Most bookkeeping courses teach you where to click. Then you open a real client file, and nothing looks like the examples.
That gap is why this exists. A fictional Ontario sole proprietorship, a garden centre with a landscaping arm, followed from registration day through its first quarter-end. Realistic source documents, real bank feeds, real cleanup, and real decisions that do not always have perfect answers. You do not watch this simulation. You work through it.
Ninety seconds on what this is and who it is for.
Work through a week of documents at a time.
The week’s documents and bank feed, as a zip.
Read them, decide what they mean, do the bookkeeping.
A short quiz, with the search amount given so you can find the transaction fast.
My reports against yours, if you want, in summary and in detail.
The walkthrough, if you want. Or jump to the bookmarks as you need them.
Watch me walk through what it looks like
Real pages from the file. This is what you would be working from.
Source documents, week by week. Pick a week to see what lands in it.
7 source documents · 6 entries · 1 walkthrough
What arrives. Business registration and GST registration; the opening owner deposit; first and last months’ rent paid by cheque (a cleared cheque with a memo only, no lease document); first supplier receipts; a deposit slip; the first bank statement. No bank feed yet.
What it teaches. Bills versus expenses; the three “zero” GST/HST tax types (Exempt, Zero-Rated, Out of Scope) and why choosing the right one matters on the return; bill pre-payments and prepaid expenses; owner contributions; manual bank reconciliation without a feed.
4 source documents · 4 entries · 1 walkthrough
What arrives. Bank-feed begins; an internet bill with a handwritten payment note; a family cell-phone bill with the owner and a family member on it; a personal utility bill; supplier invoices.
What it teaches. Introduction to the QBO bank feed; what RST is; excluding feed lines; mixed-use judgment when family members share the business phone bill.
9 source documents · 8 entries · 1 walkthrough
What arrives. Fuel receipts (a judgment test); hardware bills mixing office supplies with materials; retail stock invoices; business cards and signage.
What it teaches. Claiming auto and gas expenses, rules versus principles; bill payments; inventory purchases in a business that doesn’t track inventory; adding a QBO product/service.
7 source documents · 6 entries · 1 walkthrough
What arrives. Multi-category supplier bills; a supplier credit memo; several bills settled with one payment; a bill paid by credit card; more retail stock.
What it teaches. Entering a bill with multiple expense categories; entering and applying supplier credit memos; paying multiple bills with one bill payment; navigating to QBO’s bill-payment screen; the three different ways to enter a credit card payment in QBO.
6 source documents · 5 entries · 1 walkthrough
What arrives. Customer invoices and payments; a combined branch deposit covering multiple customers; a $10k greenhouse repair; retail stock; the first GST/HST filing period due date.
What it teaches. The most common new-user bank-feed error, double-entered income on deposits; Undeposited Funds and the Bank Deposit screen for combined deposits; leasehold improvements; filing GST/HST in QBO with a checklist; changing filing dates.
8 source documents · 10 entries · 1 walkthrough
What arrives. A restaurant receipt submitted three ways (purchase, payment, combined); the first payroll (new-hire form, TD1s, payroll calculator printouts with handwritten notes); equipment purchases; month-end.
What it teaches. Gauging whether a meal is claimable; combining purchase and payment receipts digitally; meals with tips; 50% Meals ITCs; equipment as asset versus expense; entering a manual paycheque; when vacation pay is earned versus paid; accrued vacation on the pay stub.
13 source documents · 16 entries · 1 walkthrough
What arrives. Business and personal utility bills submitted; a debit-card refund; a bounced customer cheque with a follow-up e-transfer covering the NSF fee; the line-of-credit statement.
What it teaches. HST on utility bills is not always 13% of the total (rebates change it, read the bill); Business Owners submitting personal “home office” bills, handling debit refunds; the full life cycle of a bounced cheque.
16 source documents · 19 entries · 1 walkthrough
What arrives. A credit-card statement with transactions that settle across the cutoff; a purchase that appears paid two ways (card declined, e-transfer sent); small mixed receipts; combined e-transfer payments to a supplier.
What it teaches. Reconciling a credit card through statement-timing differences; catching a would-be double entry; how Find-Match can create multiple payment entries; inferring combined payments on account when no remittance detail is given.
9 source documents · 11 entries · 1 walkthrough
What arrives. Deposits including one that plausibly matches two different customers (planted); the municipal water bill; the GST/HST refund arriving on the feed; mobile cheque deposits.
What it teaches. Payment-application discipline, evidence over coincidence; bank-feed issue triage; recording a GST/HST refund correctly (through the sales-tax module, never from bank feed).
8 source documents · 12 entries · 1 walkthrough · 2 POS lines
What arrives. Square payment detail and its later deposit; gift card sales; register recaps and POS deposits; the first vendor statement; month-end, and one recurring bill is missing (pd by personal card).
What it teaches. Payment-processor clearing accounts (timing and fees); gift card sales as a liability, not revenue; POS clearing for the store’s debit/credit machine; working a vendor statement and resolving unmatched items; review-by-absence, noticing the bill that didn’t arrive.
22 source documents · 33 entries · 4 walkthroughs · 11 POS lines
What arrives. The biggest single event: a truck purchase with financing paperwork; register recaps; diesel versus gas receipts; a transfer to savings; job-deposit invoices.
What it teaches. Booking a vehicle purchase with a loan (asset, liability, down payment); register cash mechanics, recaps as controls, not sources; customer job deposits inside invoices; daily card settlements begin arriving in volume (Bank feed rules)
16 source documents · 24 entries · 3 walkthroughs · 14 POS lines
What arrives. A capital lease on shop equipment; an employee reimbursement with its receipts; payroll carrying a raise and an advance (recorded in handwritten notes); an invoice actually in USD; a courier import bill with majority GST; a supplier overpayment.
What it teaches. Capital versus operating leases; employee reimbursements without double-counting the receipts; payroll raises and advances; USD invoices resolved through the card charge; import GST/HST versus duty and brokerage; overpayments on account.
22 source documents · 27 entries · 3 walkthroughs · 18 POS lines
What arrives. A CRA payroll remittance appearing on the feed as a cryptic descriptor with no paper behind it (planted); an instalment-style payment against a vendor statement; a trailer purchase with MTO registration; a chiro appointment on the business card; a split-tender receipt paid partly with loyalty money (planted); a USD subscription.
What it teaches. Paying payroll source deductions (and problem solving missing paperwork); instalment payments on vendor accounts; MTO/RST is not an HST ITC (nearly everyone gets this wrong); personal charges on business cards; split tenders, the receipt’s tender section is part of the document.
17 source documents · 28 entries · 3 walkthroughs · 12 POS lines
What arrives. Canadian Tire Money on receipts; an email donating a gift card and a coupon to a raffle; a grocery receipt mixing business and personal items; supplier credits referencing earlier purchases; a first-and-last equipment lease payment; vendor double charging; vendor refund of double charge.
What it teaches. Loyalty currencies; gift cards versus discounts versus coupons, and what a donated gift card does to the books; splitting mixed receipts line-by-line with the tax following the business items; credit memos that must be traced to their original purchase categories; first-and-last lease payments, prepaids and ITC timing.
28 source documents · 33 entries · 11 walkthroughs · 14 POS lines
What arrives. Quarter-end capstone: monthly bank, credit-card, Moneris and Square statements; the store sales summary; a bad-debt write-off; a WSIB premium remittance form; a vendor statement to match against open bills; deposits containing split settlements; the Q2 GST/HST period closes; first loan payment on work truck. Optional for June Wk 5 – Using Dext
What it teaches. ITC carry-forward from a prior period; matching vendor statements to unpaid bills and credits; POS reconciliation with a split settlement; writing off bad debt correctly, journal entry with an ITC adjustment, not a credit memo (even QBO’s default gets this wrong); calculating loan interest; WSIB reporting; the full month-end and quarter-end close.
Productive struggle is the method. Being abandoned is not.
There are two sets of documents to choose from. The Nomi Notes set carries a note from me on each one: a suggested category and sometimes a nudge towards the right question. The clean set has none of that, so you can find out what you actually know.
From registration day to a filed HST return.
The part that matters is not the volume. It is the judgment that separates a bookkeeper from data entry: reading handwritten notes as evidence, splitting mixed and split-tender documents, chasing unmatched items instead of forcing them, noticing what is missing, and knowing when the right answer is a question for the client.
A bookkeeper who has made their mistakes on a client who cannot be harmed, before they make them on one who can.
$997, one payment, both document sets and all 34 walkthroughs.
The file covers fifteen weeks of business activity. That is not how long it takes you.
That gap is the investigating, and the investigating is the point. Most people manage about a month of the file per week, with June taking closer to three. Call it two months at a comfortable rhythm, less if you push. There is no schedule to keep up with.
“I really loved the course and got so much value from it. The real-world approach made everything click in a way traditional courses do not.”
Fiona Baird“Naomi has a way of teaching that sticks the key concepts in your brain. Highly recommended to any bookkeeper or accountant looking to learn how to be a better bookkeeper. The time investment is well worth it.”
Riley Pohl, CPAAny bookkeeping software you like. The documents and the CSV bank feeds are not tied to one, though the walkthroughs are filmed in QuickBooks Online.
If you need a QuickBooks Online file to work in, there is a 30-day free trial and a monthly subscription after that, usually discounted for the first few months. Worth knowing before you start: the trial runs 30 days and most people take about two months, so either budget for a month or two of subscription, or begin when you have a clear run at it.
Dext, in June week five, has its own free trial. Fifteen days covers that week comfortably, so do not start it early.
The same file, on your own or with other people.
Work it alongside other bookkeepers and talk through the hard calls with people making the same ones.
See the next cohortLicence it for a firm, run a private cohort, or pair with a peer firm through The Firm Exchange.
For bookkeeping firms