Cleanup bookkeeping for books you can’t trust

Cleanup bookkeeping audits books that already exist and fixes what’s wrong in them: accounts that don’t reconcile, transactions entered twice, and income or expenses sitting in the wrong categories. When it’s done, every balance ties back to a statement and the reports mean something again.

The books are there. Somebody has been entering things, maybe you, maybe a past bookkeeper, maybe the bank feed on autopilot. The trouble is that the numbers don’t line up with the bank, and you’ve stopped believing the profit and loss. Here’s what cleanup fixes, the signs you need it, how the work runs, and how it differs from catch-up.

What cleanup bookkeeping fixes

• Unreconciled accounts. Bank and credit card accounts whose balances in the books don’t match the statements.
• Duplicate transactions. The same deposit or expense recorded twice, often once by hand and once from the bank feed.
• Wrong categories. Income, expenses, loans, and owner money sitting in accounts where they don’t belong, which throws off the profit and loss.

Finding the problems is the part I’m best at. I started my career in quality assurance, and the habit stuck. A cleanup is me trying to break your books on purpose until I find every place they don’t hold up, then fixing each one.

Signs your books need cleanup

• The bank balance in your books doesn’t match the bank.
• Your profit and loss shows income that you know includes loans, transfers, or money you put in yourself.
• You see the same transaction twice, or a month that looks far too good or far too bad.
• Your CPA sends questions every year that nobody can answer from the books.

How a cleanup runs

1. I review everything back to the last point where the books can be trusted.
2. I fix what’s miscategorized, remove duplicates, and track down the transactions that never made it in.
3. I reconcile every account forward to today, statement by statement.
4. Where the structure itself is the problem, I rebuild it, starting with a chart of accounts that fits a cleaning company.
5. You get corrected reports and a plain list of what changed and why.

Most of what I find is predictable. Every cleanup turns up a few skeletons in the closet. For house cleaners, they’re usually around tips. None of it is unusual, and none of it is a reason to be embarrassed.

If the file itself was set up wrong from the start, part of the cleanup may be a QuickBooks Online rebuild and training so the same problems don’t come back.

Cleanup or catch-up?

Cleanup fixes entries that exist but are wrong. Catch-up bookkeeping fills in months where nothing was entered at all. If your books have both problems, I handle them in the same engagement, and the order depends on what I find.

After the cleanup

Clean books stay clean when somebody keeps them that way every month. That’s monthly bookkeeping, with reports split by residential and commercial work so you can see which jobs actually pay.