Monthly Bookkeeping
The ongoing service that stops a file drifting back out of date.
Monthly Bookkeeping
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Home›Bookkeeping›Catch Up Bookkeeping Humble TX
Three years of unopened statements is a scope of work. We have a method for it, and it starts with nobody making you feel bad about the state of the file.
There are two different problems here and they get confused constantly. Catch-up means the work was never done. Cleanup means it was done wrong, and the file now contains numbers that look finished but are not. Plenty of businesses arrive with both.
We work backwards through bank and card statements, rebuild the missing months in order, correct what was miscategorized, and hand back a file that balances. Then we tell you what it would take to keep it that way, which you are free to ignore.
The reason a backlog feels impossible is that it is being looked at all at once. It is not one problem. It is thirty or forty small ones in a specific order, and the order is what makes it tractable.
We start at the oldest open period and work forward, because a file rebuilt from today backwards reconciles at the surface and collapses the moment anyone looks underneath it.
The books stopped when the business got busy, which is nearly always eighteen months before anyone admits it. A previous bookkeeper left mid-year and nobody knows what state the file was in when they did. The software was set up by someone in a hurry and the categories have been wrong since day one. A lender or a partner has asked for statements and there is nothing to give them.
None of these are unusual and none of them are unrecoverable. The only version of this that gets genuinely expensive is the one where it waits another year.
1
We look at the file and the statements before quoting anything. You get a straight read on how far back the problem goes and what it will take.
2
We rebuild forward in order. Working backwards from today produces a file that reconciles at the top and falls apart underneath.
3
A miscoded transaction gets recoded. It does not get an adjusting entry stacked on top of it to make the total look right.
4
Every account, every month, until the file is current.
5
What was wrong, what we changed, and what to watch so it does not drift again.
This is the highest-urgency service we offer and the one people put off longest. If a deadline is driving it, say so on the first call. Scope changes depending on whether we have six weeks or six days, and we would rather tell you early that the timeline is tight than discover it halfway through.
There is no such thing in our experience. We have taken on files that had not been touched in several years. The work scales with the number of months and accounts, not with how embarrassing it feels.
It depends on months missing, account count and transaction volume. A single missing quarter can be days. Several years across multiple accounts is a multi-week project. You get a timeline in writing before it starts, not after.
No. Every file we take on arrives because something went wrong, and most of the time it went wrong because the owner was busy running the business.
We document what we find and correct it. The written summary at the end is a factual record of what changed, which is useful if you need to have a conversation with anyone about it.
No. Cleanup is a project with a defined finish. Many clients do move to monthly afterwards because they would rather not repeat the exercise, but it is not a condition.
The ongoing service that stops a file drifting back out of date.
Monthly BookkeepingWhere the cleanup is really a setup problem, this is the fix.
QuickBooks Online Setup & ManagementRebuilding the structure underneath so the corrections hold.
Chart of Accounts SetupA consultation with the owners, a straight read on what this would take, and a scope in writing before anything starts.
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