a form. A one time cleanup of existing books, if you need one, is quoted from that diagnostic and typically runs $500 to $1,000 on Starter and $1,500 to $2,500 on the other sizes.
No contract, no notice period, leave any month. Your QuickBooks stays yours the whole time, so the risk of trying this is a month, not a migration. Payroll runs, tax filing, audits and your QuickBooks subscription stay outside at every size.
Luca is an accounting and fractional CFO practice, not a call center, built by an accountant who did this work from the inside. The person who closes your books is the person who writes your report and answers your questions. We are not a US CPA firm: we do not file your tax returns and we do not audit anything. Your tax preparer keeps doing that, and gets clean books from us in January instead of a shoebox in March.
You will not find a wall of logos or borrowed testimonials here, and that is deliberate. What being in the first group buys you: the person who closes your books is the person who answers you, the practice is small enough that your file is not a ticket in a queue, and the way Luca works next year gets shaped by what the first group asks for.
Not an account manager in front of an offshore team. The same accountant closes the month, writes the commentary and answers in the thread.
We can close a limited number of files properly. When the group is full we stop taking clients rather than slow the close down.
The close checklist, the reasoning on every categorization and the age of every question are visible to you. Proof beats a testimonial.
The demos need no login and the diagnostic is free. You can leave any month, and the QuickBooks file was always yours.
Read by Adriel himself, reply within a day
Not ready to connect QuickBooks? Write a sentence about your books. I read every note myself and reply within a day. No connection, no card, no call.
Behind on the reconciliations, books that never match the bank, a cleanup you keep putting off. Whatever it is, say it plainly and I will tell you where you stand.
Because a monthly call exists to answer four things, and all four are answered here faster and in writing. The portal shows cash and the month. The report explains what changed. The conversation resolves questions in one pass, because your answer becomes the posted entry. Ask Luca answers from your real books at whatever hour you are thinking about it. When something genuinely needs a conversation, we have one. What you are buying is the absence of a standing meeting you did not need, not the absence of the person behind your books.
Faster than a firm with an office on your street. Ask Luca answers instantly, at any hour. Your accountant answers in writing the same business day, so nothing waits for a call to get scheduled. We work on US Eastern hours, so our working day is your working day.
Nothing. The subscription stays in your name and you keep full access. We work inside your file as an invited user. You never have to open it, but it is yours and it stays yours.
That is what the free diagnostic is for. It grades the current state from 0 to 100 and produces an ordered cleanup plan, so you see the size of the problem before you commit to anything. You can take that plan elsewhere if you want.
Luca is an accountant and fractional CFO practice, built for exactly what you are buying: the bookkeeping, the close, the reporting and the CFO work, one flat fee, one name on all of it. Tax filing and audits stay with your CPA, who gets clean, closed books to file from instead of a year-end cleanup.
Any month, with no notice period. The QuickBooks file is yours, closed months stay closed, and you keep every report that was ever written for you.
Connect QuickBooks read only, get a grade from 0 to 100 and an ordered cleanup plan. If your books are fine we will tell you that too.