3 Signs Your Books Need a Cleanup
By Markie Antle, CPB — Go Fig Bookz
Most business owners don’t wake up one day with broken books. It creeps up: a busy season, a bookkeeper who left, a software migration that never quite finished. Then one day you need a number — for a loan application, a tax deadline, a big decision — and you realize you don’t trust anything in the file.
Here are the three signs we see most often, and what each one actually means.
1. Your bank balance never matches QuickBooks
Open QuickBooks, look at your chequing account balance, then open your bank app. If those two numbers are strangers to each other, your books aren’t being reconciled.
Reconciliation is the monthly discipline of matching every transaction in your books against the bank’s records, line by line. It’s how errors, duplicates, and missing transactions get caught. When it isn’t happening, small discrepancies compound silently — and every report built on those balances (profit, cash position, HST owing) inherits the problem.
A quick self-check: in QuickBooks Online, go to Accounting → Reconcile and look at the last reconciliation date on each bank and credit card account. If it’s more than a couple of months old — or blank — that’s your answer.
2. Your reports make no sense
You know your business. So when the Profit & Loss says you made triple what you expected, or shows a huge “Uncategorized Expense” line, or your Balance Sheet shows negative payroll liabilities and customers who’ve owed you the same amount for three years — the reports are telling you the data underneath is miscoded.
Common tells:
- A large Uncategorized Expense / Uncategorized Income balance
- An Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable aging full of ancient, stale amounts nobody recognizes
- Negative balances on accounts that should never go negative
- An Opening Balance Equity account that still has a balance years after setup
None of these fix themselves. Each one is a stack of individual transactions that need to be traced, understood, and recoded properly.
3. You dread tax season
This one is the sum of the other two. If February makes your stomach drop because you know your accountant is going to come back with a list of questions you can’t answer — or worse, a bill for the hours they spent fixing bookkeeping before they could even start the tax return — your books are costing you real money.
Accountants bill more per hour than bookkeepers. Every hour they spend cleaning up coding errors is the most expensive possible way to do bookkeeping.
What a cleanup actually involves
A proper cleanup isn’t “delete it and start over.” It’s systematic: gather the bank and credit card statements for the whole period, rebuild or repair the transaction record, categorize everything to the right accounts, reconcile every month, and tie the result back to your last filed year-end so the books agree with what CRA already has. Then — and only then — set up a monthly routine so it never drifts again.
Most cleanups take two to six weeks depending on how far behind things are, and we charge a prorated flat fee per catch-up month rather than an open-ended hourly rate, so you know the cost before we start.
Behind on your books? That’s our specialty — it’s most of how new clients find us. See our Catch-Up & Clean-Up services, check flat-fee pricing, or take the free Books Health Check to see exactly where you stand.