Core Bookkeeping
Historical Cleanups
Whether it is four months behind or four years, a cleanup rebuilds your books from the bank records up: reconciled, correctly coded, trust accounts proven, and handed to your CPA in a state they can actually file from.
Sound familiar?
- You are months or years behind and every month makes it worse
- Your last bookkeeper left mid-year and nobody knows what they did
- Your CPA will not file until someone reconciles the trust account
- You got a bar inquiry and cannot produce a clean three-way reconciliation
- You are on extension again and the deadline is real this time
What you get
What changes once this is running.
- Every month in the cleanup period reconciled against real bank records
- Trust accounts proven — or the discrepancies documented in writing so you can act
- Case costs pulled out of expenses and back onto the balance sheet where they belong
- A defensible year-end package for each year cleaned up
- A written record of what was wrong, what was fixed, and what we could not verify
Included
What the engagement actually covers.
Scope and assessment
Before quoting, we establish how far back the problems actually go. That is often further than firms expect — the year you noticed is rarely the year it started.
Month-by-month reconciliation
Every account, every month in the period, reconciled to statements. Not sampled, not estimated. Where records are genuinely missing, that gets documented rather than guessed at.
Trust account reconstruction
Client ledgers rebuilt from deposits, disbursements and earned-fee transfers, then reconciled three ways. This is the most delicate part of any cleanup and the part firms most need done properly.
Chart of accounts rebuild
A structure that separates fee income, advanced client costs, reimbursed costs and trust liability, applied consistently across the whole cleanup period so year-over-year comparisons actually mean something.
Findings report
A written summary of what was wrong, what we corrected, what we could not verify from available records, and what needs your decision or your attorney's judgment.
How it runs
No surprises about the process.
Diagnostic Review
A fixed-fee review that establishes the real scope. You get the report whether or not you go ahead with the cleanup, and it is what makes an accurate cleanup quote possible.
Fixed-fee proposal
Cleanups are quoted as a fixed fee, not hourly. You know the cost before work starts, and we absorb the risk of it being messier than it looked.
Oldest period first
We work forward chronologically, because a correct opening balance is the only thing that makes the next month solvable. Progress updates come at agreed checkpoints.
Handoff and prevention
The finished books go to you and your CPA with the findings report. Then we talk about what caused the backlog, because a cleanup that is not followed by a working monthly process is a cleanup you will need again.
Why cleanups get worse the longer you wait
Bookkeeping backlogs compound in a way that surprises people. It is not just that there are more months to fix — it is that each unreconciled month makes the next one harder to solve.
An unexplained balance from March becomes the opening balance for April. By September you are not reconciling nine months, you are reconciling nine months plus an accumulating error you now have to hunt backwards through three quarters to find. Add a bank that only keeps statements online for two years, or a bookkeeper who left without documentation, and the work multiplies.
Trust accounts are worse. A misapplied client deposit in month two silently corrupts every client ledger balance downstream of it. Finding it in month four is an afternoon. Finding it in month twenty-six means rebuilding two years of ledgers to locate a single transaction.
What we do not do
We do not tell you your trust account is fine when we cannot prove it. If the records do not support a conclusion, the findings report says exactly that, in those words. A cleanup you can rely on is worth considerably more than one that reads well.
We also do not make judgment calls that belong to you. If a disbursement looks unauthorised, or a client ledger has been overdrawn, we document it and bring it to you. What happens next is a matter for your professional judgment and your ethics obligations.
Questions
About Historical Cleanups
How far back can you go?
As far as your records allow. We have rebuilt multiple years. The limit is almost never our willingness — it is whether bank statements, deposit records and client ledgers still exist for the period. Most banks retain seven years, which usually covers it.
What if my trust account does not reconcile?
Then you need to know that, in writing, as soon as possible. A cleanup that surfaces a trust discrepancy has done its most important job. We document precisely what does not balance and by how much, and hand you a clear record. What you then do about it — including any reporting obligation to your state bar — is a legal and ethical question for you and your ethics counsel, not for us.
How much does a cleanup cost?
It depends entirely on the number of months, the number of accounts, the transaction volume and how much of the underlying record survives. That is exactly what the Diagnostic Review determines. The one thing we can commit to up front is that the quote will be a fixed fee.
How long does it take?
A few weeks for a straightforward year on a low-volume solo practice; considerably longer for multiple years with trust reconstruction. We give you a timeline with the proposal and update you at checkpoints. If you are working to a filing deadline, say so on the first call — it changes how we sequence the work.
Do I have to sign up for monthly bookkeeping afterwards?
No. Cleanup is a standalone engagement and plenty of firms take the finished books back in-house. We will tell you honestly what we think will happen if the process that caused the backlog does not change, but the decision is yours.
Keep going
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Ready when you are
Find out what shape your books are actually in.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether we are the right fit for your firm — and you will leave it knowing more about your own numbers either way.
- No obligation, no sales script
- Straight answer on whether we fit
- Talk to the person who does the work