Most sets of books fall behind for a boring reason: the person doing them stopped, and nobody replaced them. A quarter passes, then a year. The bank feed in QuickBooks has two thousand unreviewed transactions and opening it feels like opening a bill. Nobody did anything wrong. The fix is a project with a start, an end and a fixed price.
What we need from you
- Read-only access to every business bank and card account, or PDF statements for every month of the gap.
- Payment platform exports: Stripe, PayPal, Shopify, Amazon settlements, Square.
- Payroll reports if there was payroll; loan statements; the last filed tax return, which gives the opening balances.
- Access to the existing QuickBooks Online or Xero file, however messy. A messy file is better than no file.
- Twenty minutes on a call to explain what the business does and who the large recurring payees are.
How the rebuild runs
- Baseline. Confirm the last month that reconciles cleanly, or the balances on the last filed return. Everything before that is trusted; everything after is rebuilt.
- Feeds and imports. Bank feeds only go back 90 days at most, so older months come in by statement import. Platform sales come in as summarised monthly journals (gross sales, refunds, fees, sales tax collected, payout), not as thousands of individual orders.
- Categorisation. Rules for the repeat payees, then the long tail by hand. Anything unclear goes on a list for you, batched, not one message per transaction.
- Reconciliation, month by month. Each month's book balance ties to the statement balance before the next month starts. This is where duplicate transactions, missing transfers and unrecorded loans surface.
- Owner transactions. Personal spending on the business card and business income into personal accounts are identified and booked to the owner's account, not left as expenses or income.
- Close. Fixed assets and depreciation, loan interest split, payroll tied to the filed 941s, sales tax liability tied to the returns, and a balance sheet that balances for a reason.
How long, and how much
A typical service business with two accounts and a year's gap takes two to three weeks from receiving the documents. E-commerce with inventory and several channels takes longer, mainly because the platform data has to be reconciled to the bank. We quote catch-up as a fixed price after seeing the transaction volume, in writing, with the months covered, and it does not change unless the scope does. Ongoing bookkeeping from $99 a month starts once the catch-up is done, with no long-term contract.
What it produces
A reconciled file with monthly financial statements for the gap, a list of open questions with our best assumption on each, and a tax-ready package: profit and loss, balance sheet, fixed asset schedule, owner transactions summary. If returns are late, they are prepared from this and filed together with the relief request.
So it does not happen again
Three things. A bank feed connected for every account and reviewed weekly, even if only for five minutes. A monthly close with a fixed date, done by someone whose job it is. And separation of personal and business money, which removes half the categorisation work at source.
The check: open your accounting file and look at the date of the last reconciled month. That date is the size of the project.