Yes. This is one of the most common situations we walk into. A bookkeeper quit, got fired, or just stopped doing the work properly, and now the books are a mess. It happens more often than you’d think.

The problems usually look similar. Transactions dumped into wrong categories for months. Bank accounts that haven’t been reconciled since who knows when. Credit cards that don’t match statements. Accounts receivable that shows customers owing money they already paid. Payroll liabilities that don’t tie out. The balance sheet doesn’t balance and nobody can explain why.

Cleaning up books starts with figuring out how bad it actually is. Sometimes it looks worse than it is and a few days of focused work gets everything straight. Sometimes it’s genuinely a disaster that takes weeks to untangle. We look at what’s there, tell you honestly what we’re dealing with, and quote a price to fix it.

The work itself is tedious but straightforward. We reconcile every account going back to the last time things were accurate. We reclassify transactions that were categorized wrong. We track down missing information. We rebuild reports that should have been maintained. By the end, your books reflect what actually happened in your business.

Some damage can’t be fully undone. If your previous bookkeeper didn’t keep source documents, we can only work with what exists. If transactions were recorded without any notes or context, we sometimes have to make educated guesses and document our assumptions. We’ll tell you where the gaps are and what we did to address them.

Once the cleanup is done, we move into monthly bookkeeping so it doesn’t happen again. The value of clean books only lasts if someone maintains them. Letting things slip puts you right back where you started.

The cost of cleanup depends on how far back we need to go and how messy things got. A few months of neglected books costs less than two years of actively bad bookkeeping. We quote the cleanup as a separate project so you know exactly what you’re paying before we start.