Marsha Thayer didn’t seem like a typical math nerd in high school. Far from it.
“I aced pre-algebra and then started failing,” she said, “which was surprising since now I’m working with numbers all day.”
In fact, Thayer’s been in the numbers business for roughly 15 years. Today, she’s the owner of Keeping the Books NE LLC, a bookkeeping firm that helps new and growing businesses build efficient, accurate financial systems and reports. Services range from data entry to bookkeeping and accounting, creating order out of financial chaos.
Thayer grew up in Narragansett with two sisters and a brother. Her father was a fisherman and her mom ran the Wickford Diner. “My parents’ attitude was, unless you’re dead, you go to work,” she said. “It was how I was brought up.”
As soon as she was tall enough to reach the counter at the diner, she was pouring coffee and waiting tables. That lasted through high school. “I made money and paid rent, $50 a week. Customers loved it when my sister and I bantered with them,” Thayer said.
When she graduated from Chariho High School’s vocational program, she wasn’t ready to head off to college and began searching for a job. She focused on up-and-coming industries and stumbled on the idea of becoming a comptroller. The prospect of overseeing the finances and accounting for an organization appealed to her. She enrolled in a certificate program in managerial and financial accounting at Rhode Island College while holding down two, sometimes three, part-time jobs. On weekends, she cooked at Athena’s Breakfast and Lunch in Cranston and worked for a Newport company that made uniforms.
“I loved it,” she said. “I learned that bookkeeping isn’t about adding. It’s about putting together all this information, assets and liabilities and income and expenses, to figure out the answer to a problem. When you love something, it’s not like work.”
Eventually, she was offered what seemed like the job of a lifetime, as the accounting manager for a disaster restoration company. There were no desks or computers or infrastructure, and it took her a year to stand up the business and hire a staff. She was there for a couple of years, but jumped ship when she learned the owner was involved in insurance fraud. “Customers would call and yell at me,” she said. “It was horrible.”
From there, she performed accounting for a couple of businesses, but nothing really worked out. Then, an earlier connection introduced her to a networking group and gave her a new perspective.
“It got me comfortable in talking to people. I had always invested in others. Now I was investing in myself,” Thayer said. “I learned QuickBooks [accounting software] online and rented 100 square feet [of office space] in a real estate company in West Warwick.”
In August 2022, she launched Keeping the Books NE.
Using her networking contacts to spread the word about her business, she created a presence on social media to help her business stay relevant, including creating TikTok videos, some of which have logged almost 2,000 views. She asked everyone she had worked with to write reviews on Google. “In the beginning, I was scared to death. I didn’t know what to do,” Thayer said.
Eventually, word of mouth and referrals brought in business.
“The bulk of my clients are old timers. They were writing checks by hand, and the payroll was handwritten. No one likes change,” Thayer said. She works with businesses in the service industry, as well as in real estate, small startups and established firms, and is sympathetic to owners who find themselves disorganized and overwhelmed.
Problems can range from unpaid sales taxes to receivables that haven’t been logged in six months. And often they result from a well-intentioned owner who’s made a poor hiring choice. “One of my clients was friends with the bookkeeper, who wasn’t up to snuff, but the owner didn’t want to fire them,” Thayer said. “Another client came to me because they learned the bookkeeper was stealing from the business. I get clients on their last legs. The people I work with trust me. We look at everything in their lives.”
Keeping the Books NE has roughly 35 clients and a staff of four, one of whom is her daughter, Emily Thayer. “She does my books,” Thayer said. “I got into business to help others, not to balance my own checkbook.”
As for her downtime, “Just before [the pandemic], I started flipping houses, beginning with my mother’s,” Thayer said. She’s completed three more in the meantime, and she’s about to start her fifth. “Believe it or not, it is fun; although in the middle, I ask myself, ‘What was I thinking?’ ”
And like many small-business owners, Thayer puts in a long day, sometimes meeting with clients as early as 6:30 a.m. She says she’s looking for a consultant to help scale the business and take on some of the load. The most challenging part of her job is letting go, she says.
“I’m a doer. When you become an owner, you have to learn to delegate,” she said. “Every situation is different; my happiness comes from the clients.”
