Catch-up bookkeeping for US 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 IRS. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside bookkeeping & accounting more broadly, that stays with your CPA or enrolled 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 receipts or invoices, and the documentation gap memo we hand off will say so plainly for the older months.

They get recorded from the bank or card statement with the amount, date, and payee as shown, and flagged as unsubstantiated rather than assigned a confident category. Every gap gets flagged rather than filled with a plausible-looking entry — the flag goes to you or your CPA to resolve.

It can surface things a prior return missed — an unrecorded 1099-NEC vendor, a miscategorized expense, income that was never booked. Whether that means an amended return is a determination for your CPA, made from the ledger we hand off clean.

Yes, but the bar for diligence is higher than the bar for a tax filing — investors and lenders typically 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 941s were already filed by your payroll provider, so those figures are treated as the record of truth. Catch-up reconciles the general ledger’s wage, tax, and liability accounts to match what was actually filed, rather than recalculating payroll independently.

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 month against its actual statement, not an estimated balance.

Most recent first, working backward. Recent months still have live context — current vendor relationships, recent memory of what a charge was for — and if there’s a filing deadline, the tax-year months take priority over older ones that don’t affect the return that’s due.

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

Every account reconciles to its statement ending balance for every month in the gap — that’s the test, not a subjective sense that things look right. If a month doesn’t reconcile, it isn’t marked closed, and it shows up in the handoff memo as open.

It depends on how many months 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.