Catch-Up Bookkeeping
We clean up months or years of backlog, reconcile every account, and fix miscategorizations. You get accurate financials so you can file taxes, apply for financing, or just know where you stand.
What This Is
Catch-up bookkeeping is for businesses whose books have fallen behind. Maybe it started with a busy season and you never got back to it. Maybe your last bookkeeper left and nobody picked up the work. Now the bank accounts haven’t been reconciled in months. Transactions are sitting uncategorized in QuickBooks. The whole thing feels too big to face, so it keeps getting postponed.
This is a one-time project to get everything current. We go through the entire backlog, reconcile every account, categorize every transaction, and produce accurate financial statements for the full period. Once it’s done, you can either maintain the books yourself or hire someone for ongoing monthly work.
The Work
The Work
We pull bank and credit card statements for the entire backlog period. Match transactions to receipts and invoices where available. Reconcile accounts month by month. Fix errors, remove duplicates, correct miscategorized expenses, and clean up the chart of accounts. You get a complete set of financial statements when we’re done.
The Timeline
The Timeline
Depends on how far behind you are and how messy the file is. A six-month backlog for a straightforward business usually takes one to two weeks. A two-year backlog with multiple accounts and job tracking might take three to four weeks. You’ll get a timeline estimate after we review your situation.
Why This Matters
We’ve seen this pattern with MetroWest contractors and service businesses more times than we can count. Work picks up in spring. Crews are busy. The owner is juggling jobs, customers, and suppliers. Bookkeeping gets pushed to next week, then next month. By October the backlog is so big that it’s easier to keep ignoring it than to dig in. Meanwhile, decisions are being made based on the bank balance and gut feel instead of actual numbers.
The longer books stay messy, the more problems stack up. You can’t get financing because you don’t have statements to show the bank. Tax season becomes expensive because your CPA has to untangle everything before they can file. You might be losing money on certain jobs and have no way to know. Eventually you’re running your business blind, hoping things work out.
The Paralysis Effect
The Paralysis Effect
A three-month backlog feels manageable. A year-long backlog feels impossible. The bigger it gets, the harder it becomes to start. Meanwhile, every month adds more transactions to sort through. We’ve cleaned up files that were two and three years behind. The relief on the owner’s face when it’s finally done tells you everything about the weight they’d been carrying.
The Tax Problem
The Tax Problem
Come April, your CPA needs organized records. If your books are a mess, they have two choices. Charge you a premium to sort it out themselves, or send it back and tell you to fix it first. Either way, you’re paying more than you should. We’ve had clients come to us after getting quotes from their accountant to clean things up. Our project cost was less than half.
What Changes
Your books are current. Every account reconciled. Every transaction categorized correctly. You have accurate financial statements showing what actually happened during the entire backlog period. You finally know if you made money or lost it, which jobs were profitable, and where the cash went.
The practical benefits follow immediately. You can apply for that line of credit. You can file your taxes without drama or extensions. You can bring on a new accountant and hand them a clean file instead of a disaster. The weight of that growing backlog is gone, replaced by actual numbers you can use.
Real Numbers
Real Numbers
Once your books are clean, you can see which months were profitable and which weren’t. You can identify spending patterns. For contractors, you can finally see job-level margins instead of guessing. You can answer basic questions about your business that were impossible to answer before.
A Fresh Start
A Fresh Start
Cleanup gets you to zero. From there, you have options. Some clients take over and maintain the books themselves. Others move to our monthly bookkeeping service so they never fall behind again. Either way, you’re starting from a clean foundation instead of an ongoing mess that keeps getting worse.
Greater Boston's Trusted Bookkeeping Partner
The Next Step:
A Short Conversation
We'll ask a few questions, figure out what you need, and give you a straightforward quote.