Every cleanup and catch up job starts the same way: a client hands over 12 or 24 months of PDF statements. Upload them above and get sortable Excel or CSV rows with the running balance preserved, ready to categorize and reconcile month by month.
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A bookkeeping cleanup corrects books that were kept badly, and catch up bookkeeping enters months that were never recorded at all. Most engagements need both, and both run on the same raw material: every bank and credit card statement for the period, month by month, reconciled against the ledger. The bottleneck is almost never the accounting software. It is getting a year or two of PDF statements into rows you can sort, categorize, and import. BankXLSX converts those statements to Excel or CSV with dates, descriptions, debits, credits, and running balances kept intact, so the cleanup starts with clean data instead of retyping. Last updated August 2026.
The accounting work in a cleanup is judgment: categorization, accruals, owner draws, undeposited funds. The part that eats the hours is upstream of all of that, in the pile of statement PDFs nobody can sort. Here is where the time actually goes.
QuickBooks Online and Xero typically pull only about 90 days of history when you first connect an account, so a 24 month backlog cannot be solved by connecting the feed. The older months have to come from the statements.
A two year catch up means two dozen separate files per account. Opened one at a time, there is no way to sort the whole period by date or amount, and no way to spot the month where the balance stops tying out.
Pasting a statement PDF into Excel merges the description into the amount, wraps long payee names across rows, and drops the running balance, which is the one column that proves nothing was missed.
Cleanups routinely cover an account the client closed or a bank that was acquired mid period. There is no feed to connect and often no CSV download left, only the PDF statements that were saved at the time.
The backlog is rarely one checking account. Add business credit cards plus Stripe, PayPal, and Square, and a single year turns into 60 or more documents that all have to line up.
You cannot close a month until the ending balance in the books equals the statement. Without the opening and closing balance carried through every converted month, finding the break is guesswork.
Upload the whole stack. The converter reads each statement, writes every transaction to its own row, and keeps the structure a reconciliation depends on.
Drop in 12 or 24 months of statements in one go instead of converting them one file at a time, then work the combined output as a single sortable sheet.
Opening and closing balances and the running balance column survive the conversion, so you can prove each month ties out before you move to the next one.
Date, description, reference, check number, debit, credit, and balance each land in their own column, which is what makes bulk categorization possible.
Export as a QuickBooks ready CSV, a QBO or OFX file, or IIF for QuickBooks Desktop, so the cleaned months load into the ledger instead of being keyed in.
Checking, savings, business credit cards, credit unions, and payment processor statements all convert, including accounts that are already closed.
Check the parsed rows on screen against the PDF before downloading, which catches a misread column while it is still cheap to fix.
This is the data prep stage of the cleanup, before any categorization happens.
Download every month for every account in the period: checking, savings, credit cards, and processors. Most US banks keep about seven years of PDF statements in online banking.
Tip: Get all pages, not just page one.
Drag the PDFs into the box above. Keep one account per batch so the output stays clean and each account can be reconciled on its own.
Tip: Scanned statements work too.
Confirm the closing balance of each month equals the opening balance of the next. If a month breaks the chain, a statement is missing before any categorization begins.
Tip: This is the fastest completeness check.
Download Excel to categorize in bulk with filters, or a CSV, QBO, or IIF file to import straight into QuickBooks, Xero, or Wave and reconcile month by month.
Tip: Sort by amount to find the outliers.
Cleanup and catch up engagements are project work, which means a big pile of documents lands at once and the deadline is usually a tax filing, a loan, or a sale.
Take on a cleanup client without losing the first week to retyping statements, and price the job on the accounting work rather than the data entry.
Rebuild a year of books in February so the return can be filed, using statement data that ties to the bank rather than the client memory.
Inherit messy books at onboarding, get the trailing 24 months into a spreadsheet, and find where the ledger and the bank stopped agreeing.
Pull together several years of neglected records for a late filing, an SBA application, or a buyer doing diligence, without keying every line.
Bookkeeping cleanup is the process of correcting a set of books that was kept, but kept wrong. Transactions were categorized to the wrong account, the same expense was entered twice, personal spending was mixed with business spending, and the bank accounts were never reconciled, so the balance sheet no longer reflects reality. A cleanup goes back through the period, fixes those entries, reconciles every account to the statements, and produces financial statements you can actually file a return or apply for a loan with.
Cleanup fixes records that exist but are wrong. Catch up creates records that were never entered at all. In practice most engagements are both, because the business that stopped doing bookkeeping in March also made a mess of January and February. The distinction matters for scoping and pricing, not for the raw material, since either way you are working from the bank statements.
| Bookkeeping cleanup | Catch up bookkeeping | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting state | Books exist but contain errors | Months or years were never recorded |
| Main work | Recategorize, remove duplicates, fix opening balances, reconcile | Enter every missing transaction, then reconcile |
| Typical trigger | Reports look wrong, a CPA rejects the file, a buyer asks questions | A filing deadline, a loan application, an IRS notice |
| Typical timeline | Roughly 2 to 6 weeks per year of history | 1 to 4 weeks for a short backlog, longer past 12 months |
| What you need first | Every bank and card statement for the period | Every bank and card statement for the period |
Published cleanup checklists differ in the details, but the sequence below is the one most firms follow, and it is close to the order Intuit sets out in its own cleanup guide. Do it in order. Categorizing before the statements are in front of you means doing it twice.
In most cases, back to the last period that was filed and reconciled correctly. Tax exposure sets the outer edge: the IRS period of limitations for assessing additional tax is generally three years from the date the return was filed, extends to six years when more than 25 percent of gross income was left off, and does not run at all for a year where no return was filed or a fraudulent return was filed. That is why a business several years behind on filings usually needs a cleanup that reaches back further than one that simply had a sloppy year.
Statement availability is the practical limit. Most US banks keep roughly seven years of PDF statements inside online banking, while the transaction search and CSV download often reach back only 12 to 18 months, which is exactly why the PDF is the document a cleanup runs on. Our guide on how far back you can get bank statements covers what to request when the period predates what is still online.
Plan on roughly two to six weeks per year of history, driven mostly by transaction volume and how many accounts are in scope. A business twelve months behind with moderately messy books commonly finishes in four to eight weeks. Twenty four months of badly neglected records can run twelve to twenty weeks. A short catch up of a few months, where the records are simply missing rather than wrong, often lands inside one to four weeks.
| Backlog | Typical timeline | Statements to convert |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 3 months | A few days to 2 weeks | 3 to 12 documents |
| 4 to 6 months | 2 to 4 weeks | 12 to 24 documents |
| 7 to 12 months | 4 to 8 weeks | 24 to 48 documents |
| 13 to 24 months | 8 to 20 weeks | 48 to 100+ documents |
The document counts assume a checking account, one business credit card, and a payment processor. Add a second entity or a second card and the pile grows fast, which is the argument for converting the whole period in one batch instead of opening files one at a time.
US firms generally price cleanup either as a fixed fee per month of backlog or as a capped hourly project. Benchmarks published by bookkeeping practices during 2026 cluster around 150 to 300 dollars per month behind for simple books, 300 to 600 dollars for medium complexity, and 600 to 1,200 dollars or more where there is payroll, inventory, or multiple entities. Those figures assume something like 50 to 150 transactions a month for a single entity, and S corporations, partnerships, and payroll clients commonly run 30 to 50 percent higher. Some providers also charge a separate onboarding fee. Treat every number here as a market range to sanity check a quote against, not a price list, and confirm current rates directly with the firm you are talking to.
If you are the one quoting the work, the data prep step is the part you can compress. Converting a year of statements is minutes of tool time against hours of manual entry, so the fee stops being tied to keystrokes. Our bank statement converter pricing page breaks down cost per page and per statement so you can put a real number into a cleanup engagement letter.
The catch in QuickBooks Online is history. Connecting a bank feed typically brings in only about the last 90 days, and a manual date range is capped by what the bank exposes, so a feed alone will not rebuild a two year backlog. The dependable route is to convert the statements and import them. Export a QuickBooks ready CSV with date, description, and amount columns, or generate a QBO file so the transactions arrive in the bank feed review queue exactly as a live feed would deliver them. From there you categorize, then reconcile each month against the statement. The QuickBooks bank statement converter covers the format details, and how to import a bank statement into QuickBooks walks the actual import screens. Working in a different system? The same output imports through the Xero bank statement converter, the Wave converter, or the Sage converter. Once the months are loaded, reconciling bank statements is the step that closes each period out.
A firm running several cleanups at once is not converting one statement, it is converting hundreds of pages a month. That is a different problem from a one off conversion, and it is worth setting up properly: see batch bank statement conversion for running a full period in one pass, bulk bank statement processing for firm level volume, and how to batch convert multiple bank statement PDFs for the mechanics. Purpose built pages also exist for bookkeepers, accountants, and tax preparers, and the general bank statement converter handles anything that does not fit a named workflow.
Once the cleaned months are reconciled, the next ask is usually a set of presentable financials for a lender, a board, or a buyer, and turning a finished bookkeeping export into a GAAP style profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statement is a separate job from the cleanup itself. If the client also arrives with a shoebox of receipts backing up the expenses you just categorized, pulling the receipt data into a spreadsheet keeps the documentation with the transactions.
Bookkeeping cleanup is the process of correcting books that were kept but kept wrong: miscategorized transactions, duplicates, personal spending mixed with business spending, and accounts that were never reconciled. The work goes back through the period, fixes the entries, reconciles every account to the bank statements, and produces financial statements accurate enough to file or lend against.
No. Catch up bookkeeping enters transactions that were never recorded, while cleanup corrects records that exist but contain errors. Most real engagements need both, because a business that stopped recording in March usually also made mistakes in January and February. Either way the source documents are the same: every bank and card statement for the period.
Budget roughly two to six weeks per year of history. Twelve months of moderately messy books commonly takes four to eight weeks, and twenty four months of badly neglected records can run twelve to twenty weeks. A short catch up of a few missing months is often done in one to four weeks. Transaction volume and account count drive the number more than the calendar span does.
US benchmarks published during 2026 commonly run 150 to 300 dollars per month of backlog for simple books, 300 to 600 dollars for medium complexity, and 600 to 1,200 dollars or more where payroll, inventory, or multiple entities are involved. Those ranges assume 50 to 150 transactions a month for one entity. Confirm current pricing with the firm you are engaging.
Back to the last period that was filed and reconciled correctly. The IRS period of limitations for assessing additional tax is generally three years from filing, six years if more than 25 percent of gross income was omitted, and unlimited for a year with no return filed. Statement availability sets the practical floor, since most US banks keep about seven years of PDFs online.
Every month in the cleanup period, for every bank account, credit card, loan, and payment processor the business used. Twelve months is the common starting point. Missing even one month breaks the reconciliation chain, so check that each closing balance matches the next opening balance before you begin categorizing anything.
Fix the chart of accounts, set correct opening balances, then import the missing history rather than relying on the bank feed, which typically reaches back only about 90 days. Convert the statements to a QuickBooks ready CSV or a QBO file, categorize in bulk, clear undeposited funds and opening balance equity, and reconcile each account month by month in order.
Most firms price by month of backlog rather than by the hour, scoping from a diagnostic review of the client file before quoting. Count the accounts, the months, and the average monthly transaction volume, then adjust upward for payroll, inventory, multiple entities, and any unfiled returns. Pricing the data entry separately from the accounting judgment keeps the quote defensible.
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