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 writingand 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 hand-keying

For the ~90 feed-covered days, use the feed. For everything older you have three options:

1. Hand-key.Accurate if you're careful; ruinously slow — a 300-transaction month is an evening.
2. 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.
3. Extract and reconcile in one pass. MatchLedger reads each statement (including scans), extracts every line, and reconciles against what's already in QuickBooks or Xero — so the import and the completeness check happen together instead of as two jobs.

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 — 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. Hand-keying runs 2–4 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