Bookkeeping for Cincinnati service businesses and trades.

Cincinnati's small-business scene is famously dense and famously varied. Over-the-Rhine, Walnut Hills, and Northside are thick with creative agencies, photographers, restaurant groups, and hospitality operators. The West Side keeps the city's building trades humming — family-run HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and masonry shops that have been passing work between three generations of owners. On the East Side, from Hyde Park to Mt. Lookout to Oakley, you'll find premium home-services businesses: high-end remodelers, landscape designers, painters, and cleaning companies serving the historic housing stock. The riverfront and Central Business District drive professional services — consulting, law, marketing, design — that almost always run on per-project billing and need tight margin visibility.

What all of these owners have in common is a pricing problem. Cincinnati is a cost-competitive market. Labor is tight, materials keep moving, and the next bid always has to beat the last one. Without clean job-level numbers, owners end up pricing by feel — and discovering in April that a full year of "busy" didn't actually produce much profit. We built BDB to solve exactly that: month-by-month books on a consistent close rhythm, a clear view of which service lines and which jobs are carrying the business, and a monthly strategy call where we talk about what the numbers mean for your next quarter.

Cincinnati also has its own tax and reporting quirks — city earnings tax, Ohio Commercial Activity Tax (CAT) for higher-revenue businesses, and sales tax obligations that show up for a lot of service companies once they start selling parts or products alongside labor. We handle these as part of the monthly rhythm, so you're not Googling "do I owe Cincinnati city tax" at 11 p.m. on a Sunday.