Catch up bookkeeping cost and pricing by months behind

How much does catch up bookkeeping cost?

Most small businesses pay between a few hundred dollars for one to three months behind and several thousand dollars for a year or more. Price guides published by US bookkeeping firms quote totals from roughly 500 USD up to about 10,000 USD, with the high end reserved for multi year backlogs, payroll, several entities or books that were never set up properly.

There is no list price because nobody knows the hours until they see the file. A provider looks at how many months are open, how many bank and card accounts there are, how many transactions run through them, and whether the entries exist at all. Then they quote a flat fee or bill by the hour. Freelance and firm bookkeepers in the US commonly bill somewhere between 50 and 150 USD an hour, and CPA firms more than that.

So the honest answer to "what will mine cost" is a formula, not a number: hours per month of backlog, times months, times rate. The rest of this article fills in that formula so you can sanity check a quote before you sign it.

Catch up bookkeeping price by months behind

The table below works through one busy business checking account, the kind with 150 to 400 lines a month. Reconciling a month like that by hand takes one to three hours. Categorizing and posting the transactions, if they are not in the books yet, takes about as long again. We priced the hours at 50 and 150 USD to show the range.

Multiply by the number of accounts. A business with an operating account, a payroll account and two credit cards has four reconciliations per month, not one, although the quieter accounts take less time each. That is why two businesses that are "six months behind" can get quotes thousands of dollars apart.

What drives the price of a catch up project

• Transaction volume. The single biggest factor. A consultant with 40 deposits a month and a restaurant with 900 card settlements are different jobs.
• Number of accounts. Every checking, savings, payroll, merchant clearing and credit card account needs its own reconciliation for every month.
• Missing entries versus missing reconciliations. If the bank feed kept importing and someone categorized as they went, the books are mostly there and only the reconciliations are open. That is far cheaper than rebuilding from statements.
• Statement format. CSV and OFX downloads are quick to work with. Scanned PDF statements from older periods slow everything down.
• Errors in closed periods. An edited or deleted entry in a month that was already reconciled breaks every month after it, and tracing it back is billable time.
• Deadline. A tax extension due in two weeks or a lender waiting on financials usually means a rush fee.

Where the hours actually go

Ask a catch up bookkeeper to break down the work and you hear the same list every time: get access, collect statements, categorize, reconcile, fix what does not tie out, then hand over the financials. Of those, reconciliation is the part that scales worst. Categorizing is fast once rules are set, but ticking every statement line against the ledger has to be done line by line, month after month, for every account.

It is also where most of the errors surface. The reconciliation is what finds the vendor paid twice, the deposit that never got recorded, the bank fee nobody booked and the check that cleared for a different amount. Those items are why catch up work is slower per month than ordinary monthly bookkeeping. You are not only recording history, you are proving it matches the bank.

When the transactions are missing from the books entirely, there is a quicker route than typing them in. You can convert the bank statement into a QuickBooks import file and load each month in one step, then reconcile against the statement it came from.

Should you hire a catch up bookkeeper or use software?

It depends on what is missing. Use this as a rough decision rule.

For comparison, BankReconciler starts at 49 USD a month, or 24 USD a month billed yearly, for one company with three bank and card accounts and 1,500 transactions a month. The Business plan at 149 USD a month covers five companies and 15 accounts, which suits a bookkeeper running several cleanups at once. Full details are on the pricing page.

Set against the table above, the math is simple. Twelve months of one busy account reconciled by hand is 12 to 36 hours. With software, the matching runs in minutes per month and the human time goes into the exceptions: the duplicates, the unrecorded fees, the deposits that do not tie out. Our page on catch up bank reconciliation walks through that month by month process in detail.

Software does not replace judgment. Someone still decides whether a 1,200 USD transfer was a loan, an owner draw or a misposted sale. What it removes is the hours of ticking that come before any of those decisions.

How to get a lower catch up bookkeeping quote

If you do hire someone, a few things you can do before the first call will cut hours from the quote.

1. Download every missing bank and card statement yourself, as PDF and as CSV where the bank offers it.
2. Give read access to the accounting file and list every account the business used, including old ones.
3. Write down the big unusual items you remember: loans, equipment purchases, owner contributions, refunds.
4. Run the bank reconciliations first with software and hand over the reports. The bookkeeper then prices the review and the fixes, not the matching.
5. Agree on a fixed fee per month of backlog per account, so the price does not drift with the hours.

Once you are current, staying current is cheap. Reconciling each month as the statement arrives keeps every month small, and the monthly bank reconciliation checklist lays out the routine.

Questions about catch up bookkeeping prices

Is catch up bookkeeping more expensive than monthly bookkeeping?

Yes, per month of work it usually costs more. Old months need statements gathered, history reconstructed and errors traced back to where they started, which takes longer than closing a fresh month while receipts and memories are still easy to find.

Can I do catch up bookkeeping myself?

You can do the bank reconciliation part yourself if the entries already exist in your books. Reconciliation software matches each statement to your ledger export and leaves only the exceptions, so the slowest part of the catch up becomes review. Payroll filings and sales tax corrections are better left to a professional.

How long does a catch up project take?

Providers commonly quote two to six weeks for a backlog of up to a year, much of it spent waiting for statements and answers. The reconciliation itself, with software, fits into a day or two of review once the files are in.

Does QuickBooks or Xero do catch up reconciliation?

Both have a reconcile screen that handles one month at a time against their own bank feed. It works when the feed is complete. When statements are PDF, the feed broke, or you are reconciling outside the file, a separate tool is faster. See bank reconciliation for QuickBooks for the export to use.