Catch-up bookkeeping for Australian businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

No — catch-up bookkeeping is operational work inside your books, not something submitted to ATO. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside bookkeeping & accounting more broadly, that stays with your registered BAS or tax agent, never with us.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for catch-up bookkeeping — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

Catch-up bookkeeping sits inside bookkeeping & accounting, alongside Monthly bookkeeping, Month-end close, Bank reconciliation. Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

There’s no fixed ceiling, but reliability drops as the gap grows. Twelve to eighteen months is routine. Multi-year gaps are done regularly too, but the further back you go, the more the rebuild depends on bank and card statements alone rather than tax invoices, and the documentation gap memo we hand off will say so plainly for the older periods.

They get recorded from the bank or card statement with the amount, date, and payee as shown, and flagged as GST-status unconfirmed rather than assigned a tax code we’re guessing at. Assigning a GST code without evidence is a BAS determination, so that flag goes to your registered BAS or tax agent to resolve.

It can surface things a prior period missed — an unreconciled super guarantee shortfall, a miscoded expense, income that was never booked. Whether that means an amended BAS or a revised return is a call for your registered agent, made from the ledger we hand off clean.

Yes, but the bar for lender or investor diligence is higher than the bar for a BAS lodgment — most expect twelve to twenty-four months of monthly, reconciled financials, not an annual summary. Say up front that diligence is the goal so the rebuild is scoped to that standard from the start.

Your wages, PAYG withholding, and super liability were already reported to the ATO pay-run by pay-run through Single Touch Payroll, so that data is treated as the record of truth. Catch-up reconciles the general ledger’s payroll accounts to match what STP already reported, rather than recalculating payroll independently.

It surfaces them — we reconcile what payroll software accrued each quarter against what was actually paid into each employee’s fund and flag any gap. Whether that gap needs an SGC statement, and how it’s assessed, is a determination for your registered BAS or tax agent, based on the reconciliation we surface for them.

Ideally yes, but it’s not a hard prerequisite — we can start with what you have and request missing statements from your bank in parallel. We always reconcile a period against its actual statement, not an estimated balance.

Most recent first, working backward. Recent periods still have live context — current supplier relationships, recent memory of what a charge was for — and if there’s a BAS deadline close by, the periods that affect that lodgment take priority over older ones that don’t.

We rebuild it directly from the bank and credit-card statements for that period and mark it in the handoff memo as bank-only reconstruction, since it will carry less GST coding detail than periods where an export or tax invoices survived.

It depends on how many periods are in the gap and how much documentation exists, which is exactly what a scoping call establishes before either of us commits to a timeline — we’d rather size the gap honestly and commit to a date we know we can hold to.