Independent bookkeeping & advisory firm · Serving clients nationwide, remotely
A project-based cleanup that rebuilds accurate, reconciled, CPA-ready books from a messy state. Fixed fee, written scope, checked against TechBrot’s close standard before it reaches you. Single year, two or three bank accounts: 2–3 weeks. Multi-year, or with payroll, inventory or several entities: 6–10 weeks. Your written scope sets the date.
Accounting, cleanup, advisory — delivered by TechBrot, in your own QuickBooks® file.
What you can check before you sign
If your file needs our paid diagnostic first, its fee is credited in full against the cleanup. Either way, you get a fixed fee in writing before any work starts.
A bookkeeping cleanup fixes books that were recorded wrong, for a fixed fee of $1,200–$15,000+ against a written scope, typically 2–8 weeks. We reconcile each bank and credit-card account to source statements, investigate unmatched balances, document corrections and hand over a period-by-period exception register. Months never entered are catch-up, a separate engagement.
When accounts go unreconciled, each new period is built on the errors of the last. A miscategorization or unmatched transaction in January is carried into February’s opening balances; March compounds on February; and the gap between the books and the bank widens period over period. We call this compounding reconciliation drift — and it’s why a cleanup doesn’t just fix the latest month. It unwinds the accumulated drift, account by account and period by period, back to a reconciled baseline your CPA, lender, or buyer can rely on.
They took something that felt overwhelming to me as a first-year business owner and made it simple.
What stood out the most was TechBrot Inc’s attention to detail.
| Question | Bookkeeping cleanup |
|---|---|
| Scope | Fixes what was recorded wrong in the months or years already in the file: reconciliations that don’t tie, miscategorized and duplicate transactions, old undeposited funds and clearing-account balances, prior-period errors, and payroll and sales-tax entries that don’t match the filed returns. |
| What you provide | Accountant-user access to your QuickBooks file; bank and credit-card statements for every account and period in scope; payroll records and the payroll and sales-tax returns already filed; receipts and other source documents for transactions that are missing. |
| The steps | 1. Scoping call and a written fixed-fee scope, within 3 business days. 2. Reconciliation and correction, typically 2–6 weeks. 3. Corrected statements and review, typically 3–5 business days. 4. Handoff, then monthly bookkeeping or your own accountant. |
| An example | A first-year food & beverage business’s QuickBooks file: records reviewed and corrected, transactions reconciled, miscategorized entries fixed and the chart of accounts organized (the case, from the owner’s review on Clutch). |
| Not included | Months that were never entered (catch-up bookkeeping, a separate fixed fee); the monthly close after the cleanup (monthly bookkeeping, priced separately); tax returns and tax filing, which your CPA or EA does from the CPA-ready books. |
| Timeline | Single year, two or three bank accounts: 2–3 weeks. Multi-year, or with payroll, inventory or several entities: 6–10 weeks. Your written scope sets the date. |
| What “done” means | Every account reconciled to its statements for every period in scope; uncategorized items cleared; undeposited funds and clearing accounts at zero or documented as open items; payroll liabilities tied to the filed returns; corrected P&L, balance sheet and cash-flow statements; and a written record of every adjustment, reviewed against TechBrot’s written close standard. |
| Next step | Call or send the details. A 30-minute file review looks at your books, statements and payroll records, and the written fixed-fee scope follows within 3 business days, before any work begins. |
| When it isn’t the right service | Books that are correct but behind, with months never entered: catch-up bookkeeping. Books already current and reconciled: monthly bookkeeping. A file that needs both gets the cleanup first. |
QuickBooks file cleanup · Clearing undeposited funds · Catch-up bookkeeping · Send the details
The video’s narration in full, chapter by chapter — readable, searchable and quotable without watching.
A bookkeeping cleanup is a project-based engagement that rebuilds accurate financial records from a messy or unreconciled state. It covers categorization corrections, real bank and credit-card reconciliation, cleared undeposited funds, duplicate and missing transactions, prior-period errors, payroll and sales-tax verification, and financial statements you can actually file from. Messy books are common. They’re also fixable, and the work has a defined shape.
Cleanup, catch-up and monthly bookkeeping are three different engagements. Catch-up brings behind-but-structured books up to date — the transactions were never recorded at all. Cleanup corrects periods that were recorded wrongly. Monthly bookkeeping is the recurring work that keeps a clean file clean. The test is simple: missing is catch-up, wrong is cleanup. Many engagements need both, and cleanup is what monthly bookkeeping starts from.
If any of these sound familiar, the answer is yes. You haven’t reconciled in months, or years, and the books have quietly drifted away from the bank. Your CPA flagged the file before tax season and needs numbers they can actually file from. Or a lender or a buyer asked for clean financials, and what you have right now won’t survive the review.
Three more. Your previous bookkeeper left things in disarray — miscategorized transactions, duplicates, bank rules that never worked properly. You switched accounting software and the migration left gaps in the data behind it. Or you ran the books yourself, got a year or two in, and realized the structure isn’t holding. None of those are unusual, and none of them are a character flaw.
What a cleanup actually delivers starts with four things. Every bank and credit-card account reconciled against real statements, line by line — not against the bank feed. Every transaction reviewed and categorized to the right account, with the rules rebuilt so it doesn’t regress. Old undeposited funds investigated and cleared. Duplicates removed, and missing transactions reconstructed from statements, receipts and payroll records.
Then four more. Errors in closed prior periods corrected with documented journal entries, mapped for your tax preparer. Payroll liabilities reconciled to the returns actually filed, and sales-tax accruals verified against the filings. The chart of accounts reviewed against how the business really runs — redundant accounts merged, missing ones added. And a full statement set, with a written summary of every adjustment made.
From first call to clean books runs in four phases. A diagnostic and a written scope first — deliverables, timeline and a fixed price, before any work begins. Then reconciliation and correction, which is where most of the hours actually go. Then statements, reviewed by a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor against TechBrot’s written close standard before anything is delivered. Then handoff, and ongoing monthly bookkeeping if you want the file kept that way.
Why do books drift out of reconciliation in the first place? Each unreconciled period inherits the last one’s errors, so January’s miscategorization lands in February’s opening balances, and the gap widens month over month. There’s a name for it — compounding reconciliation drift — and a full breakdown of the mechanism linked below. It’s also why cleanup is project work: you’re unwinding accumulated drift, not fixing one month.
Most cleanup engagements take 2 to 8 weeks. A single year with two or three bank accounts typically takes 2 to 3 weeks. Multi-year work, or a file with payroll, inventory or several entities, takes 6 to 10 weeks. Either way, your written scope sets the date before the work starts, rather than the timeline being discovered along the way.
Cleanup is priced by scope, not by the hour. Small single-year cleanups run $1,200 to under $3,000. Standard cleanups of 12 to 24 months run $3,000 to under $7,500. Multi-year cleanups involving payroll, inventory or multi-entity structures run $7,500–$15,000+. Fixed fee against a written scope, so an open-ended mess never becomes an open-ended invoice.
There are three shapes this usually takes. A single-year cleanup, for a smaller business with two or three accounts and simple payroll. A standard cleanup — a year or two of history, with payroll and sales tax — which is the most common engagement here. And a multi-year cleanup for a business several years behind, often with multiple entities. The diagnostic decides which one you’re in; it isn’t a menu you pick from.
The work happens inside your own QuickBooks file — Online, Desktop or Enterprise — with your preparer working as an accountant user. Your data stays yours, and access is revocable at any time. What you receive: reconciled accounts, a corrected chart of accounts, a full statement set, and a written summary of every adjustment. And yes, a file nobody has reconciled in years can still be rebuilt.
A senior bookkeeper is assigned to your file, and every close is reviewed by a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor before it reaches you. The senior reviewer holds the Intuit QuickBooks Certification Level 2 and the QuickBooks Workforce Certification. Your CPA gets books reconciled to source documents with every adjustment documented, so they file from them instead of rebuilding them. One call tells you where your books actually stand.
Every account reconciled against actual bank and credit-card statements, line by line, period by period. No “reconciliation” against bank feeds alone.
Every transaction reviewed and categorized to the correct account. Uncategorized expenses cleared. Bank rules rebuilt to prevent regression.
Old undeposited funds investigated and cleared. Clearing-account balances reconciled to zero or to documented open items.
Duplicates identified and removed. Missing transactions reconstructed from source documents — statements, receipts, payroll records.
Identified errors in closed periods corrected with documented journal entries. Adjustments mapped clearly for your tax preparer.
Payroll liabilities reconciled to filed returns. Sales-tax accruals verified against multi-state filings. Discrepancies escalated and resolved.
Chart of accounts evaluated against the business model. Structure simplified, redundant accounts merged, missing accounts added.
Reconstructed P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. Written summary of every adjustment made, reviewed against TechBrot’s written close standard.
A first-year food & beverage business’s QuickBooks records: reviewed and corrected, transactions reconciled, miscategorized entries fixed and the chart of accounts organized. In the owner’s words, the books went “from disorganized and inaccurate to fully reconciled.”
From the owner’s review on Clutch (project Jan.–Mar. 2026); the client is not named. Read the case study
Cleanup repairs books that exist but are wrong. If the books are simply behind — months with nothing entered — that is catch-up bookkeeping, a separate fixed-fee engagement. Many files need both, and the cleanup comes first.
| Dimension | Cleanup | Catch-up |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Fixes what was recorded wrong: reconciliations that don’t tie, duplicates, misclassified transactions, opening balances | Records what was never entered: the missing months, from bank and card statements |
| Period | The months or years already in the file | The months the file is behind, up to the current month |
| Trigger | Books you can’t trust: a CPA pushback, a lender request, a reconciliation that won’t balance | Books that stopped: a bookkeeper left, a busy season, a tax deadline ahead |
| Fee band | $1,200–$15,000+, a fixed fee set by scope | $2,000–$20,000+, a fixed fee set by how far behind the books are |
When a lender, a tax deadline or a sale sets the date, the scope starts from what that date needs, and the written scope says which periods are delivered first:
A 30-minute call to review your file, statements, and payroll records. Within 3 business days you receive a written fixed-fee scope — deliverables, timeline, pricing, the standard we’re holding to.
Typical: 3 business daysReal reconciliation against actual statements. Categorization, undeposited funds, duplicates, prior-period corrections, payroll and sales-tax verification. The work happens here.
Per your written scopeReconstructed financial statements produced. Reviewed against the operating standard before delivery. Every adjustment documented.
Typical: 3–5 business daysClean books delivered with a written summary of corrections. Continue with the same preparer on monthly bookkeeping, or hand off to your existing accountant.
Optional: monthly engagementRepresentative schedule, not a guarantee — your written timeline is set from your own file after the diagnostic. A file ~6 months behind typically runs about five weeks (week 1 scope & access, weeks 2–3 categorize & correct, weeks 3–4 reconcile every account, week 5 review, corrected statements, and CPA-ready handoff). Files further behind run longer.
Cleanup unwinds the accumulated compounding reconciliation drift — here is the before and after, dimension by dimension.
| Dimension | Before cleanup | After cleanup |
|---|---|---|
| Bank reconciliation | Months behind, drifting from statements | Every account reconciled, every period |
| Categorization | Uncategorized expenses, miscoded transactions | Every transaction in the right account |
| Financial statements | Unreliable, can’t share with CPA or lender | CPA-ready P&L, balance sheet, cash flow |
| Tax filing readiness | Tax season is a fire drill | Books filed-from, not fixed-during |
| Lender / buyer readiness | SBA / lender / due diligence not viable | Statements stand up to lender review |
| Owner confidence | Don’t trust the numbers | Books reflect the business |
Three tiers; ranges are typical engagements, final pricing follows the diagnostic. A QuickBooks file cleanup is priced on its own tiers: $1,200 to under $3,000 (Focused, one contained issue), $3,000 to under $7,500 and $7,500–$15,000+. See the bookkeeping pricing page for ongoing monthly pricing after cleanup.
Cleanup = months in the period × 25–35% of the monthly fee for the same volume and accounts × the file's condition (1.0 reconciled, 1.25 partly reconciled, 1.6 never reconciled), from $1,200. For example, 14 months × 30% of an $800 monthly fee × 1.6 (never reconciled) = $5,376. The fixed fee is confirmed in writing before work starts.
Every close is reviewed before it reaches you. You’ll know exactly who is working on your books, how to reach them, and what credentials they hold. Every engagement is reviewed before delivery, and if continuity is ever a question, TechBrot handles the transition without losing the file context.
The standard, every fileEvery engagement runs on three roles: a client advisor who scopes it and stays your point of contact, a senior bookkeeper who prepares your setup and monthly close in your software, and a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor who reviews every close before it reaches you. A U.S.-based bookkeeper is available on request; we can share their public directory profile with you.
Senior bookkeepers who specialize in rental portfolios and Xero, and specialist partner practices for trust accounting for law firms and CFO advisory. We bring the right one onto your engagement when your business calls for it, under the same standards and review.
Vendor balances, unapplied payments and an aging that ties to the bills you actually owe.
The engagementCustomer balances, undeposited funds and an aging report your collections can trust.
The engagementBring backlogged books current. Often paired with cleanup — clean up what exists, catch up what’s missing, then transition to monthly.
The engagementOnce books are clean, ongoing monthly bookkeeping keeps them that way — real monthly close, real reconciliations, every close checked against TechBrot’s close standard.
The engagementSpecific QuickBooks file issues — broken bank feeds, file size, multi-user mode, version mismatches. ProAdvisor-led resolution.
The engagement3+ years of books, often required before a sale, an SBA application, or an IRS issue. Methodical reconstruction at scale.
The engagementInherited a messy file after a prior bookkeeper left? A ProAdvisor takes over — reconciles, rebuilds, and hands the books back CPA-ready.
The engagementWant monthly bookkeeping but the file is behind? Why a one-time cleanup comes first — a known-good baseline so the monthly close ties out.
The engagementInherited a file the prior owner set up wrong? A ProAdvisor re-baselines it with clean opening balances as of the acquisition date.
The engagementNot sure the books even need a cleanup? A ProAdvisor reviews reconciliation, the chart of accounts, and balance-sheet integrity, then tells you straight.
The engagementEvery cleanup step in order — opening balances, reconciliations, undeposited funds, the chart of accounts — and how to tell what your file needs.
Read moreThe symptoms that separate a file that needs bookkeeping from one that needs a cleanup first.
Read moreThe same engagement, written for the state’s own rules — sales-tax, payroll and registration wrinkles included. Delivered remotely in your own QuickBooks file; every state is served from the state directory.
By industry: SaaS · Agency · Retail · not sure where your file stands? Start with the free QuickBooks file review · moving off Desktop? QuickBooks Desktop to Online migration.
A cleanup typically takes 2 to 8 weeks. Single-year cleanups for small businesses with 2 to 3 bank accounts typically take 2 to 3 weeks. Multi-year cleanups for businesses with payroll, inventory, or multiple entities can take 6 to 10 weeks. The discovery call produces a written timeline before work begins.
Cleanup is priced by scope, not by hour. Small single-year cleanups run $1,200 to under $3,000. Standard 12 to 24 month cleanups run $3,000 to under $7,500. Multi-year cleanups involving payroll, inventory, or multi-entity structures run $7,500–$15,000+. Every cleanup engagement is fixed-fee against a written scope — for a quote, book a free file review or call (877) 751-5575.
Yes. Even when a QuickBooks file hasn’t been reconciled in 3+ years, an experienced ProAdvisor can reconstruct accurate books using bank statements, payroll records, and source documents. The process is methodical and the outcome is reliable financial statements you can file taxes from.
Catch-up bookkeeping brings behind-but-structured books up to date — entering missed transactions, completing reconciliations through the current month. Cleanup is a deeper engagement that corrects errors, fixes categorization, resolves reconciliation discrepancies, and reconstructs accurate records from a messy or unreliable state. A file can need both; the cleanup comes first.
Every engagement runs on three roles: a client advisor who scopes it and stays your point of contact, a senior bookkeeper who prepares your setup and monthly close in your software, and a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor who reviews every close before it reaches you. A U.S.-based bookkeeper is available on request; we can share their public directory profile with you. You’ll know who is working on your books and how to reach them.
Yes. TechBrot cleanup engagements produce CPA-ready, lender-ready financial statements — reconciled to source documents with documented adjustments. The handoff includes reconciled account balances, documented corrections, unresolved exceptions and financial statements prepared from the agreed records.
QuickBooks cleanup is a fixed fee in one of three tiers: $1,200 to under $3,000, $3,000 to under $7,500 or $7,500–$15,000+, set by how many months, accounts and problems the file holds. The free file review tells you which tier applies before anything costs money. If the file cannot be scoped without working inside it, the paid diagnostic is from $450 for one company file and is credited in full against the cleanup. If the full cleanup is more than you can take on now, ask for a phased scope: the periods your CPA or lender needs first, each with its own fixed fee in writing.
Tell us what’s wrong with the books. We’ll tell you whether cleanup, catch-up or monthly bookkeeping fits.
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