Most people who call me are behind. Not by a week, by months, sometimes by years. If that is you, the useful thing to know is that catching up is a sequence, not a heroic weekend. Do it in the wrong order and you will redo work.
Start with the statements, not the software
The instinct is to open the bookkeeping software and start categorizing. Resist that. Bank feeds are a convenience, not a source of truth. They drop transactions, they duplicate them after a reconnect, and they sometimes reach back only ninety days.
Download the actual PDF statements for every business bank account and credit card, for every month you are behind. Every account, including the one you barely use. That set of documents is what “correct” gets measured against.
Get the accounts into one place
Connect the accounts to whatever you are using. I put clients on Kick, in their own name, so the books belong to them and nothing is locked to me.
Then compare what imported against the statements you downloaded. Two things go wrong here, and both are quiet:
- Missing months. The feed pulled ninety days and you are eleven months behind. The gap needs importing from a CSV.
- Duplicated transactions. An account reconnected and re-imported an overlapping range. Duplicates inflate both revenue and expenses, and they are easy to miss because each one looks legitimate on its own.
Separate personal from business before categorizing
This is the step people skip and it is the one that ruins the numbers.
If your business account paid for groceries, that is not a business expense, and if your personal card paid for business software, that expense is missing from your books entirely. Both errors distort profit, and the second one costs you money at tax time.
Work through the statements once with a single question: was this for the business? Sort into business and personal first, then categorize only what is left. Doing it in the other order means categorizing transactions that should not have been there.
Categorize by pattern, not one at a time
Sort by merchant rather than working chronologically. Every charge from the same supplier almost always belongs in the same category, so you decide once and apply it to thirty transactions instead of making the same decision thirty times.
Two categories deserve real attention because they are where the money hides:
- Owner draws versus payroll. These are not the same thing and getting it wrong changes your tax position, not just your reporting.
- Transfers between your own accounts. A transfer is not income and it is not an expense. Miscategorized transfers are the single most common reason a P&L shows revenue a business never earned.
Reconcile every month, in order
Reconciling means proving that your books agree with the bank’s ending balance for that month. Not roughly. Exactly.
Do it oldest month first. An error in March propagates through every month after it, so reconciling recent months before old ones means doing them twice.
If a month will not reconcile, the difference is a clue. A difference equal to exactly one transaction is usually a duplicate or an omission. A difference that is a round number is often a transfer that only got recorded on one side.
Then look at what the numbers say
Once it reconciles, you have something you have probably never had: a real picture. Which months made money. Which ones only looked like they did. What you actually spend on subscriptions. Whether the customer you like most is the one paying you best.
That is the entire point. Clean books are not a compliance chore, they are the instrument panel. You cannot fly the plane by feel forever.
If this sounds like a lot of hours
It is. A year of catch-up on a business with a couple of accounts is realistically a full week of focused work, and most owners do not have that week.
That is the work I do. Send me three months of statements and I will build you a real Profit and Loss from them, free, then walk you through it. From there we agree how far back the catch-up is worth going, and I quote you a real number before any work starts.