Books behind, brought current before anything else starts
Why the clean-up comes first
A monthly rhythm laid on top of books that are months behind produces a tidy current month sitting on an unreliable history. The opening balances are wrong, so every comparison is wrong, and the first report anyone reads has a number in it that nobody can defend.
So the order is fixed: the books are brought to a state where a monthly cycle can start, and only then does the monthly cycle start.
The read-only look
Before anything is quoted, we look at the file in read-only. The access needed is view-only, and the file is left exactly as it stands. What that look establishes is short and specific:
- How far back the last reconciliation actually goes, per account, rather than what the file's dates suggest.
- Whether the bank feed has duplicated, skipped, or re-dated transactions, and roughly how many.
- What sits in the undeposited-funds and suspense-style accounts, and how old it is.
- Whether payroll has been recorded consistently, and whether it agrees with the provider's reports.
- Whether the chart of accounts still matches the business, or has grown accounts that duplicate each other.
- What the accountant's last year-end adjustments were, and whether they were ever entered.
That look is where the quote comes from. The clean-up is a one-time fee in a published range, set by the state of the books rather than by the calendar, and it is quoted before any work begins. A quote given without looking would be a guess with a number attached.
What the clean-up does
Working backwards from today, each month is reconciled to the statement, transactions are categorized, and the exceptions are listed. Anything genuinely undecidable — a transfer with no counterpart, a deposit nobody recognises, an expense that could belong to two jobs — is collected into one list and asked about once, rather than guessed at. A guess entered into a ledger stops looking like a guess within a week, which is exactly the problem the clean-up exists to undo.
Where your accountant's year-end adjustments were never entered, they are entered, and the year that follows is rebuilt on top of a closing balance everybody agrees on.
At the end you have a date. Before it, the books are historical and your accountant's year-end stands. After it, they are current — and keeping them there is what the monthly cycle does, which is a separate piece of work that starts from that date.
Questions we are asked
How far back does a clean-up usually go?
To the last point where the books and the bank genuinely agreed. Often that is the last year-end your accountant signed off, sometimes it is further back. The read-only look establishes which, and that answer sets the scope and the quote.
When does the monthly work start?
The clean-up is looked at and quoted first, and the monthly cycle starts once the books can carry it. That order is the point of the section above: a tidy current month sitting on an unreliable history produces a report nobody can defend. Where the backlog is long, the quote names which months are being rebuilt and which month will be the first current one, so you know the date before the work begins.
Will our accountant have to redo their year-end?
That is their call, and the package we produce gives them what they need to make it. Where the clean-up finds something that changes a filed year, it goes to them with the detail behind it rather than being corrected quietly in the file.
What does it cost?
The clean-up range is published on the plans section of the home page, and the exact figure is quoted after the read-only look, before anything monthly starts.
One next step
A fifteen-minute call about your month, at no cost. Ask for a call.