Catch-Up Bookkeeping and QuickBooks Cleanup
Books that are months or years behind, brought current by a CPA, on a fixed scope and a fixed fee. We find the last period that actually tied, work forward, document every correction, and hand you a clean starting balance you can put in front of a lender, a partner, or your tax preparer.
Signs the books need more than a bookkeeper.
Falling behind is rarely about effort. It is usually one wrong structural decision made early, compounded by a year of transactions posted on top of it. Adding hours to the same process does not fix that. Someone has to go back to where it broke.
Diana Posner is a CPA and Certified Fraud Examiner who spent the first half of her career auditing financial statements, which is largely the discipline of proving whether a set of books can be relied on. A cleanup answers the same question.
- Bank accounts have not been reconciled in months, or reconcile only by forcing the difference into an adjustment account
- The balance sheet carries balances nobody can explain: undeposited funds, opening balance equity, suspense
- Owner draws, contributions, and loans are tangled together in one or two accounts
- Credit card activity is entered from memory rather than from statements
- Your tax preparer sends back the same long list of questions every year
- You are trying to borrow, sell, or bring in a partner and the books will not survive being looked at
How a cleanup runs
Fixed scope, in a fixed order.
The order is not a preference. Recode transactions before the structure is fixed and you will recode them twice, which is how a cleanup turns into an open-ended hourly arrangement.
- 01
Diagnostic and fixed quote
We look at the file, the bank and card statements, and the entity structure, then tell you what is actually wrong, how far back it goes, and what the cleanup costs. No work starts before you have that number.
- 02
Find the last period that tied
Cleanup done in the wrong order gets done twice. We work backward to the most recent month where cash genuinely reconciled, and treat that as the foundation everything else is built on.
- 03
Rebuild the structure first
Chart of accounts, classes, locations, and entities corrected before anything is recoded, so transactions land in a structure that can produce the reporting you need rather than the one that caused the problem.
- 04
Work forward month by month
Every month reconciled to statements, misposted activity corrected, loans and fixed assets agreed to their supporting documents, and inter-entity activity untangled.
- 05
Document what changed
A written record of the corrections and the reason for each one. That is what your tax preparer, your lender, and your future self need, and it is what separates a cleanup from someone quietly plugging the difference.
- 06
Hand over a clean starting balance
You end with a reconciled file, financial statements you can put in front of a third party, and a clear line in the sand. From there it is either monthly service with us or a working handover to whoever carries it forward.
If you own or manage property.
Property books go wrong in their own specific ways, and a general cleanup misses most of them: security deposits sitting inside the operating balance, owner distributions recorded in the wrong period, management fees accrued but never drawn, intercompany activity that makes a portfolio look profitable because a related entity absorbed the cost. Real estate is where Diana has spent most of her career, so those are the first places we look.
Questions we get asked.
How far behind is too far behind?
There is no point at which we turn work away for being old. Two years of unreconciled activity takes longer than two months, but the method is the same: find the last period where the books actually tied, work forward from there, and document every correction. What matters more than the age is whether the source records still exist. Bank and credit card statements, loan documents, and closing statements are what we rebuild from, so the sooner those are gathered the shorter the project.
What does a cleanup cost?
Cleanup is quoted as a fixed-scope project rather than an open hourly arrangement, so you know the number before we start. The quote comes out of a short diagnostic: how many accounts and entities are involved, how many months are open, what condition the reconciliations are in, and whether the chart of accounts needs rebuilding. If the diagnostic turns up something that changes the scope materially, we tell you before doing the work, not after.
Do you take over the bookkeeping afterward?
Most clients move onto a monthly arrangement once the cleanup is finished, because the fastest way to end up back in the same position is to hand clean books to the same process that broke them. That said, cleanup is a standalone engagement. If you have someone in-house who can carry it forward, we will hand over the corrected file with notes on what changed and why.
Will you have to redo my tax returns?
We do not prepare tax returns. What we do is produce a corrected set of books and a workpaper package your tax preparer can work from, and tell you plainly where the corrected numbers differ from what was previously reported. Whether that difference warrants an amended return is a call for your tax preparer, and we will talk to them directly to get it settled.
My books are in QuickBooks but the setup is wrong. Is that part of it?
Yes, and it is usually the part that matters most. A chart of accounts that cannot produce property-level or department-level reporting, classes and locations that were never set up cleanly, or a migration that left balances stranded will keep generating the same problems no matter how carefully the transactions are entered. We fix the structure as part of the cleanup rather than reconciling around it.
How long does it take?
Most cleanups run a few weeks rather than a few days, and the timeline depends far more on how fast statements and documents come back to us than on the accounting itself. We will give you a target date with the fixed quote and tell you immediately if something on your side is going to move it.
Tell us how far behind you are.
A free consultation, no judgement and no pitch. Send us the shape of the problem and we will tell you what a cleanup would involve and what it would cost.
diana@posneraccountingsolutions.com
Cranford, New Jersey. Serving New Jersey and the New York metro area.