Two words, two different jobs.
Catch-up is when the books do not exist. There is a business, there are bank and card statements, and nobody has written them up into a ledger for a year or more. The job is to build books from nothing.
Clean-up is when the books exist and are wrong. Somebody kept QuickBooks or Xero, but transfers were counted as income, the owner's groceries are in office supplies, the bank balance in the software has not matched the real one since 2024. The job is to find and fix what is wrong, and the hard part is knowing when you have found all of it.
Why the difference matters for the price
A catch-up is predictable: the statements have a known number of lines, every line gets posted once, and the work scales with the statements. A clean-up is not: the cost depends on how wrong the file is, which nobody knows until they are inside it. That is why clean-up quotes are hourly and open-ended, and why many firms would rather rebuild a bad file from the statements than audit it line by line.
Which one do you have?
- No accounting software, or one that was set up and abandoned: catch-up.
- Software that was kept but the bank balance in it does not match the bank: usually a rebuild is cheaper than a clean-up. Treat it as a catch-up from the last date the balances agreed.
- Software kept carefully, with one known problem (a wrong account, a duplicated month): a real clean-up, and a small one. Your bookkeeper can fix it.
What Return Ready does
Catch-up, and the rebuild kind of clean-up. It builds books from the statements you give it, however many years, posts every line to a double-entry ledger, asks you the questions only you can answer, and hands your accountant a trial balance, a general ledger, a QuickBooks import file and an Excel workbook. If your existing file is beyond saving, the rebuilt books replace it: import the QuickBooks file into a fresh company and carry on from there.
It does not log into your QuickBooks and edit entries. If you have a tidy file with one problem, you do not need us; you need an hour of a bookkeeper's time.
Read how it works, or what the books look like from your CPA's side.
Questions people ask
- My QuickBooks has three years of entries. Will you fix it?
- We rebuild rather than fix. Give us the statements for the same three years; you get books that tie, and a file to import into a clean company. Your existing file stays as a record.
- Can you start from the last month that was right?
- Yes. The books start from a date and an opening position your accountant confirms, and the statements from that date forward build the rest.
- What if the problem is only one year?
- Then it is one year of books. Each year is priced on its own: $699 per business per year of books.
- Will my accountant accept rebuilt books?
- Accountants generally prefer them. A rebuild from statements has an audit trail from every figure back to the bank; a cleaned-up file carries whatever was wrong before and nobody can say for certain it was all found.