Wilmington based Top2Bottom Business Solutions, a bookkeeping and payroll service company, acquired Cornelius-based Accurate Payroll & Bookkeeping Service, a move that helps Top2Bottom expand into the Charlotte area and add to its workforce.

Top2Bottom paid more than $600,000 for the acquisition and the combined companies are expected to earn $1 million in yearly revenue, Christopher Mallery, co-founder and CEO of Top2Bottom, said Friday.

“The long-term goals are to create a situation that allows us more revenue flexibility so that moving into the next three to five years, we can expand our reach,” Mallery said. “Having the extra revenue and that extra bandwidth with the new manpower that we have acquired will give us the ability to quickly, in the future, go into other markets. I'd like to eventually spread out into some other cities in North Carolina.”

All 10 employees at Accurate Payroll and its clients will join Top2Bottom, bringing the company to a total of 18 employees and 200 clients in 30-plus states, he said.

While the deal was finalized Oct.1, the relationship, however, between Top2Bottom and Accurate Payroll originated before the sale.

“We got our start in the bookkeeping and payroll business from Alex Hirsch who is the owner of Accurate Payroll and Bookkeeping, and he's been in business since the early 80s,” Mallery said. “He mentored us, and we moved out here to start a new office. So, it was just a natural progression that when he decided he was ready to retire, that we would get the first right of refusal with our new company and all the stars aligned and it all worked out.”

“We ended up just falling into a really good deal for both of us. He gets to ride off into the sunset and we get to keep the business going,” he added.

Top2Bottom was co-founded by Mallery and accounting director Jerri Blanton, Mallery’s mother, in 2017.

The company provides accounting, bookkeeping, payroll and sales tax services for small businesses, as well as QuickBooks training and budget creation and forecasts, among other services.

“Some clients we do very little with, maybe we just do bank reconciliations and provide them reports to help them towards the end of the year. And other clients we do everything for,” Mallery said. “It's really based on the need of the client and it's scalable.”

While the company serves many local businesses, it provides remote services for clients outside of the area with the help of CMIT Solutions of Wilmington, an information technology support company.

“They have helped us develop a new program through a remote-based server platform that we are able to create access points for clients to get to their accounting software,” he said. “Having the ability to work with multiple different platforms is something that we do that is probably different than others.”

The company is currently operating out of tekMountain and is in the process of looking for office space in the Porters Neck/Ogden area.

Mallery, who used to be in the restaurant business, said that besides growing Top2Bottom, he hopes to continue to take tasks off small business owners’ plates.

“When I started trying to find my way out of the restaurant business, it was to spend more time with my family. That’s something a lot of small business owners struggle with. The business that I decided to go into allows me to help other people resolve that so they're not doing their books at 9 o'clock and 10 o'clock at night when they can be spending time with their spouse,” he said. “My goal is to continue to enhance our offerings so that we can do that for more people.”