Unfortunately I had a bad experience with Barb and her company. After the initial meeting, showing her my books and going through my needs she gave me an estimate of the costs involved in keeping my books, doing payroll etc. After the first reconciliation she charged me a "clean-up fee" of $250. Not that big of a deal but I had not been apprised of it before and when I very nicely brought that up she made it seem as though I was being price sensitive or trying to control costs when in fact my objection was clearly that she had not told me before the unexpected costs were incurred. I let it go.
After that, they were not able to set-up my payroll because she insisted my articles of incorporation were filed incorrectly. I jumped through the hoops of changing the articles even though I got a consult with a lawyer which she recommended and his assessment was that it was unnecessary. She insisted.
Other problems were being charged for about 30 minutes to respond to an email. I asked three 1-2 sentence questions and she responded with a novel and charged me for it. They were also never able to return my QB file with accurate bank balances for some reason, they're response was that they only reconcile until the first of the month and not current. It would be an additional charge to reconcile to the current date...
In all, I paid them $1100. When I went back to my previous bookkeeper, she had trouble getting the books to reconcile after the work Appenzellar did. We ended up going back to the last time the previous bookkeeper reconciled prior to Appenzellar and reconciling forward. Total cost to throw out all the work Appenzellar did and get current? $250. The only reason I wanted a new bookkeeper was to have a CPA and bookkeeper in the same shop since my large CPA firm didn't offer Bookkeeping on a small scale. What a mistake.
In all, I wasted $1100, a $200 legal consult and about 3 months of having my books in a constant state of flux. I hesitate to write poor reviews and have never written one in the 5 years I've been on Yelp but felt it was my only recourse after such a terrible experience. I hope that my experience was an isolated one and the other reviews here are a better barometer of Barb's services.