The bookkeeper left
Mid-year, mid-reconciliation, with half the logic in their head and none of it written down. The replacement inherits a system they cannot follow, so they start their own.
Catch-up and clean-up
Behind on your books?
Let’s deal with it.
Months — sometimes years — of records that were never processed. It is far more common than you think, it is almost never carelessness, and it is fixable.
How it happens
Nobody plans
to fall behind.
Every business I have caught up got there by one of these routes. Not one of them was negligence.
The business grew faster than the admin
Volume that worked fine on a spreadsheet at forty transactions a month does not work at four hundred. The books do not fail suddenly; they fall behind quietly.
A software migration stalled halfway
Opening balances were never agreed to the old system. Now there are two sets of records, neither complete, and nobody is certain which one is right.
A year spent surviving
Load-shedding, a lost contract, illness, a partner leaving. The books came last — and given the alternative, they correctly came last. That decision still has to be unwound.
It was never set up properly
Started on a spreadsheet in year one because that was sensible then. Year four is still on the spreadsheet, and it is now the single biggest risk in the business.
A registration changed the rules
A sales tax or VAT registration, or a first employee and payroll. New obligations arrived; no new process arrived with them.
Every one of these ends in the same place: a drawer, a box, or a folder on a desktop that you have stopped opening.
What it is costing
The problem does not
sit still.
Being behind is not a static condition. It compounds, and most of the cost is invisible until something forces the issue.
The tax authorities do not wait
Returns estimated rather than calculated. Administrative penalties that recur every month a return is outstanding, and interest that runs regardless of whether anyone has looked at the file.
Finance stalls
No bank, funder or landlord will lend against records that cannot be produced. The application does not get declined — it simply never progresses, usually at the worst possible moment.
You are steering by bank balance
A bank balance is not profit. Without current books you cannot tell a good month from a month that merely collected slowly, and pricing decisions get made on a feeling.
Assurance cannot even begin
A review or an audit has nothing to work from. The year-end stops before it starts, and the deadline arrives anyway.
The exposure is personal
Directors are responsible for the company keeping proper accounting records. That obligation does not transfer to whoever was supposed to be doing the books.
Every month makes it bigger
Records get harder to obtain, memories fade, suppliers archive statements, and staff who knew what a transaction was for leave. Clean-up is the one job that is never cheaper later.
And there is the part that does not appear on any schedule: it is what surfaces when the year-end letter arrives, and the reason a call from your accountant goes to voicemail. It is rarely the biggest problem in the business. It is usually the one that never quite goes away.
The work
What a proper
clean-up involves.
This is the part that gets underestimated. Catching up is not data capture with a late start — it is a reconstruction, and it has to be done in order.
01
Establish a defensible starting point
Find the last date at which the records can actually be trusted. Where no signed set of financial statements exists, opening balances have to be derived and supported rather than assumed — everything downstream rests on this.
02
Rebuild the cash cycle from source
Bank and card statements reimported from the institution, not from whatever was previously captured. Every line classified. Inter-account transfers matched on both sides so cash is not counted twice.
03
Reconstruct from source documents where there is nothing to work with
Where no usable bookkeeping exists at all, the ledger is rebuilt from invoices, supplier statements, contracts and slips. This is the work a cheaper competitor cannot do — it needs a clean bank feed and an existing chart of accounts before it can start.
04
Rebuild the subledgers
Debtors and creditors reconstructed and then agreed — to supplier statements, to customer records, to the actual ageing. A control account that balances to nothing in particular is not a reconciliation.
05
Reconcile to what was actually filed
Sales tax and payroll reconciled to the returns actually filed — the 941s and W-2s in the United States, the VAT201s and EMP501s in South Africa. Where they differ, the difference is identified and explained, not plugged to make the page balance.
06
Clear suspense, loan and inter-company accounts
The director’s loan account, inter-company balances, and the catch-all account everything unexplained was posted to. These carry the most tax risk and are almost always the last thing anyone looks at.
07
Treat prior-period errors as what they are
Corrections that affect closed years are dealt with properly and disclosed, not quietly absorbed into the current year because it is tidier.
08
Produce a trial balance that balances — with support
Every material line backed by a schedule that an independent reviewer, a funder or a tax examiner could follow without needing a conversation.
09
Report, in plain language
What was wrong, what was fixed, what remains a judgment call and why, and what should change so this does not recur.
That is not a weekend’s work, and anyone who quotes it as one has not looked at your records. It is also, in my experience, the single most useful thing a business can do with an accountant — and the relief when it is done tends to be out of all proportion to the size of the job.
Before you commit
Scoped first,
then quoted.
The diagnostic
Nobody can quote honestly
on a mess they have not seen.
Before any clean-up is agreed, I carry out a short, fixed-fee review of the records as they stand. It establishes how far back the problem goes, what is recoverable, what has to be reconstructed, and what the work will cost.
- How far back the records are usable
- What can be recovered and what must be rebuilt from source
- The tax exposure that has already accrued
- A fixed quote for the clean-up, and a realistic timeline
Why it works this way
An open hourly clock on an unknown quantity is not a fair offer to make, and no sensible owner accepts one. Scoping it properly first means the number I give you is the number.
Ask about a diagnosticNext step
However far behind you are,
it has been worse before.
The question worth asking first
Am I a CPA? No.
Here is what I am.
You should know exactly what you are hiring and exactly what you are not. Nobody comes off well when that surfaces later.
A regulated professional accountant
AGA(SA) — Associate General Accountant — is awarded and regulated by SAICA, the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants, the same body that awards CA(SA). It carries a binding code of professional conduct, mandatory continuing education and a disciplinary process.
It is not a United States credential and I will never imply that it is. I am not a CPA, I am not an Enrolled Agent, and I hold no state licence.
Why that does not matter for this work
Client accounting and advisory work — the books, the month-end close, the controls, the management reporting and the systems underneath them — requires no CPA licence anywhere in the United States. It requires an accountant who does it properly every month and is still across the detail in November.
What does require a licence is tax and attest work. That is precisely what stays with your CPA.
The person who keeps the books should not be the person who assures them. An accountant willing to do both for the same client is telling you something.
Your CPA keeps the tax. I do not prepare or sign US federal or state returns and I cannot represent you before the IRS. I produce the records, reconciliations and reporting your CPA works from — which generally makes their job faster and their advice better founded. South African taxpayers: SARS compliance I handle directly — the South African offering is set out here.