Months behind, years behind, or never started. It is a one-time fee with a published formula, a real timeline, and nobody on this end who is going to make you feel bad about it.
Catch-up costs about 80 percent of your core monthly rate for each month you are behind, charged once. Core monthly rate means your transaction volume base rate adjusted for your industry, before any add-ons like payroll or bill pay.
A service business at a $250 core rate that is twelve months behind pays about $2,400 once. A trades business at a $720 core rate twelve months behind pays about $6,900 once. Then you are on the normal monthly fee going forward.
It is discounted against the monthly rate on purpose, because a closed period is more predictable work than a live one. The table below prices it out for real profiles rather than making you do the arithmetic.
These come from the same formula the estimator runs, rounded to the nearest $25 exactly as it rounds.
| Business profile | Base rate | Industry | Core rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo consultant, under 50 transactions | $250 | 1.00x | $250 |
| Growing service business, 50 to 150 | $400 | 1.00x | $400 |
| Trades contractor, 150 to 400 | $600 | 1.20x | $720 |
| Restaurant, 400 to 800 | $900 | 1.40x | $1,260 |
The base rate comes from monthly transaction volume and the multiplier from your industry. Both tables are published in full on the fee schedule page. Note that payroll, bill payments, sales tax filing, and extra account fees are deliberately left out of the core rate, which is why catch-up is cheaper than 80 percent of your all-in monthly bill.
| Business profile | 6 months | 12 months | 18 months | 24 months |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solo consultant ($250 core) | $1,200 | $2,400 | $3,600 | $4,800 |
| Growing service business ($400 core) | $1,925 | $3,850 | $5,750 | $7,675 |
| Trades contractor ($720 core) | $3,450 | $6,900 | $10,375 | $13,825 |
| Restaurant ($1,260 core) | $6,050 | $12,100 | $18,150 | $24,200 |
Charged once, not monthly. If you are behind by an amount that is not on this table, the estimator has a catch-up toggle with a slider that goes to 24 months or more, and it prices your exact situation instantly.
What is included in the one-time fee: every back transaction categorized, every bank and credit card account reconciled to the statements, the chart of accounts rebuilt or repaired, undeposited funds and stale uncleared items cleared, loans and payroll liabilities tied to real documents, and closed financial statements produced for each year so your returns can be filed on numbers that hold up.
The one-time number and the ongoing number, side by side, because the second one is the part people forget to ask about.
Tax return preparation for the back years is quoted separately from the cleanup, because the number of returns and the entity type drive it rather than the bookkeeping. The business tax page covers that side.
Five steps, in this order, because each one depends on the one before it.
We look at the statements, the existing file if there is one, and the last filed return. Twenty minutes of looking is what separates a fixed price from an open-ended hourly bill, and it is why we do not quote a cleanup off a phone call alone.
A chart of accounts that matches how your business actually runs, opening balances tied to something real, and the accounts connected. If there is an existing file full of guesses, this is where the guesses come out.
Every transaction categorized and every account reconciled to the statement, in order, oldest first. A month is not done until the reconciliation ties. This is the part that takes the weeks.
Undeposited funds that never deposited, uncleared checks from two years ago, loan balances that never amortized, payroll liabilities that never cleared, owner draws sitting in expense accounts. This is where most of the real damage usually is.
Closed financial statements for every period, a written list of what we found and what we changed, and a comparison against what was already filed so you know whether anything needs amending.
The cleanup only pays for itself if the books stay closed after it. Ongoing monthly bookkeeping picks up from the first current month, and the close happens on a schedule instead of when someone remembers.
Falling behind on the books almost never happens because someone was careless. It happens because the business got busy, and the one task with no external deadline is the one that slips. Then it compounds, and the longer it sits the more it feels like something you have to fix before you can admit it exists.
The cost is rarely the penalty. It is the six months you spent not knowing whether you were profitable, the loan application you could not complete, the estimated tax payments you guessed at, the deductions nobody claimed because no one categorized the receipts, and the price you paid for equipment you already owned because the fixed asset schedule was never built.
There is also a real deadline problem. A refund on an unfiled return generally expires three years after the original due date. Money you were owed on a return you never filed can simply stop existing, and that is a genuinely avoidable loss that we see more often than we would like.
Catch-up is periods with nothing recorded at all. It is a build. Cleanup is periods that were recorded badly, where a bank feed was connected and everything got auto-categorized into whatever the software guessed. Cleanup is usually the harder of the two, because the work starts with figuring out which entries are real. We price both the same way, off months behind, and we tell you which one you have after we look.
Unrecorded payroll and unfiled payroll returns are a different urgency, because those deposits are held in trust and the penalties accrue faster than anything else in the tax code. If that is part of your situation, say so in the form and we will treat it first. The payroll page covers what ongoing payroll looks like once you are current.
Catch-up is a one-time fee of about 80 percent of your core monthly rate for each month you are behind. Core monthly rate means your transaction volume base rate adjusted for your industry, before any add-ons.
A service business at a $250 core rate that is twelve months behind pays about $2,400 once. A trades business at a $720 core rate that is twelve months behind pays about $6,900 once. After that you move onto the normal monthly fee.
Because a closed period is more predictable work than a live one. The statements already exist, nothing new arrives mid month, there are no questions to chase in real time, and the same categorization decision can be applied across a whole year at once.
Ongoing work also includes the monthly close, the financial statements, and being available to you, none of which apply to a month that ended two years ago.
Most catch-up work runs two to six weeks from the day we have your statements and access. Up to about a year of a straightforward business is usually two to three weeks. Two or more years, or a business with payroll, inventory, or multiple entities tangled together, runs closer to six.
The single largest variable is not the size of the job, it is how quickly we can get bank statements and access to the accounts.
Bank and credit card statements for every month in the period, access to your accounting file if one exists, last year's filed tax return, loan and lease documents, and payroll reports if you have employees.
If you do not have an accounting file at all, that is fine and fairly common. We build one from the statements.
It is usually easier than the alternative. A business with no records is a clean build from the bank statements. A business with two years of guessed categories, duplicate transactions, and a bank balance that has never matched is a demolition first and a rebuild second.
Nobody is going to make you feel bad about either one, and we see both every month.
Once the books are correct we compare the real figures against what was filed. Sometimes the difference is immaterial and the right answer is to leave it and file correctly going forward.
Sometimes it is large enough that an amended return is the honest move, and often it is in your favor because unrecorded expenses are more common than unrecorded income. We tell you which situation you are in before you spend anything on an amendment.
The catch-up is priced and quoted as its own one-time engagement, so you are not signing a monthly contract to get current.
That said, most people who fall behind once fall behind again, and the catch-up fee only makes sense as an investment if the books stay current afterward. We will say so directly rather than quietly selling you the same cleanup a second time next year.
Yes, and it is one of the most common things we find. Payroll that was processed by a provider but never posted to the books leaves wages missing from the profit and loss and tax liabilities missing from the balance sheet, which makes every return filed off those numbers wrong.
We rebuild the payroll journals from the provider reports and tie them to the quarterly returns that were actually filed.
Far enough to cover every year that still needs a tax return filed or corrected, and far enough back to establish correct opening balances for the first year you are keeping current. Going back further than that is usually spending money on history nobody will ever use.
We work out where that line falls for your business before quoting, rather than quoting every month you have ever been in business.
The estimator has a catch-up toggle. Answer four questions, drag the months-behind slider, and both the one-time figure and the ongoing monthly appear. No email, no signup, no sales call.
See your priceHowever bad you think it is, we have seen it. Tell us roughly where things stand and we will come back with a fixed number, usually within one business day.
