How Much Does Catch-Up Bookkeeping Cost in Canada?

If your books are months — or years — behind, the first question is always the same: what is this going to cost me? Most bookkeeping websites won’t tell you. Here’s the straight answer, with real numbers.

The honest market picture

Across Canada in 2026, catch-up bookkeeping is typically priced per month behind, scaled by how many transactions your business runs each month. Industry-wide, small cleanups (1–3 months) commonly land between $500 and $1,500 total, a full-year rebuild runs roughly $1,000 to $5,000, and multi-year rescues with structural problems can run well beyond that at firms that price by value rather than hours.

Hourly billing exists too — but for catch-up work it has a problem: you’re paying for an unknown number of hours against an unknown mess. The bill is open-ended by design.

How we price it instead

At Go Fig Bookz, catch-up work is priced per month behind, by transaction volume — from $265 per month behind for low-volume businesses (up to ~25 transactions a month) up to $1,050 per month behind for high-volume books (200–400 transactions a month). Very high-volume books are quoted individually.

So a business that’s 8 months behind with modest volume isn’t facing a mystery — it’s facing roughly 8 × the bracket its volume lands in, quoted as a range up front and then fixed after we’ve actually seen the file.

The diagnostic review: how the price gets fixed

No honest bookkeeper can give you an exact fixed price for books they’ve never opened — anyone who does is guessing, and someone pays for the guess later.

Our answer is a Diagnostic Review ($650 flat): we go through your actual books, document what we find, and hand you a written findings report with a fixed, capped price for the full cleanup. If you go ahead, the $650 is credited in full against the project — the diagnostic effectively costs nothing. If you don’t, you still own a professional assessment of exactly where your books stand.

From there, the price you’re given is the price you pay. Overruns are our problem, not yours. Only a genuine change in scope — discovered accounts, additional years — changes the number, and that happens in writing before more work occurs.

What moves the price up or down

Transaction volume — the biggest driver. Twenty transactions a month is a different job than two hundred.
How many accounts need reconciling — every bank account, credit card, and loan adds work.
Payroll and government filings — if payroll, HST/GST, WSIB, or source-deduction filings are also behind, catching those up is part of the scope.
The state of your records — clean bank feeds with digital receipts move fast; shoeboxes move slower.
Structural problems — a chart of accounts that needs rebuilding, or years of miscoded history, moves a job from “catch-up” to “rescue.”

What you should get for the money

A finished catch-up isn’t just “the months are entered.” When the work is done properly, every account reconciles to its statements, income and expenses are correctly categorized (not dumped in a catch-all), payroll and tax filings are current or ready to file, and your accountant receives a file they can work with instead of one they have to fix — at year-end rates.

That last part matters more than most owners realize: accountants bill significantly more per hour than bookkeepers. Every hour of cleanup your accountant doesn’t have to do is money saved on top of the bookkeeping itself.

The real cost of waiting

Behind books aren’t a stable problem — they compound. CRA deadlines pass and penalties accrue, HST input credits go unclaimed, and decisions get made on numbers that don’t exist. The businesses that come to us two years behind almost always say the same thing: I should have done this a year ago.

If you want to know exactly where your books stand and exactly what it would cost to fix them, that’s precisely what the diagnostic is for.