Estimator
How big is the cleanup, really?
Being behind feels worse than it usually is, and the uncertainty is most of the discomfort. Volume matters less than you would think. What actually drives a cleanup is whether the records exist and whether personal and business money went through the same account.
Your numbers
Refine the scope
These change the answer far more than transaction volume does.
Estimated cleanup effort
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- Reconciling accounts
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- Categorizing transactions
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- Rebuilding the balance sheet
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- Migrating the software
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- Payroll and sales tax
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- Total estimated hours
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- Likely calendar time
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- At your rate
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Read this part
What this still leaves out
A number without its assumptions is worse than no number. Here is what the model does not reach.
- Tax filings. A cleanup produces the numbers. If returns were missed or filed on wrong figures, amending or catching them up is separate work with its own deadlines and penalties.
- What the reconciliation finds. Cleanups sometimes surface a genuine problem: a loan never recorded, a duplicate payroll run, an account nobody mentioned. Those add time that no estimate can predict.
- Your responsiveness. The calendar figure assumes documents arrive promptly. In practice this is the main thing that stretches a cleanup, and the one part entirely within your control.
- Prior-year opening balances. If the last closed year was itself wrong, the cleanup has to reach further back before anything after it can be trusted.
This is a scoping figure, not a quote. We price a cleanup as a fixed fee after looking at the actual file, so you know the cost before the work starts rather than watching an hourly meter.
The mechanism
What a cleanup actually involves
The work is mostly reconciliation. Every account is matched to its statements month by month until the books agree with what the bank reports. Until that is true, nothing built on top of the numbers can be relied on, which is why it is priced per account per month rather than per transaction.
Then categorization: each transaction assigned to the right account, personal spending separated, owner draws and contributions recorded properly rather than buried in expenses. This is where commingled accounts cost the most, because every line needs a judgment instead of a rule.
Then the balance sheet is rebuilt. Loans, credit cards, fixed assets, and equity are usually what have drifted furthest, since they do not show up in day-to-day categorization and nobody notices until someone asks for a balance sheet.
The cost of waiting compounds quietly. Penalties accrue, deductions go unclaimed because the records supporting them are gone, and the cleanup itself grows every month. The month you start is the month it stops growing.
Common questions
Before you act on the number
No, and it is far more common than owners assume. Books slip when a business is busy, so being behind often correlates with growth rather than failure. Every accountant has seen worse than yours, and the conversation is about scope rather than judgment.
Because it changes the nature of the work rather than the amount. In a clean business account most transactions can be categorized by rule: this vendor is always software, that one is always travel. When personal spending runs through the same account, every line needs a human decision about whether it belongs to the business at all, and that decision has to be defensible later. It roughly doubles the categorization effort and is the most common reason a cleanup runs longer than expected.
Only if the prior periods are genuinely closed and correct, which they usually are not if you are asking. Opening balances have to come from somewhere, and if they are wrong every period after inherits the error. Starting clean without reconciling the past tends to produce a balance sheet nobody can explain a year later.
Most run two to six weeks, and the limiting factor is almost always how fast statements and documents arrive rather than the hours themselves. Gathering everything before the work starts is the single thing that shortens it most.
You get reconciled books, a balance sheet that ties out, and financial statements for the periods covered. From there it is worth staying current monthly, which costs less than repeating a catch-up and means tax planning becomes possible during the year rather than after it.
Want it scoped properly?
Send us the file and we will come back with a fixed price and a timeline.