Books fall behind in the busy season. The office gets through May and June on deposits and phone calls, and by August nobody has opened QuickBooks except to send invoices. By the time the tax preparer asks for the year, there are six months of bank feed waiting and a balance in Uncategorized nobody can explain.
Catching up is a project, and the order you do it in decides whether it sticks.
Before anything: the free call
On the call I ask how the books are kept today, who touches them, and what you want to know from them that you can't see right now. Before the call, I look at QuickBooks so the conversation starts from what's actually there.
Afterward you get a written list of what's wrong and what each fix costs. That list is yours whether or not you hire me.
What you hand over
This is most of your part, and it takes an afternoon at most.
- Accountant access to QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks sends you an invite to approve; I never need your password.
- Statements for every bank account, credit card and loan, for every month that's behind.
- The payroll reports for the same months, from whatever app runs payroll.
- A list of the jobs that are open right now, with any deposits you've taken on them.
If a statement is missing, I tell you which one and where to pull it.
The first 30 days
The first pass is a diagnosis. I go month by month from the last time the books matched the bank, and I write down everything that doesn't tie.
The same things turn up in most trade company books. Catch-all accounts like Uncategorized Expense and Ask My Accountant have grown. Transactions are in twice, once from the bank feed and once entered by hand. Crew pay sits in overhead instead of on the jobs. Owner draws are booked as expenses, so the P&L shows less than the business made. Loan payments are booked whole, with no split between what paid down the loan and what was interest.
Each of those gets a line on the list with what it's doing to your numbers today. That's the list you approve before I start fixing.
Months two and on: fixing and closing
I fix in date order, oldest month first, because every month's opening balance depends on the one before it.
For each month, the catch-all accounts get emptied into the right places. Duplicates come out. Crew pay moves into cost of sales, which is what each job costs you to build. Owner draws move to equity, where they belong. Then the bank, every card and every loan get reconciled to the penny against the statement.
When a month ties, I close it in QuickBooks with a closing date. Nobody can change a closed month by accident, and if something has to change later, it shows up as a change.
Sometimes the chart of accounts itself is the problem. It has dozens of accounts nobody uses and three different ones for fuel. When that's the case, I rebuild it first, so everything after it has a clean place to land.
How long it takes
It depends on how many months are behind and how tangled they are. You get the timeline with the quote, in writing, before I start.
What you have at the end
Every month is reconciled and closed. You have a P&L you can believe, a balance sheet that matches the bank, and a starting point for job costing.
Most owners move to monthly books from there so it doesn't happen again. That's your call. A catch-up bookkeeping clean-up is quoted on its own and doesn't require anything after it.
Book a free call. Thirty minutes, and you leave with the list whether or not you hire me.