ebs Associates, Inc.

ebs Associates and their awesome team have been a blessing. My Quickbooks was way behind as I never have time to do my own accounting. Mary met with me and went over all of the details of the work they performed, gave me a reasonable price to get caught up and monthly reviews.
Her team has always been quick to respond to any questions and are very thorough with their work. It’s been a huge relief to have ebs Associates step in and take over. I have also recommended them to several other companies/​friends and all have come back to thank me for the suggestion. Definitely deserve their 5 stars in my book.
Central Auto Body thanks you!

It should have been a tip-​off: the fact that their email addresses all end with @teachmequickbooks.com. This operation runs a school to teach Quickbooks to aspiring bookkeepers, while simultaneously presenting itself as a professional bookkeeping service capable of handling the needs of a small manufacturing business like ours with 100 product SKUs and roughly 800 wholesale customers nationwide. it is true that the greater Portland area is seriously in need of skilled employees and independent bookkeeping services that have a strong mastery of Quickbooks Enterprise edition for manufacturers. But this group charges too much while falling far short on their promises. They can’t even handle itemized billing on their own invoices when they overcharge us, let alone handle our day-​to-​day bookkeeping needs. «This invoice is unavailable to be viewed right now, but you can still pay us now!» And that is a big improvement from the way they have been billing us – simply charging our credit card multiple times a month with almost no explanation. Our contact, ###, is a very bright, professional and likable woman, but the people doing our actual work seem to be unskilled students of theirs. We are more than a month behind on our reconciling, our payroll taxes get miscalculated, and after six months of working with these people, we still don’t have our supplies inventory linked up to our product inventory builds or our cost of goods sold. We hired them on to straighten out our books from a previous group’s messes. That is precisely what they pitched (and generously billed) themselves as being capable of doing. The head person we deal with there in the event of a problem or complaint (which are now nearly constant), is incredibly persuasive at talking the talk, but the minute a complaint comes to her, she will spin it wildly around into something that is 100% our fault, and 0% theirs. She constantly blames our staff for everything. (I stand by my staff, by the way) If things get at all contentious, she is downright rude, condescending and belligerent. No doubt she will respond to this review with some entirely plausible, condescending though apparently «professional» excuse. All I can say is, we consider them a nightmare to work with — the worst group we have ever worked with, in that when they can’t handle what we need (which is nearly always), they actually become insulting and rude and condescending. We would have switched firms a long time ago were it not for the fact that we can’t seem to find a great group to switch to that really knows manufacturing. If you have a choice between them and ANYONE ELSE for your bookkeeping service — choose anyone else. I also can’t imagine that they would be a good group to learn any business skills from, despite that appearing to be their main source of income. And please, if you know of a great bookkeeping service aimed at manufacturers in the Portland, OR area, leave us a comment here :)