Cleanup and catch-up
We take books that are behind, wrong, or both, and bring them to a state your accountant, your bank and your tax filer will all accept.
PRICED BY THE HOUR
$25 to $40
Scoped on a free call and quoted before any work begins. One-off, never folded into a monthly fee.
Book a free 30-min callYou are probably here because one of these is true.
Which version you need.
Cleanup is not one job. The right one depends on how far back it goes and how much of the record survives. We work this out on the call, before quoting.
Tidy-up
- Miscoding corrected
- Duplicates removed
- Bank and card reconciled
Usually days, not weeks
Full-year catch-up
- Everything in tidy-up
- Every balance sheet account reconciled
- Suspense and stale entries cleared
- Receivables and payables cleaned
- Brought to CPA-ready standard
Typically a few weeks
Reconstruction
- Everything in full-year catch-up
- Bank statements rebuilt from feeds
- Inter-company balances eliminated
- What broke the books, named
- The process changes that stop it recurring
Scoped on the call
What is in, and what is not.
Included in every cleanup
- Transaction categorisation and recoding to the correct accounts
- Bank, credit card and full balance sheet reconciliation
- Duplicate identification and removal
- Suspense account clearing and stale entry write-off
- Receivables cleanup: bad debt, stale invoices
- Payables cleanup: old vendor credits, duplicate bills
- A query file for anything we cannot resolve without you
- A note on what caused the problem, so it does not recur
Not included
- Filing income tax. That stays with your practitioner. We hand them clean books
- Ongoing monthly bookkeeping. That is a separate engagement, and most clients start it after
- An audit or a forensic investigation. This is a cleanup, and we will say so if it needs to become something else
- Decisions about how to treat a material prior year error. We find it, quantify it and recommend. You decide
Five stages, and you know where you are at each one.
Nothing is force-fitted. Anything we cannot tie to a document goes on a query file we work through with you rather than guessing.
What you have at the end.
Named artefacts, not adjectives. Everything below is something you can open, forward or hand to a third party.
WHO DOES THIS WORK
A named senior accountant
ACCA-qualified · Bookkeeping department · Reviewed by Quality Assurance
Cleanup runs out of the bookkeeping department, which is headed by an ACCA-qualified senior accountant, and every deliverable is checked by quality assurance before it leaves. Three layers work each engagement, so cover holds if someone is away. You get the name of the senior accountant who owns yours on the first day, not a shared inbox.
$25 to $40 an hour, scoped before we start.
We will not put a fixed number on this page. Cleanup varies more than any other service we sell, and a floor price you then exceed is worse than no price at all.
Price your ongoing bookkeeping insteadQuestions we get asked.
Onboarding takes 5 to 10 business days. Before we take your books forward we review what came before, because we cannot stand behind this year if last year is wrong. If there is a backlog to clear, we scope it on the call so you know the timeline before you commit.
You hear it from us first, with the size of it quantified rather than described. If it changes the scope we agreed, we stop and re-quote before continuing. We would rather have an awkward call in week two than a surprise invoice in week six.
They go on a query file that we work through with you, rather than force-fitting them into an account to make the numbers balance. Businesses often carry issues from prior years that nobody remembers the reason for. That is normal, and it is why the review comes first.
No. Income tax is best filed by a practitioner in your own country who knows the local law. We keep your books ready for them, and the year-end pack is quoted separately when you need it.
Every deliverable passes four levels of review before it reaches you: a junior self-check against source documents, a mid-level review of categorisation and reconciliation, a senior sign-off, then an independent QA check. We do not claim error-free work. We claim errors are caught before delivery, and reported when they are not.
No. You get a clean QuickBooks or Xero file and we brief whoever takes over. Your books belong to you. Most clients do carry on, but the cleanup is a complete job on its own.
More on cleanup, if you want it.
Case studies are anonymised and figures are banded. Nothing here identifies a client.