Why Happy Books Solutions now works exclusively with Materio firms

The firm behind the firms

Holly Skog is the owner of Happy Books Solutions, a fully remote bookkeeping and advisory practice based in Princeton, New Jersey. Minnesotan by birth, Holly talks about her work with a mix of warmth and blunt practicality. Happy Books just crossed the five-year mark. For the last three of those years, Holly has worked exclusively with interior designers across the United States. As of this year, she has narrowed that focus even further: Happy Books now serves designers on one platform only.

What a bookkeeper sees that designers don’t

After five years inside the books of design firms, Holly has seen the same fires over and over. “It’s just very common for there to be things that go wrong,” she says of the non-Materio platforms her clients have used.

She points to one issue she was untangling the morning of our conversation: a designer had collected funds on a Houzz Pro estimate, never converted it to an invoice, and the money was sitting there, unapplied and easy to miss.

Her objection to other platforms isn’t aesthetic. It’s that the data doesn’t surface the financial insight her clients actually need.

“Some platforms make it much harder to gain meaningful insight into your financials.”

Holly Skog

When firms stay on those platforms, Happy Books does manual work to fill the gap.

Pick one, and go all in

In December, Holly had her second daughter. The maternity leave that followed surfaced a problem she’d been carrying alone. Her team could handle the bookkeeping, but not on every platform a designer might walk in using.

“I was the only one who knew all the nuances of serving designers across any number of project management platforms. I had let our services become hyper custom in ways that only I knew and understood in my own brain.”

Holly Skog

But the decision wasn’t just about making Happy Books easier to run. It was about creating a consistent, teachable process that let her team deliver better support without recreating the financial workflow from scratch for every client. The fix wasn’t to clone herself. It was to standardize the work around the platform she trusted most.

“We really need to just focus on one. Let’s pick one and focus on that one.”

She picked Materio.

Existing clients on Houzz Pro and Design Files were invited to transition to Materio if they wanted to continue with Happy Books under the new model; those who chose not to transition were supported through offboarding.

Less room for things to go wrong

The first thing Holly notices when a firm runs on Materio is what isn’t broken.

“Materio leaves less room for human error or for user error. There’s greater visibility as far as what is happening, what the status is for certain things.”

Holly Skog

For Holly, the value is that the financial workflow becomes legible enough for her team to support without rebuilding the story from scratch every month. When something looks off, her team can usually trace it themselves rather than escalate to a designer who already has too much on her plate.

The QuickBooks integration is part of why. “We know that when the PO gets to a certain point, it’s going to show up in QuickBooks as a bill.”

Her team likes the platform too. For finance brains who aren’t designers, “it’s pretty intuitive for us to be able to understand what goes on.”

That visibility also supports the advisory side of Happy Books’ work: helping designers understand profitability, cash flow, and project performance with fewer manual workarounds.

An alignment of philosophies

For Holly, this isn’t just a tool preference. It’s an alignment of philosophies. “Materio is in alignment with a lot of my soap boxes as an accountant,” she says.

The biggest one: a designer can’t choose their next project well without seeing the current one clearly.

“You can’t know where you’re going without knowing where you’ve already been or where you’re at now.”

Holly Skog

That’s why Holly’s bet on Materio is more than an operational preference. It’s how she’s making Happy Books more focused, more scalable, and more useful to the designers she serves.