What is Clean up in bookkeeping?

Maximum clarity on the business’s health and leverage can be achieved by keeping a clean record of receipts, payments, credit card expenses, and financial statements. Catch up bookkeeping and bookkeeping clean up are used interchangeably to describe the process of getting your financial records organized and up-to-date. It’s like tidying up your business’s accounting mess, so that you can make better business decisions and keep operations running smoothly. The need to pay bookkeeping clean-up fees is, quite frankly, avoidable. If you know how to manage your books correctly from the start, that is.

Cleaning up your books also means catching any suspicious or unknown charges and handling them quickly. By cleaning up regularly, you’ll stay on top of the ins and outs of your money and anything unexpected will stand out as a red flag. Find and remove duplicates to get rid of unnecessary clutter and save your books from inaccuracies. If you struggle with disorganization in accounting, you need to know how to fix bad bookkeeping. When you’re having issues with Quickbooks, you must work with a professional right away to assist you with catch-up. Steph’s Books specializes in Quickbooks catch-up to help you get back on track as quickly as possible.

What to expect from Live Bookkeeping

This may involve reviewing the general ledger, reconciling bank statements, and ensuring that all transactions have been recorded correctly. The goal of clean-up is to bring the financial records into compliance with accounting standards and best practices. Common bookkeeping errors that can impact your taxes include incorrect expense categorization, unrecorded transactions, unreconciled accounts, and inaccurate revenue recognition. A common oversight we find during the Good-Bookkeeping Audit™process is the absence of business loan liabilities and related interest expenses on the Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss Report. When business owners setup their QuickBooks Online accounts, they are understandably focused on connecting accounts and setting up customers, products and services, and vendors. For this reason, liabilities and related interest expenses may be overlooked.

• Your accountant will focus on Accounts Receivable cleanup work as a first priority.
• These are important to gauge profitability and accurately assess budgets.
• Some companies prefer to open multiple accounts to organize department budgets or to use one account for income and another for vendor payments, for example.
• Not only will you pay less in clean up costs, but you can avoid penalties, maximize deductions, and make better financial decisions, making for a great return on your investment.
• First, the accountant must categorize all transactions from the catch-up period.

Some business owners will attempt to reconcile their bank and credit card accounts directly within their account registers. Others will reconcile accounts with manually entered transactions, leaving bank feed bookkeeping clean up transactions unmatched and outstanding in their bank feeds. Your accountant will undo some reconciliations, resolve reconciliation discrepancies and opening balances, then re-reconcile your accounts.

Run reports

Messy, incomplete, and inaccurate bookkeeping can lead to a slew of issues that cost more than just time. Bad bookkeeping can also lead to hefty IRS penalties and (gasp!) audits. It all depends on how long you have ignored your books, and how messy your records are. Generally speaking, you will probably pay between $5 and $20 per hour to get your books in order.

• You can easily customize the templates if the workflows don’t perfectly align with your processes.
• If your business has employees, you’ll need to file Form W-2.
• Your finance team will build a proper bookkeeping document checklist, reconcile accounts, and evaluate financial statements to ensure your business is on the right track.
• Clean up in bookkeeping is the process of reviewing and reconciling a company’s financial records to ensure accuracy and consistency.
• Accounting cleanup services can be seen as a monthly recon of your books, financial statements, and ledgers to ensure correspondence of the numbers and consistency throughout.

Moreover, all the canceled cheques must be present in the record as well. Our bookkeepers average 10 years of experience working with small businesses across a wide array of industries.2 They’re certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors, and many are CPAs. There are certain grave cases where catch up booking is crucial. For instance, the last-minute rush to be tax compliant and avoid penalties.

Financial Statement Review:

Still, every business is unique, and some may require more than one bookkeeping clean up, depending on their specific needs. It’s important to find a solution that works best for you to keep accurate books. A little catch up bookkeeping now can save you big bucks down the road. Not only will you pay less in clean up costs, but you can avoid penalties, maximize deductions, and make better financial decisions, making for a great return on your investment. If your answer is yes, it’s time to leverage our Financial Health Score – a powerful and free tool that catches 80% of your bookkeeping errors within just a few minutes.

Whether selling your business, managing cash shortfalls or planning growth, clean accounting records are worth the effort. Save your time and avoid bad decisions with outsourced accounting cleanup services. Account clean-up is an essential process, and it is good to do the clean-up of your books of accounts monthly than to rush at the end of the year.

Let Steph’s Books take bookkeeping off your hands. Forever.

To learn more about catch-up bookkeeping and other financial services, contact us today or sign up for our free trial. We support thousands of small businesses with their financial needs to help set them up for success. If you are working with an electronic file, you will need to download the information from the client’s financial institutions or wait for your client to send you PDFs each month.

Typically, we don’t need to WAIT for you to gather all of the information we need before we get started. It’s usually best for the bookkeeper to get started on your clean-up bookkeeping project and then let you know what information is a priority so you can get working on getting that secured. About 1.5-2 hours into that first block of time, https://www.bookstime.com/ our Bookkeeper or Accountant will have a more firm estimate of what it will take to get it done. It is still an estimate, though, as these projects are very difficult to predict. In evaluating a service you are likely to see flat-fees, hourly and a combination of both. It may help you understand WHY we moved to this 10-hour block model.