Catch Up Bookkeeping

This is the first thing anybody wants to know and the hardest thing to get a straight answer to, for a reason worth understanding before you ring round.

Almost every provider bills catch-up work hourly, at $50 to $100 an hour for an independent bookkeeper and higher through a firm, and almost none of them will quote until somebody has looked at the accounts. That is not evasiveness. The work genuinely is unknowable until the transactions are counted, because two businesses that are both eighteen months behind can be a factor of ten apart on volume.

The number that actually drives the invoice is transactions per month multiplied by months missing, adjusted for how many accounts have to be reconciled and how much of the documentation still exists. A sole trader with one bank account and forty transactions a month, two years behind, is a small job. A shop with nine thousand card transactions a month, six months behind, is a much larger one despite being far more current.

So the useful thing to do before asking for a quote is to count. Export the transaction list for each missing month from the bank, note how many accounts are involved, and check whether the receipts still exist anywhere. A provider given those three numbers can price the work in an email rather than after a call, and you can compare two quotes that were priced off the same thing.

Meinry does not price catch-up hourly. Cleaning up and closing the prior months is included on the ladder above, up to three months on the middle rung and twelve on the top one, because the work is volume work and the cost of doing it is not a person's time.

The cost of catch-up work does not really rise with time. It rises with what you have forgotten. A transaction from last month you can identify in seconds; the same transaction from nineteen months ago needs a receipt you no longer have and a memory you do not have either. Every month that passes converts a ten-second question into a half-hour one.

The other cost arrives with a deadline attached. A filing date, a lender asking for statements, a due diligence request, a notice from a tax authority. Catch-up work is almost always bought under time pressure, which is precisely when hourly billing is least in your favour and when you have least leverage to shop around.

Each period's opening balance is the previous period's closing balance. A reconciliation attempted out of order therefore fails against a number that has not been fixed yet, and you cannot tell whether the difference you are looking at belongs to the month you are in or to one you have not reached. Starting at the most recent month feels faster and is the usual reason a catch-up stalls.

Meinry runs the whole history from the bank feed, month by month in order, reconciling each one before moving on. Where a period will not reconcile it names the period and the amount rather than carrying the difference forward, because a difference carried forward is an error that gets harder to find with every month it travels through.

Being years behind on bookkeeping feels categorically worse than being a quarter behind, and financially it usually is, but the work is the same work repeated. What changes is what still exists to work from.

Bank feeds through an aggregator typically reach back twelve to twenty-four months. Past that the transactions have to come from statements, which the bank will still have and will usually produce as PDFs on request, sometimes for a fee. Card processors and payment platforms generally keep longer histories than banks do. So the data almost always exists; it is the documentation around it that has gone.

That is what makes an old period expensive rather than impossible. A transaction from last month you can identify in seconds. The same transaction from three years ago needs a receipt nobody kept and a memory nobody has, and it becomes a question you answer with a best judgement rather than a fact. There is a point at which reconstructing the detail costs more than the detail is worth, and a good provider will tell you where that point is instead of billing through it.

The other thing that changes with age is exposure. Filings that were made on estimated numbers, loans taken against figures that were never reconciled, a sale or a funding round where the diligence will look at the whole period. Those are the reasons to do the old years at all rather than starting clean from a date, and they are worth being explicit about with whoever scopes the work, because they decide how much of the tail is worth reconstructing.

Done by a person, a catch-up runs at roughly one to three missing months per working week, depending on volume and on how quickly you answer questions. The elapsed time is usually much longer than the work time, because a bookkeeper is fitting it around clients whose books are current, and because each round of questions costs a few days of waiting.

That question loop is the part worth optimising, and it is the part nobody quotes for. If the exceptions arrive as four separate emails over a month, the catch-up takes a month regardless of how many hours went into it. If they arrive once, as a list with the date, the amount, the counterparty and what the evidence suggests, you can clear the whole backlog in one sitting.

Done from the feed, the coding and reconciling of a multi-year history is a compute problem rather than a scheduling one. The elapsed time is then almost entirely your time answering the questions that could not be resolved from the data, which is usually an afternoon rather than a fortnight.

Some of it genuinely cannot be recovered from a bank feed, however far back it goes. A transfer between two of your own accounts looks like income on one side and an expense on the other. A payment to a person could be a contractor, a refund or a distribution, and the treatment differs in each case. A large one-off charge to a vendor you never used again is a question no amount of context answers.

Those come to you as a list with the amount, the date, the counterparty and what the evidence suggests. Everything else is done before you are asked anything, which is what makes a multi-year backlog tractable in an afternoon of your attention rather than a fortnight of it.

A catch-up is finished when each missing period has a set of statements behind it that reconcile to the bank. Anything short of that is a categorised transaction list, which looks similar and is not the same thing.

Check it yourself in about ten minutes. Take any two months in the middle of the backlog. The closing balance of the first should be the opening balance of the second, on every account. Each month's bank balance should match the statement for that month rather than approximately match it, and where it does not, there should be a named difference with an explanation rather than a rounding entry. If there is a line in the accounts you cannot trace to a transaction, ask what it is; a plug entry is how a stalled reconciliation gets made to look finished.

Then ask what happens next. A backlog cleared and then left alone is a backlog again in six months, and the second one costs the same as the first. Whatever keeps the books current from here needs to be arranged in the same conversation, not after the invoice.