Guide
The catch-up bookkeeping playbook
Every cleanup starts the same way: a business hands you 18 months of neglected books, you connect the bank feed, and it cheerfully back-fills about 90 days. The other 15 months live in PDF bank and credit-card statements. How you handle that stack determines whether the engagement is profitable or a death march.
Step 1 — Scope before you quote
Count accounts × months × statement density — a landscaping company's checking account is not a restaurant's. Ask for the last statement of each account up front: page count and transaction volume tell you more than the client's memory. Price the rebuild and the verification as separate line items; the second is where your professional value lives.
Step 2 — Collect the statements (the real bottleneck)
Get PDFs straight from the bank portal where possible — one multi-month download beats twelve emails. Accept scans if that's what exists; note which months are missing in writing and make the client chase them. A cleanup without complete statements isn't a cleanup — it's an estimate.
Step 3 — Get transactions into the books without manual data entry
For the ~90 feed-covered days, use the feed. For everything older, the usual approaches:
- Manual data entry. Accurate if you're careful; ruinously slow — a 300-transaction month is an evening.
- Generic converters. Turn PDFs into CSVs fast, but you inherit the cleanup of their output and still have no idea whether the import is complete.
What we'd do
Extract with the completeness check built in. MatchLedger reads each statement (including scans), extracts every line, and proves nothing is missing against the statement's own opening and closing balances — so you import a month you already know is whole, instead of importing first and hunting for gaps later.
Whatever you use: work oldest month first, one account at a time, and don't move forward until the month ties out.
Step 4 — Verify every month ties out
The discipline that separates a rebuild from a liability: for each month, opening balance + activity = closing balance, matched to the statement. If a month doesn't tie, stop — the error compounds into every later month. This per-month tie-out is MatchLedger's balance verification; done by hand, it's the highlighter ritual.
Step 5 — Close it out like an engagement, not a favor
- Per-account, per-month reconciliation summaries
- A written list of unresolved items (missing statements, uncategorizable transactions) with the client's sign-off
- Feed connections plus a monthly cadence going forward — and a standing feed audit so a silent gap can't rebuild itself — so you never do this for the same client twice
What a cleanup really costs (and why tooling changes the math)
The unit of work is the statement-month. Manual data entry can easily run hours each. Extraction with verification takes minutes each, with your time shifting to review and categorization — which is the part the client is actually paying your judgment for.
Common questions
How far back can bank feeds pull?
Typically ~90 days; beyond that it's statements. See how to audit a bank feed for the related failure modes.
The client only has paper statements?
Scan them. Vision-based extraction handles scans — completeness matters more than scan quality.
QuickBooks can import PDFs now, right?
It can read some statement PDFs natively — small, digital, English-language, one at a time. A multi-month cleanup across several accounts is a different job — and reading a statement isn't the same as proving the books tie to it.
Keep reading
- How to audit your bank feed — the companion routine for the months a feed does cover, so the gap you just rebuilt doesn't quietly reopen behind you.
- Statement-first bookkeeping — the same argument generalised past cleanup work: why the statement, not the feed, should be the spine of the job every month.
- MatchLedger vs DocuClipper — how a pure converter compares on the Step 3 and Step 4 work above.
- Pricing — billed per set of books, so a one-off cleanup client doesn't have to sit on the same plan as your busiest one.
Run your next cleanup month through MatchLedger — 30-day trial, no credit card required.
Start Free