What a QuickBooks cleanup actually involves

Nobody enjoys admitting their books are a mess, so most cleanup enquiries open
with an apology. They do not need to. A backlog is the normal result of running a
business that grew faster than its admin, and the work of fixing it is
well-defined.

What follows is what a cleanup actually involves, so you can judge a quote
— including ours — instead of guessing.

The seven things that are actually wrong

1. Unreconciled accounts. Bank and card accounts that have never been
   matched to statements. Until they are, no figure in the file can be trusted,
   so this is always first.
2. Uncategorised transactions. The “Ask My Accountant” pile, or
   hundreds of entries sitting in Uncategorised Expense.
3. Duplicates. Usually from a bank feed connected twice, or a manual
   entry that was also imported. These overstate both revenue and costs.
4. Personal spending mixed in. Not a crime, and very common. It has to
   come out to owner’s draw rather than sit in business expenses.
5. Opening balances that do not tie. Frequently a balance sheet that
   does not balance, or a prior year that disagrees with the filed return.
6. Transfers booked as income or expense. Moving money between your own
   accounts is not a transaction — recorded wrongly it inflates both
   sides.
7. Loans and credit cards treated as expenses. The principal portion is
   a balance sheet movement. Expensed, it understates profit and the liability
   never reduces.

A cleanup is not re-typing a year of transactions. It is finding the seven or eight structural errors that made every number wrong, and correcting those.

How it is priced, and why fixed scope matters

Cleanup work is genuinely harder than routine bookkeeping, because you are
reconstructing decisions someone else made without notes. Roughly one hour per
hundred historical transactions is a reasonable planning figure, but volume
alone does not determine the cost — the number of accounts, how far back
the errors run, and whether prior returns were filed on the wrong figures matter
more.

Which is why the scope should be fixed before the work starts. An open-ended
hourly cleanup is a bill with no ceiling, and you are not in a position to judge
whether hour forty was necessary. We quote a fixed range after looking at the
file, and if the file turns out to be worse than it looked, that is our problem
rather than a change order.

How long it takes

Most cleanups covering a single tax year land in two to four weeks, with the
first week spent almost entirely on reconciliation. Multi-year work runs longer,
and is usually best done newest-year-first so that the current filing deadline is
protected before older periods are touched.

What we need from you

• View-only access to QuickBooks or Xero
• Bank and credit card statements for the period
• The last filed tax return, so the opening position can be tied to it
• Loan agreements, if there are any
• An hour, once, to answer the questions only you can answer

That last item is the one that decides the timeline. Most cleanups stall
waiting on a handful of “what was this $4,200 payment?” questions, which is why
we batch them into one list rather than emailing them as they arise.

Questions we get asked