Catch-Up Bookkeeping
Cleanup work for books that are months or years behind. We'll get you current and back in control.
What This Is
Catch-up bookkeeping is for businesses whose records have fallen behind. Maybe a few months, maybe a few years. Bank accounts haven’t been reconciled. Transactions are sitting in QuickBooks uncategorized or missing entirely. Receipts are buried in email, stuffed in a drawer, or scattered across apps. The backlog feels too big to deal with, so it gets pushed off another month.
This is a defined project to get you caught up. We pull the statements, match transactions to source documents, reconcile every account month by month, and produce clean financial statements for the entire period. When it’s finished, you have a complete picture of what actually happened in your business and a clean foundation to work from going forward.
The Work Involved
The Work Involved
We gather bank and credit card statements for the backlog period, reconcile each month against your accounting records, categorize transactions properly, identify and fix duplicates or errors, and produce a full set of financials including profit and loss and balance sheet.
Scope and Timeline
Scope and Timeline
Timeline depends on the size of the backlog and the condition of the records. A four to six month cleanup is usually a couple of weeks. Two or three years of backlog takes longer. You’ll get a clear scope, timeline, and fixed quote after we look at your situation.
Why This Matters
Behind books create real problems. Your CPA can’t file an accurate return without them. A lender won’t fund a loan or line of credit without current financials. You can’t tell whether a slow quarter was actually slow or whether revenue just wasn’t recorded. You end up making decisions based on your bank balance instead of your actual numbers.
The other problem is that backlogs grow. Six months behind becomes a year. A year becomes two. The longer it sits, the harder it gets to reconstruct what happened. Memory fades, vendors change, records get lost, and the clean version of the answer gets more expensive to recover.
Tax Season Pressure
Tax Season Pressure
When April hits, your tax preparer needs organized records. If the books are a mess, they either charge a premium to sort it out or tell you to file an extension and come back when it’s clean. Catching up before tax time avoids both outcomes.
Financing and Due Diligence
Financing and Due Diligence
Banks, SBA lenders, and investors all want current financials. So does anyone looking to buy your business or partner with you. Without clean books, those conversations stall out before they start.
What Changes
Your books are current. Every account reconciled, every transaction categorized, every month closed. You can see what the business actually did during the backlog period. Which months were profitable. Where the money went. What your real margins look like. The guesswork is gone.
From there, you have options. Keep doing the books yourself with a clean starting point. Hand off the monthly work to us under Full-Service Bookkeeping. Either way, you’re no longer carrying the weight of a backlog that kept getting bigger.
Ready for Tax Filing
Ready for Tax Filing
Your CPA gets the organized records they need to file an accurate return. No scrambling, no extensions driven by missing data, no surprise bills for cleanup work done at tax-prep rates.
A Clean Foundation
A Clean Foundation
Catch-up work ends with a closed set of books. From that point forward, staying current is a manageable monthly task instead of a recurring crisis. The hard part is done, and the ongoing work is straightforward.
Pasadena's Small Business Bookkeeper
The Next Step:
A 15-Minute Call
Tell us where your books stand today. We'll ask a few questions, share how we can help, and give you a clear quote.