QuickBooks cleanup

How much does QuickBooks cleanup cost?

Cleanup is priced per month of backlog at $199 , so a file with four wrong months costs less than one with fourteen. Most client files that come to us need three to eight months fixed instead of a full year, and the file review gives you the exact count before we quote anything.

What a cleanup usually looks like

These four turn up in almost every file we're asked to fix. None of them means the client was careless. QuickBooks makes it genuinely easy to fall behind on this kind of upkeep while somebody is busy running a business.

Any one of these throws off the profit and loss. Together, they're usually why a tax preparer or a lender is asking questions the file can't answer yet.

Can a bookkeeper fix books my last bookkeeper got wrong?

Yes, and it's most of what cleanup work is. We don't need to know why the last bookkeeper miscategorized a year of transactions, only what the right categories are, and QuickBooks keeps enough history to reconstruct that from the bank feed and the client's source documents. A messy handoff is the normal starting point here, not the exception.

What if the chart of accounts itself is wrong?

This comes up in most cleanups, not a minority of them. A chart of accounts built by whoever set up the file three owners ago tends to accumulate accounts nobody uses, duplicates of accounts that already exist under a different name, and categories too broad to tell a lender or a tax preparer anything useful. We won't rebuild it from scratch by default, since that risks breaking prior-year comparisons. What we do is merge the obvious duplicates, retire unused accounts and split anything too broad to be useful, then document every change against the month it affected.

If the client's industry has standard categories a lender or franchisor expects to see, say cost of goods sold broken out by type, we map to that structure as part of the same engagement instead of pricing it as a separate project.

Who this is for

Client files that are active in QuickBooks Online, have some months in bad shape, and a reason to need them fixed soon: a filing deadline, a loan application, a reviewer who has stopped accepting the file as it is. If you're not sure whether a file is a cleanup or something smaller, we'll answer that in writing before quoting any price.

It's not the right fit if the file has no bank feed connected at all and every transaction has to be entered from paper records. That's catch-up work, priced differently because the labor genuinely is different. It's also not the right fit if the client is still on QuickBooks Desktop, which starts with a migration instead.

What's included

Every cleanup engagement covers the same ground, regardless of how many months are in scope:

• Every flagged month re-categorized to the file's actual chart of accounts rather than a generic template, with draws, owner contributions and loan paydowns booked where they belong instead of into expenses.
• Bank and credit card accounts reconciled to the statement balance for each month in scope, with the reconciliation report saved against that month.
• Duplicate transactions removed, keeping the version that matches the bank feed and deleting the manual copy instead of just hiding it.
• A written summary of what was wrong and what changed, month by month, so your firm and the client's tax preparer both know what moved and why.

What does a bookkeeper need to start a cleanup?

Three things get a cleanup moving on day one: accountant-level access to the client's QuickBooks company, read access to the bank and credit card accounts feeding it, and answers to a short list of questions about anything unusual we find: a large deposit, a loan, a related-party transaction. Those come back to your firm as one batch, and most take the client under twenty minutes once the flagged list is in front of them.

Nobody hands over the master admin role, billing, or the ability to delete the company file. An accountant user is enough to categorize, reconcile and run reports, and it's revoked from the client's own user list, by you or by them, without asking us.

Turnaround

Most cleanups are clean and current within 10 business days of access being granted and the answers to the flagged-item list coming back. Files with a long list of unusual transactions to research can run longer, so we give you a specific day count for that file, not a generic range, before you commit to anything.

What happens on day one

An accountant-user invite request goes out the same day you agree to the engagement. Once it's accepted, we pull every transaction in the months you've asked us to fix and sort it into three piles: clearly right, clearly wrong, and needs a question answered. You get the third pile, usually a handful of items, within 48 hours. That way the clock is never quietly running on a cleanup that's waiting on us.

How you'll know it's actually done

Each flagged month closes the same way, reviewed and corrected and reconciled to the statement balance, with a running total of what's still open. So "done" is a number that reaches zero for your reviewer, not a status update:

We update that count as work closes instead of sending one report at the very end, so you can watch the backlog actually shrink during the engagement instead of taking our word for it afterwards.

If this isn't quite the file

If entire months are missing rather than wrong, that's catch-up bookkeeping, not cleanup, and the free file review tells you which. Once the file is clean it can go straight onto a monthly close under your firm's name, or be delivered once a year as a handoff pack. Every price on this page and every other offer is on the pricing page.