Months behind. Maybe years. We can fix that.

The bookkeeper left. A part-time bookkeeper, an office manager, a family member who “did the books” — they leave, and the routine leaves with them. Nobody else knows the bank rules or where the receipts go, so the safest thing is to touch nothing. The gap starts the month after the handover that never happened.

The owner was the bookkeeper. It worked at the start. Then the business grew, and bookkeeping became the one job that could be pushed to next week without a customer noticing. Weeks of next week add up to a quarter, and a quarter is where the dread sets in.

A software or bank change broke the routine. A move to QuickBooks with the history never finished. A new bank account whose feed was never connected. A feed that disconnected in a browser update and silently stopped pulling. Everything after that point exists at the bank and nowhere else.

Payroll or sales tax got complicated. A second state, a new payroll provider, a marketplace that started collecting tax on some sales and not others. The hard part stalled, and because the hard part was blocking, the easy part — plain bank entry — stalled with it.

Something happened. An illness, a family emergency, a move, a bad year. The books were the first thing dropped and the last thing anyone wanted to look at afterwards. This is the most common story we hear, and it is not a character flaw.

The return was the only deadline. Many small businesses do the books once a year, for the tax preparer. Between returns, nothing is entered; each spring is an annual catch-up. It works until a lender, a buyer, or a mid-year decision needs current numbers, and there aren’t any.

The last catch-up never became a routine. Books caught up once, then behind again, because the way they were being kept didn’t change. This is why the engagement ends with a transition rather than a handoff — the point of the last section on this page.

Most catch-ups take two to ten weeks. A three-to-six-month backlog typically clears in two to three weeks; twelve to twenty-four months in four to six; a multi-year backlog in eight to ten. The timeline is fixed in the written scope, and it moves with three things: the number of months, the number of accounts that have to be reconciled through them, and how quickly the statements can be retrieved — a closed bank account or a payroll provider you no longer use can add more calendar time than the entry itself.

Cost moves with a different variable. Catch-up is priced per month of backlog, so the months set the base; what moves the rate is what has to be verified inside each month. A business with one bank account and no payroll sits at the bottom of the band. Payroll adds liabilities that must tie to filed returns. Sales tax adds accruals, and a second state adds a second set of them. Inventory adds cost-of-goods work. A second entity adds a second set of books. None of it is hourly, and none of it is guessed: the diagnostic counts it, and the fee in the scope is the fee.

A catch-up that ends with “you’re current” and nothing else has a predictable future: the cause that produced the backlog produces the next one. So the engagement ends by changing how the books are kept. Bank rules are configured from the categorization decisions made during the catch-up, so next month’s transactions land where the caught-up months did. The close gets a checklist — statements in, feeds matched, each account reconciled, the month locked. And the first monthly close after the catch-up is run as a check on the catch-up itself: if that month reconciles cleanly from the baseline we delivered, the baseline was right.

From there you choose. The same operator continues on monthly bookkeeping, with the file context already in hand. Or you take the file, the rules and the checklist to your own accountant, or back in-house, with the same routine written down. Both are fine. There is no lock-in, and the point is that you never need this page again.