🎃 Don’t Let “Missing Receipts” Haunt Your Books This Halloween

As the pumpkins roll in and the crisp Texas fall air settles in, the spookiest ghost you might face isn’t a haunted house—it’s the ghost of lost receipts, misplaced invoices, and untracked bills creeping around your books.

The Ghostly Problem

When receipts vanish, invoices float away, and bills get buried, you’re left with more than just clutter. You’re staring down:

• Misreporting that hides your true profit margins.

• Stress that builds by tax season when you can’t find what you need.

• Audits or penalties looming because you didn’t retain or categorize properly.

In fact, across industries, small business owners highlight “time management,” “accounting challenges,” and “managing payables/receivables” as major pain points.

In construction and project-based work, part of the struggle is “inefficient data collection and handling” — meaning receipts/invoices often slip through the cracks.

Imagine: a field crew buys materials late Friday, you get the receipt Monday—somewhere in a chain of emails, job site drop offs, maybe a shoebox gets it. That’s a phantom cost, haunting your future profit.

Why It’s a Bigger Problem Than You Think

• Every hour you spend chasing missing paperwork is an hour not spent bidding jobs, servicing customers, or scaling your business.

• Mistakes or gaps in documentation can make your financials unreliable, meaning you’re making decisions based on guesswork.

• When tax season or an audit comes around, you’ll wish you had every piece in place—not scrambling to reconstruct the missing parts.

A Halloween-Season Warning Sign

Here’s your “haunted bookkeeping” checklist — if any of these feel familiar, you’ve got a ghost in your books:

• You open your filing or digital folder and see stacks of “to file / to reconcile” that date back months

• You discover job-costs or parts-expenses without any receipts or vendor statements attached

• You’re still using spreadsheets, sticky notes, or multiple tools to track expenses instead of a streamlined system

• You’re unsure exactly where your money went on a given job because the documentation doesn’t match the job codes

The Trick vs. The Treat

The Trick: Let this ghost roam unchecked. It may look like “it’s no big deal,” but over time it drains your margins, damages your financial clarity, and invites stress.

The Treat: Capture your project costs the moment they happen. Build simple systems that keep everything in one place. Turn that chaos into clarity.

🎁 The Treat We Offer

At Coyote Bookkeeping, we specialize in helping construction and automotive businesses stop treating their bookkeeping like a side-spur. We’ll help you:

• Set up a process so receipts/invoices get captured (via mobile app/photo) as soon as they’re created

• Ensure every cost is tagged to the correct job, car, service, or equipment so you know where you’re making and losing money

• Clean up your books so tax time isn’t scary—and you’re audit-ready

• Provide you with monthly reports that show your real status, not a ghost version of “I think we did OK”

Don’t Let Your Books Get Haunted

October is a great time to purge the clutter and set up systems for the next quarter.

If you’re tired of spending nights chasing receipts, or wondering if you under-billed because costs slipped through, it’s time to reclaim control.

Schedule a free consultation today—let’s stop the ghost of “missing paperwork” from haunting your profits.