We're not a firm. We're not an agency. We're the folks your cousin's bookkeeper calls when she's in over her head.

How it started

Around 2003, a handful of us had all landed in the same awkward spot — semi-retired, working part-time, still loving the work but tired of the agency meat-grinder. The placements coming through the big staffing shops paid pennies on the hour we were billed out at, and half the time we were being shipped across the Lincoln Tunnel to clients we could barely get to by eight in the morning.

One slow Thursday at a diner near the Paramus mall, three of us wrote the rules down on a napkin: stay in North Jersey, charge what's fair and hand it straight to the member doing the work, only take clients somebody in the network could vouch for, and keep the whole thing small enough that everybody knew everybody else's name. We filed incorporation papers as a New Jersey member cooperative the following spring and held our first pot-luck in Dan P.'s backyard in June.

How the coordination actually runs

Membership is capped at forty. We meet four times a year — March (before it all goes sideways), June (debrief), September (planning), and the December holiday dinner where nobody talks shop until dessert. Between meetings, the coordinator — currently Marlene, serving her second two-year term — keeps a shared calendar of who's available, who's buried until April 16th, and who's off visiting grandkids in Naples.

When a local business reaches out through a trusted introduction, Marlene triages the ask against three filters: specialty (does anyone on the rotation actually know this industry's quirks?), geography (is this a twenty-minute commute for somebody, or are we asking a member to drive from Wayne to Montclair in rush hour?), and calendar (is the timing honest, or is this a "we needed it yesterday" that somebody will end up resenting?). If all three line up, she makes the match. If they don't, she says so, and sometimes points the inquirer toward a firm that would fit better.

The money side, stated plainly

The member and the client agree on rate and scope directly. The co-op takes a small flat coordination fee once a year per member — currently $180, set at the spring meeting — and that covers the shared calendar software, the meeting space rental when we can't fit in somebody's dining room, and a small reserve for the annual dinner. That's it. No percentage skim. No exclusivity contracts. No non-competes. If you become a member's regular client later on, good. That's the idea.

We publish a suggested rate band on the Rates & scope page so nobody has to guess. Members are free to charge above or below it based on the specifics; most of them land within five dollars of the midpoint.

The work we actually do

Most of our placements are short: a week here, six weeks there. Common asks include covering a bookkeeper's maternity leave at a small law office, catching up a year of neglected books for a restaurant that finally got serious, standing in as interim accounting manager at a family manufacturer during an ownership transition, or running the 1099 process for a construction outfit that would rather eat drywall than deal with forms.

A good chunk of the work is in QuickBooks (Desktop and Online), some in Sage 50, a handful of clients on NetSuite, and a stubborn few still on older systems that shall remain nameless but rhyme with "Peachtree." Everybody in the network has done payroll, bank reconciliations, sales and use tax, 1099s, and year-end close at least a hundred times. Several members sat for the CPA exam back when it took two full days and a sharpened #2 pencil.

Why temp-to-perm is the point

Solo CPAs in Bergen, Passaic, Essex, and Morris — the firms we were built for — don't hire the way big firms hire. A solo shop can't afford to carry a bad hire through a busy season and can't afford the agency fee structure that treats the first ninety days as free look-time. Our temp-to-perm model means the member works the book under co-op terms for up to sixteen weeks, you decide at week 12 whether to convert her to your payroll, and if the answer is no she rotates back to the bench without either of you eating a kill fee. Agencies hate this model. Firm owners like it. We're not the agency.

Ground rules, posted on the wall at every meeting

1. Stay in North Jersey. No exceptions we can't walk to.
2. Every client arrives through an introduction. No cold leads, no ads, no lead-gen.
3. The member doing the work sets the rate and keeps the rate.
4. We don't sign returns as a co-op. If a client needs a signed return, we refer out.
5. Confidentiality is total. Client names don't leave the member's head.
6. If a placement isn't working, either side can end it. No hard feelings, no invoice drama.
7. If you're too buried to answer the coordinator, say so. Silence is the only thing we can't work with.