QuickBooks cleanup services

$99 per month of backlog, and nothing else: no project fee, no hourly overrun, no separate charge for the written summary. A file with four months that need correcting costs four times that figure; from 6 months, the whole job is 20% off. The free file review counts the months before any price is quoted, so the number your firm agrees to is the number it pays. Every firm that publishes a cleanup price is compared side by side.

Bookkeeping cleanup is correcting months that were entered in QuickBooks but entered wrong: miscategorized transactions, duplicates from the bank feed, accounts that no longer reconcile to the statement. It differs from catch-up, which is entering months that were never recorded at all. The two are priced here at the same rate but scoped separately, because the work is different.

Most client files that come to us need three to eight months fixed instead of a full year, and the free file review gives you the exact count before we quote anything. Cleanup is priced per month of backlog, so a file with four wrong months costs less than one with fourteen. There is no project fee sitting on top of the count.

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.

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.

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, the same rate but genuinely different labor, and telling the two apart takes four checks in the file. It's also not the right fit if the client is still on QuickBooks Desktop, which starts with a migration instead. If the historical data is hopelessly corrupted, see our guide on should you start a new QuickBooks file.

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.

A typical small-business year is clean and current within 5 business days of accountant access and every statement being in hand. 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. Other firms' published timelines are in how long catch-up bookkeeping takes.

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. The full order of work is written up as a nine-step checklist if you would rather run one yourself.

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: six open at the start of the engagement, two open at the midpoint with a few months still waiting on your answers, zero open when every flagged month is reconciled and signed off.

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. What a QuickBooks cleanup should include lists everything that comes back at the end, and how to check it.