SERVICES / CATCH-UP BOOKKEEPING
Catch-up bookkeepingMonths behind is normal.
It's also fixable.
Being nine months behind on your books is a scheduling problem, not a character flaw. It happens to good businesses run by capable people, usually because the business got busy. There is no lecture attached to fixing it.
Why it happens,
and why it compounds
Almost nobody falls behind deliberately. It starts with one month skipped during a busy period, then the next month has two months of work in it, so it gets skipped too. By month four the task looks large enough to avoid entirely.
What makes it worse is that the cost of being behind is invisible day to day. Nothing breaks immediately. The business keeps trading, invoices keep going out, money keeps moving. The consequences arrive later and all at once.
Then a deadline appears. A tax filing, a loan application, a lease, an investor, a buyer. Suddenly the books need to exist by a date, and a year of reconstruction has to happen in three weeks under pressure — which is the most expensive and least accurate way to do it.
There is also a quieter cost. Every month you operate without current numbers is a month of decisions made on instinct. Pricing, hiring, spending. None of those decisions get revisited when the books finally catch up.
The good news is that catch-up work is well-defined. It has a scope, a price and an end date, and once it is done you are simply current.
Signs you need catch-up
- More than two months since your books were closed
- A tax deadline approaching with nothing prepared
- A lender or buyer asking for financials you cannot produce
- Bank accounts that have not been reconciled this year
- A bookkeeper who left mid-year and was never replaced
- Genuine uncertainty about whether the business is profitable
From $200 per month behind · Quoted before we start
What catch-up
work involves
A defined project with a scope, a fixed price and a completion date.
Records gathered
Bank statements, card statements, invoices and receipts collected and organised for every missing period.
Full reconciliation
Every account reconciled month by month so each period actually ties out rather than approximately balancing.
Transactions categorised
Every transaction coded correctly, with a chart of accounts rebuilt if the existing one does not fit.
Statements produced
Monthly profit and loss and balance sheet for every period, so you can see how the year actually went.
Issues flagged
Anything that looks wrong gets raised with you rather than quietly recorded and forgotten.
Clean handover
You finish with current books, ready for tax filing and ready for monthly bookkeeping if you want it.
From behind
to current
Free assessment
We look at what exists, how far back it goes and how usable the records are. Then we quote a fixed price.
Records gathered
We tell you exactly what we need. Usually bank and card statements plus access to whatever software exists.
The work
Reconciliation and categorisation, month by month, oldest first. Typically two to four weeks.
Review together
We walk you through what the catch-up revealed. There are usually surprises, and some of them are good.
What being current
actually gets you
The first thing is relief, and that is not a small thing. The background awareness of an unfinished job that grows every month is genuinely draining, and it disappears the day the books are current.
The second is a real picture of the year. Most people who catch up discover something they did not know — a service line that is more profitable than assumed, an expense that crept up, a customer who never paid. None of that was visible before.
The third is that tax becomes manageable. A clean set of books means the return is prepared from records rather than reconstructed from memory, which is both cheaper and considerably less likely to contain errors.
And you have the option of staying current. Most catch-up clients move onto monthly bookkeeping afterwards, because having done the work once, nobody wants to be here again. But there is no obligation — plenty of people catch up and stop there.
BOOK A FREE CALLEvery client gets
- Replies within 48 hours, guaranteed
- Books closed by the 15th, every month
- Flat monthly pricing, no hourly billing
- A plain-English summary with every report
- The same team every single month
- Cancel any time, files handed over cleanly
Catch-up bookkeeping questions
There is no such thing. We have taken on books that had not been touched in three years. Beyond twelve months we quote custom rather than per month, because the work stops being linear, but it is always doable.
$200 per month behind for standard books, $300 for more complex situations, custom quote beyond twelve months. Six months behind is around $1,200. You get the number before any work starts.
Two to four weeks for most cases. Longer if records are missing or if we are reconstructing from bank statements alone. We give you a completion date before starting rather than a vague estimate.
Common, and mostly workable. Bank and card statements carry most of what is needed. Missing documentation for specific deductions may limit what can be claimed, and we will tell you clearly where that applies.
No. Catch-up is a standalone project. Plenty of people get current, take the books back and handle it themselves or with someone else. There is no bundling and no pressure.
We work for you. What we find is between us, and how you handle it with anyone else is your decision entirely.
Get a fixed price
for catching up
Thirty minutes, no judgement. Tell us how far behind you are, we will look at what exists, and quote you a fixed price to get current.
BOOK YOUR FREE CALL