Catch-up bookkeeping cost, by months behind

Ledgerbrook sells catch-up bookkeeping, so its own prices are in here alongside the market’s. Every other figure links to the firm that published it.

What catching up costs, by how far behind you are

Catch-up means entering months that were never recorded: no transactions categorized, no accounts reconciled, sometimes nothing in the books at all. Almost every firm prices it by the number of months behind, so that is the number to know first.

Months behind	Published market range	Ledgerbrook
3	$300 to $1,500	$297
6	$500 to $1,500 (low volume)	$475
8	$1,500 to $3,000	$634
12	$1,500 to $3,000	$950 or less
24	$2,500 to $6,000	$1,901 or less

The market ranges are the published bands from OneBooks and Steph’s Books, read in September 2026, for a small file at the low end of their volume bands. Some firms charge a flat rate per month instead: SDO CPA publishes $320 a month of history.

Ledgerbrook’s figures are its $99 per month of backlog rate, with 20% off the whole job from 6 months. From 12 months the figure is a ceiling: longer backlogs are quoted individually at a deeper discount. The full firm-by-firm comparison, including cleanup prices, is in QuickBooks cleanup cost, compared.

What makes one file cost more than another

Months behind sets the starting point. Four things move it from there:

1. Transactions a month. Sixty card swipes and nine hundred are not the same work. When a firm publishes a range, the low end is a quiet file.
2. Accounts. Every bank, card, loan and merchant account is reconciled on its own for every month. Three accounts for a year is 36 reconciliations.
3. Payroll and inventory. Payroll run through a provider is easy to post from its reports. Payroll run by hand, or inventory counted once a year, takes longer.
4. Missing statements. If statements have to be requested from the bank or reconstructed, the work waits on them. It rarely costs more at a fixed-price firm, but it always takes longer. The same rebuild from statements is what an audit with missing records needs; audited with no receipts covers what the IRS accepts in their place.

What should not move the price is your revenue. A month of large payments is not harder to reconcile than a month of small ones.

A worked example: last year for the CPA, this year to date

A common shape in the fourth quarter: an S corporation whose owner has just set up QuickBooks Online and connected the bank, with nothing categorized or reconciled. The tax preparer needs a closed 2025 to work from. 2026 has to be brought current too, but it is not the urgent part.

That is two backlogs, and it is worth pricing them separately so the urgent one can start first:

Part	Months	Ledgerbrook
2025, for the return	12	$950 or less
January to October 2026	10	$792

Both parts are past 6 months, so each carries the 20% discount. The 2025 figure is a ceiling, because 12 months is where longer backlogs are quoted individually.

Three things about the order:

• The prior year goes first. Its December 31 balances are the opening balances for 2026, so the current year cannot be finished until the prior one is.
• A newly connected bank feed may not reach back through 2025. Banks allow anywhere from 90 days to 24 months of history at connection, so any months it misses come from statements downloaded from the bank’s portal. Having them ready on day one is what keeps the timeline short.
• The P&L is not a separate job. Once every account reconciles, the profit and loss and balance sheet are reports the file produces. What a preparer can rely on is the reconciliation behind them, which is why a P&L produced from an unreconciled feed tends to come back with questions.

At Ledgerbrook the per-month rate is the whole price for a file that already exists in QuickBooks Online: categorizing, reconciling, the owner questions and the closing trial balance are inside it. New File Setup, at $199, applies only when the QuickBooks company has to be created or rebuilt. To change the months, the cost calculator opens at a full year. For the timeline against a fixed date, see working back from a deadline.

Catch-up or cleanup?

They are often sold together, and they are different jobs. Catch-up enters months that were never done. Cleanup fixes months that were entered but are wrong: duplicates, miscategorized expenses, accounts that do not reconcile. Plenty of files need both, recent months cleaned up and older ones caught up. QuickBooks cleanup vs catch-up has the four checks that tell them apart. At Ledgerbrook both are the same rate, so the split changes what gets done, not what it costs.

If you are behind right now, do these first

1. Find the last month you can trust. In QuickBooks Online, open the reconciliation history for each bank account and note the last reconciled month. That is where the catch-up starts. If nothing was ever reconciled, it starts at the date the business opened or the start of the last tax year that was filed.

2. Download every statement from that month to today. Bank, credit card, loan, PayPal, Stripe, Square, payroll provider. Statements are the slow part of every catch-up, and having them on day one is the single biggest thing you can do to shorten it.

3. Check your tax deadlines. If a return is due before the books can be finished, ask your tax preparer about an extension. An extension gives more time to file, not to pay, and the IRS failure-to-file penalty is 5% of the unpaid tax for each month late, up to 25%. Filing late on rough numbers and amending later is a decision for your preparer, not your bookkeeper. A lender waiting on a year-to-date P&L for a loan is the same kind of deadline.

4. Stop the gap from growing. Keep business and personal spending on separate cards from today. Every mixed transaction in the backlog is a question someone has to ask you.

5. Get the months counted before anyone quotes. A fixed price needs a month count. Ask any firm to tell you how many months are in scope, in writing, before they price it.

Doing it yourself instead

A catch-up is realistic to do yourself if the file is a few months behind, has one or two accounts, and you are comfortable reconciling in QuickBooks. Budget a few hours per month behind, more for busy months. The steps are the same ones a bookkeeper follows: import the bank feed for the missing period, categorize, match transfers between your own accounts, then reconcile each account to each statement, oldest month first. How to reconcile in QuickBooks Online walks through the reconciliation.

It is usually not worth doing yourself past six months, or once payroll, sales tax or inventory are in the file. Those are the months where a mistake carries into a tax return.

Common questions about catch-up cost

Is $2,500 a fair price to catch up a year of bookkeeping?

For a small file, yes. It sits inside the published $1,500 to $3,000 band for 12 months, and below SDO CPA’s $3,840 for the same year at $320 a month. What decides whether it is fair is what the figure covers. Ask whether every account is reconciled to its statement for every month, whether it is a fixed price or an estimate, and whether payroll corrections or sales tax are excluded. A $2,500 quote that only categorizes the bank feed is a different job from one that hands back a reconciled year. At Ledgerbrook a year is $950 or less, reconciled, with the closing trial balance.

Can ChatGPT or AI do catch-up bookkeeping?

Not on its own. Catch-up starts with months that have no records in QuickBooks, so the first job is getting statements out of the bank, and no AI tool can download a statement from a portal it has no login for. Once the transactions are in, the categorizing assistant built into QuickBooks Online and a chat tool can both suggest categories quickly. What they cannot do is tell a loan from an owner contribution, answer the questions only the owner can, or prove a month reconciles to its statement. Use AI to speed up categorizing. A person still has to reconcile and sign off the year.

How long it takes

Firms that publish a timeline quote two to four weeks for a year behind. At Ledgerbrook a typical small-business year takes 5 business days, counted from the day every statement is in hand. How long catch-up bookkeeping takes breaks down where the days go.

Not falling behind again

Most files fall behind for the same reason: bookkeeping is the task that can always wait a week. Three things stop it:

• A fixed monthly date. Reconcile every account by the same business day each month, or have someone do it for you.
• One bank feed per account, connected. Gaps in the feed are where months go missing.
• Monthly bookkeeping after the catch-up. Ledgerbrook’s monthly close is $99 a month for most small businesses, closed by the 5th business day. Outsourced bookkeeping for small business explains how it works.

If you are not sure how far behind you are, send the file for a free review. Within 48 hours you get the month count, which months need catch-up and which need cleanup, and the fixed price, in writing, whether or not you hire us.