Months or years of unreconciled transactions, cleaned up and brought current, without judgment about how it got that way.
It usually starts small. One month gets skipped during a busy stretch. Then a bookkeeper leaves. Then a quarter goes by. Eighteen months later nobody knows what the real numbers are, and the thought of opening the file is enough to make you close the laptop. This is the service for that.
Getting behind is not a character flaw. It's what happens when a business grows faster than its back office. Baum's Accounting Services has walked into plenty of files like this, and after 18 years in finance roles the work is more methodical than dramatic. Businesses around Lexington, Nicholasville, Georgetown, and the rest of central Kentucky bring us in to get current, then keep it that way.
A few patterns show up again and again. Bank feeds ran on autopilot for a year and everything got auto-categorized into whatever the software guessed. Personal and business spending got mixed on one card. Owner draws got booked as expenses. Transfers between accounts got recorded twice, once as income and once as an expense, inflating both sides. Payroll got entered as a single lump sum with no split between wages and employer taxes. None of these are unusual. All of them make the financial statements wrong in ways that compound month over month.
First step is finding the last month where the books were genuinely correct. That's the starting line, and sometimes it's further back than the owner expected. From there the work moves forward in order, one month at a time, reconciling each account before moving to the next. Miscoded transactions get reclassified. Duplicates get removed. Missing transactions get added. Once the file catches up to the current month, you get a real set of statements and a clear picture of where the business stands.
A cleanup that isn't followed by a system is a cleanup you'll need again in two years. Most clients move straight into monthly or quarterly bookkeeping once they're current, which is the whole point. The file is clean, the chart of accounts makes sense, and the habits are set. If the business is big enough to need more than bookkeeping, the same relationship can step up to fractional controller or CFO work without changing providers or starting over with someone new.
Depends on how far behind you are, how many accounts are involved, and how quickly documents come back. A few months of cleanup on one bank account moves fast. Two years across multiple accounts and a payroll mess takes longer. The consultation includes a look at the file so the scope is based on what's actually there.
No. Every business that's grown quickly has a version of this story. What matters is fixing it and setting up something that holds. Honestly, files that look terrifying to an owner often turn out to be straightforward once someone who does this every day starts working through them in order.
Your tax preparer needs accurate books to work from, so in practice yes. This firm doesn't prepare or file income tax returns, but the cleanup produces the closed books and supporting detail your CPA needs. If you're facing a deadline, mention it early so the work can be sequenced around it.
Other work in this area that tends to come up in the same conversation.
QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, or NetSuite, configured around your business and then maintained, so the system keeps working after the setup call ends.
Read moreA ProAdvisor builds your QuickBooks Online file properly the first time: bank feeds, rules, users, permissions, and reports that answer real questions.
Read moreStill on QuickBooks Desktop and it works? Good. Company file setup, ongoing maintenance, and support for the version you already run.
Read moreBook a consultation and we will walk through the work, the timing, and who does what.
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