I’m not the cheap option. I pretend my work will be audited immediately upon finishing. This is hard; it requires experience and skill and endurance. If you don’t like the price, don’t negotiate. Call someone else or it yourself.
Sometimes I have to work a data set to learn the best path forward. This means I sometimes do a bunch of work that I have to abandon now that I know how your data is fitting together. I charge for this work, even though it didn’t gain us ground toward the finish line, but instead turned us away from the wrong path.
Getting your accounting done is going to require a lot of homework from you. People often ask me “I’m paying you to do this, why am I being asked to do so much stuff?” the answer is: I can only process the data I have. If you don’t get the data, nothing gets done. Also, a lot of the data is a jumble of crypto-bro nonsense, and I need to talk through what I’m looking at. Are you posting collateral? Will it be recovered in the same currency? Are you borrowing something? What are the terms of the loan? do you still own the collateral you posted? This stuff is hard, and ZERO of the reports are clear and complete.
You won’t save money by doing some of the work for me. You’ll just make my life harder. Send me the reports, and then when I ask questions, answer them clearly and directly. Don’t worry, I’ll have a ton of questions. If you feel a tinge of discomfort at this, don’t hire me.
Hardly anyone answers the questions I ask. They seem to give replies which don’t directly answer. It’s weird. I encourage clients to read the question aloud, actually speaking words aloud into the air, and then answer the question aloud in a complete sentence. Example: “there was a deposit of 5 bitcoins into Coinbase on January 17, 2021. Where did you withdrawal them from?” your answer should be “I withdrew 5 bitcoins from _________ on January 17, 2021 which were transferred to Coinbase.” It may sound tedious and unnecessary, but my clients seem to not quite get it. Maybe I have a disorder where I think I’m typing words but it’s really something different? Maybe I’m a ghost living in a world of real people, and the real people can’t quite understand what I’m saying?
I get all pissy. Whatever is wrong with me, I end up talking with a hostile tone and being super intense about my work. And my work is to count pretend internet money, which is stupid.