Your books should speak your business.
Twelve trade editions. Built on over fifty years across the trades, kept right by our firm, and explained by Clavé.
Most accounting packages hand a sandwich shop the same chart of accounts as a law firm. Yours arrives already knowing what you sell, what you file, and which number actually tells you how the month went.
Why a trade edition
A restaurant does not have gross margin. It has prime cost.
Food plus labor, and if that number goes past 65% the month eats itself. A landlord does not have revenue — he has NOI, per building. A contractor does not have work finished; he has work in progress, and how he measures it changes the tax return.
Every one of those is a different chart of accounts, a different calendar, a different set of filings and a different question at the top of the page. Most small-business packages ship one set for every trade, and the packages that ship real industry editions are priced and sized for companies fifty times larger.
That gap is the whole product.
The editions
Twelve trades. One shipping, the rest in build.
Marked honestly, because the alternative is a prospect finding out mid-conversation. The edition is chosen once, when the engagement is opened, by the accountant who already knows what you do — you are never asked to pick an industry off a menu.
What is in it
Thirty-three rooms, and none of them is a spreadsheet you still have to keep on the side.
Grouped by what you came to get done. Everything marked now is built and running in the product today.
The money, checked
Every place cash can go missing between the till and the bank, each one counted against a record rather than assumed.
- Bank reconciliation
- Credit card reconciliation
- Merchant deposits
- Check register
- Cash on hand
What the business holds
The balance sheet as things you can point at — counted, scheduled, depreciated and amortized without anyone remembering to.
- Inventory & counts
- Prepaids & insurance
- Fixed assets
- Intangibles & startup costs
- Debt & leases
- Gift cards
The filings
Worksheets that map line by line to the return they support, so whoever files is copying rather than deciding. We prepare; a CPA signs.
- Sales tax
- Resort & local tax
- Payroll tax
- 1099s & W-9s
- Tangible property
- Owner estimated tax
- Amendment workpapers
The close
Periods that actually lock. Cross-checks run before a pack prints — if the statements do not tie, it does not go out.
- Period lock & reopen
- Eleven tie-out checks
- Adjusting entries
- Cash/accrual bridge
- Change log
Reporting
Sixty-two reports. Statements always rounded, everything else your choice. Every figure drills to the transactions under it.
- Financial statements
- Trial balance & GL
- Comparatives & YTD
- Trailing twelve
- Closing pack
- Print & export everywhere
Clavé Advisor
The part that reads the month back to you: what changed, what it costs, and what to do about it — on screen and in the pack.
- Month-end memo
- KPIs against your industry
- Productivity per employee
- Menu & product margin
- Tax-reduction levers
- Due dates
Direct integrations
Today the data comes in from exports and files. Next it comes straight from the systems that produced it.
- Point of sale
- Delivery marketplaces
- Bank & card feeds
- Payroll
- E-commerce
Looking forward
The books tell you where you have been. These are the ones that answer what happens if.
- Projections & scenarios
- Cash runway
- Borrowing power
- Dashboards
Eleven more editions
The base is done and shared. Each new trade is a pack of rooms, a chart, a calendar and a vocabulary on top of it.
- Construction
- Property
- Wholesale
- E-commerce
- Manufacturing
- Medical
- Short-term rental
- Vehicle & marine
- Agriculture
- Cannabis
- General
What you actually get
An accounting app, and the accountants who run it.
Bookkeeping software is a filing cabinet that can add up. It will let you be wrong all year. It cannot tell you that the deposit you booked as income is really a customer deposit, that your owner draws should have been payroll since January, or that you have been paying sales tax on orders the marketplace already remitted.
With Clavé Books you get both halves: the books kept clean, the filings made, and the questions answered by people who sign returns. Clavé does the tidying. A CPA signs off.
Always current to your last entry, closed monthly by us. Your books are yours, and you can export them any time.
The name
Meet Clavé.
Clave is the Spanish for key — and it is the keystone of an arch, the wedge that holds the whole span up. It is also the rhythm at the center of Cuban music: the quietest thing playing, and the thing every other instrument is measured against.
Music that breaks it is cruzado — crossed — and every musician hears it instantly, without checking.
A month that does not balance is exactly that. Out of clave, and it should be just as obvious.
He is sixty, Cuban-American, and modeled on the man this firm started with.
Ask him
He answers nine questions. The tenth goes to a person.
Clavé is a guide, not a chatbot — these are written answers to the questions people actually ask. Anything else goes to a person who signs returns.
Founding edition
Are we the first in your industry?
Then you help us build it. You give us your real month, your feedback, and permission to keep the trade edition we build around you. You get books built for your trade, a quarter off your first twelve months, and the firm's full attention while we build it.
Three at a time, no more — because doing it properly is the point.
Put your trade forward →In every edition
Four things it will not do.
Each one is a convenience somewhere else, and each one is how a set of books quietly stops being true.
- No clearing accounts
- A clearing account is a promise to sort it out later, and later never comes. There is one suspense account, it is visible, and the close will not run while anything is sitting in it.
- No basis switch on a report
- Cash and accrual are not a checkbox. Moving between them is a workpaper with a bridge in it, not a toggle above a P&L — a statement printed on the other basis by accident is never correct and never labeled.
- No sub-accounts
- Sub-accounts are grouping pretending to be structure. Grouping belongs to the report, where it can change without every prior period changing with it.
- No plug, ever
- If a reconciliation does not reconcile, it says so and stops. It does not post the difference to make the screen go green.
Who is behind it
Palacio, Palacio & Zimmerman LLC
A Miami CPA firm — accounting and tax advisors, strategy, fractional CFOs. Clavé Books is what we keep our clients' books in, and it is included in the engagement.
Not a software licence and not a per-seat price. One monthly fee, one relationship, and somebody who signs the return. Clavé Books is operated, not licensed.