How long catch-up bookkeeping takes (2026)

What other firms publish

These are the timelines firms put on their own pages, read on September 24, 2026. They are not directly comparable, because each firm draws its bands differently, but they agree on the shape: a year behind is measured in weeks.

Firm	A few months behind	About a year behind	More than a year
Certum Solutions	1 to 2 weeks (1 to 3 months)	2 to 4 weeks (3 to 12 months)	4 to 8 weeks
Steph’s Books	1 to 2 weeks (3 to 6 months)	2 to 3 weeks (6 to 12 months)	3 to 5 weeks (1 to 2 years)
OneBooks	Several weeks	Several weeks (7 to 12 months)	1 to 2 months (1 to 2 years)
Ledgerbrook Get a free file review	Under 5 business days	5 business days	About 5 business days per year

Ledgerbrook’s clock starts when accountant access and every statement in scope are in hand. Most published timelines do not say when theirs starts, and that difference matters more than any number in the table.

Where the days actually go

A catch-up has five parts. Two of them are waiting on someone else.

1. Getting the statements. Every bank, card and loan account, every month in scope. The QuickBooks bank feed reaches back only as far as the bank allows, from 90 days to 24 months, so anything older comes from the bank’s own portal, and some banks keep less history online than others. A statement older than the portal allows is an archive request, which is a fee and a wait of days or weeks.
2. Entering and categorizing. For a typical small business, a few hours per month of backlog. Bank rules set up on day one do much of the repetitive work.
3. Reconciling. Each account, each month, to the statement’s ending balance.
4. Questions for the owner. A large deposit nobody recognizes, a transfer to a personal account, a loan that appears once. These come back as one list, and the file waits until they are answered.
5. Review and tie-out. Balance sheet to statements, holding accounts to zero, a closing trial balance.

Parts 1 and 4 are outside the bookkeeper’s control, and they are where most catch-ups lose their weeks. A timeline that starts on the day you sign, not the day the statements arrive, is mostly measuring how fast you can collect paperwork.

Why a year takes 5 business days at Ledgerbrook

Four things, all of them structural.

The months run in parallel. A bank statement carries its own opening and closing balance, so a month can be entered and reconciled against its statement without waiting for the month before it to be finished. The final tie-out still runs in date order. The entry does not have to.

One person does the whole file. No handoff from a preparer to a reviewer’s queue, no ticket waiting for someone in another time zone to pick it up. The same practitioner who entered a month is the one who knows why it looks the way it does.

QuickBooks Online is the only platform. 5+ years in the one piece of software means no time spent relearning where a report lives or how to undo a reconciliation.

Questions go out early. Anything that needs the owner’s answer is flagged within 48 hours of access, in one batch, instead of trickling out as it is found. The clock does not quietly run while a question sits in someone’s inbox.

What makes a year take longer

The five-day figure is for a typical small-business year. These push a file past it, and the free file review says so, with a specific day count, before any work starts:

• Statements that are not online yet. The clock starts when they arrive, so an archive request adds its own wait in front.
• Unanswered questions. If the flagged list comes back in a week, the file finishes a week later.
• Much higher volume. Thousands of transactions a month, several entities, or a sales platform settling hundreds of payouts.
• Payroll run inside QuickBooks with errors in it. Correcting payroll liabilities takes longer than categorizing expenses.
• A filed return on the old numbers. Whether to amend is a decision for the tax preparer, and the work waits for it.

For more than a year behind, the pace holds: about 5 business days per year of backlog, so two years is about ten.

How to shorten it yourself

Most of the time on a catch-up is time spent waiting for documents. Gather these before anyone starts and the timeline is mostly the work itself:

• Statements for every bank, card and loan account, for every month in scope, as PDFs
• Payroll reports from your provider for the same months
• Payout reports from Stripe, Square, Shopify or whichever platform takes your sales
• Loan agreements for anything borrowed in the period
• A short note on anything unusual: an owner contribution, a vehicle bought, an account opened or closed

The same list as a spreadsheet a client can fill in: download the document request list (Excel).

If you are also unsure whether the file needs correcting or entering from scratch, cleanup and catch-up are different jobs and the order matters. For what the work costs at each firm above, see what QuickBooks cleanup costs. Catch-up bookkeeping has the scope and the rate, and three illustrative files set months behind against business days to fix.