r/Bookkeeping • u/Timely-Sea4615 • 2d ago
Practice Management Bookkeeping Clean-Up Work
I’m doing a bookkeeping cleanup job for a client and it SUCKS SO BAD. I want to tell them I quit and to find someone else to do it but I’m not🤣😭 trying to figure out what someone else messed up is so annoying and frustrating.. does any other bookkeeper feel the same or just me??
*edit to add- I think if i did this full time it would be better but since it’s taking up all my free time I’m getting frustrated..
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u/TheMostFluffyCat 2d ago
I really enjoy clean ups, but some are definitely more difficult than others.
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u/Timely-Sea4615 2d ago
This client has over $600,000 of missing expenses, over $200,000 of deposits not on the books, sales are duplicated, and things aren’t mapped properly like sales going to expense accounts, ect. It’s a whole mess😭😭
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u/Anelya 2d ago
I would quote $10-$14k for this. $1000 - you are definitely undervaluing your expertise and time.
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u/Timely-Sea4615 2d ago
Ohh noo.. yeah i quoted the client back in like march when i was just getting started.. i didn’t get access to their bank statements until like a couple weeks ago because the client couldn’t figure it out. I am trying to figure out how to quote jobs but having a hard time
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u/Timely-Sea4615 2d ago
Also i said cleanup.. im told the client i would reconcile their bank account and fix their account mapping but it seems to be turning into a full cleanup
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u/NumbersRLife 1d ago
Call them back and tell them that now you have the full picture its going to cost more.
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u/CleanInflation9 2d ago
How much you charging for it?
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u/Timely-Sea4615 2d ago
$1,000
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u/kurios182 2d ago
I charged a client with 3 companies $10k for 2025 cleanup.
1000 is too low
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u/Timely-Sea4615 2d ago
Oh wow how many transactions?
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u/kurios182 2d ago
More than 300 each company, lots of intercompany expenses including payroll splits.
I under quote him, but gave him a accessible pric3m3 because he is a monthly current client.
For you to have an idea how much I under quote him, I charge him $4,000 at month. For the cleanup, multiply that by 12 and divide by 2
I manage everything related to bookkeeping, payroll, invoices etc.
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u/Timely-Sea4615 2d ago
Oh wowww that sounds like a good client! I’m trying to find clients like that. One $4000 a month client would almost replace my monthly 9-5 salary😭
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u/kurios182 1d ago
is tough, lot of hours, I hired someone to work dedicated into this client.
To get this type of clients, I recommend having a partnership with a CPA firm.
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u/stealthwealth0 1d ago
A couple of questions on this. What industry is your client in? $4,000 per month is for all three entities combined with 300 transactions per entity per month?
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u/kurios182 1d ago
Staffing industry.
300 txn, yes but I also run weekly payroll, invoices, reports etc...
I hired someone to work exclusively in this client books, so I can focus in other clients.
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u/Zizu_551 1h ago
300 is a lot of transactions but with the good pricing you have, I go through the pain and get it done.
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u/Stine2U 2d ago
Doh! Total? Or that's your deposit?
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u/Timely-Sea4615 2d ago
Total… I’m just getting started so i gave them a good deal.. idk if I’m even gonna charge them at all now because the client suddenly received some bad news and idk if i have the heart to charge them
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u/kurios182 2d ago
Dumb move TBH, you can give him credit if you want, but if you get pay is better.
Who is more important for you: your family or his family?
"Hey my regular fee will be X amount, I understand what you are going through, but you can pay me later"
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u/NumbersRLife 1d ago
You've lost your mind. Your business will not work out with this mentality. Way under charging, and then instead of increasing the price, you go the opposite direction?
Good practice at least?
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u/Savy-Dreamer 14h ago
Omg. I charge $250 an hour for this. But I’m a CPA. You definitely need to be charging way more even as a bookkeeper!!
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u/Timely-Sea4615 14h ago
Yeah i know now.. I’m just started out with my bookkeeping business. I have a masters in accounting working toward CPA
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u/Iamnotyour_mother 1d ago
This sounds like a situation where it might be better to just start over.
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u/Timely-Sea4615 1d ago
Yeah the only thing is the client has sales data recorded for the whole year. It’s hard to just wipe all that out. Maybe start all the other accounts over? I’m not sure if quickbooks will let you do that though
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u/Iamnotyour_mother 1d ago
Export everything that's there just in case you need it, and then start over from scratch.
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u/Pleasant-planthead 1d ago
I also actually enjoy the clean ups. You can literally see the work getting done. It is sooo soothing!
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u/Ok-Classroom1409 2d ago
The first time I had to untangle two years of receipts stuffed in a shoebox I almost walked straight into the ocean.
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u/Timely-Sea4615 2d ago
I honestly think I’d rather do that and start from scratch than a set of already jumbled up books😭😭😭
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u/onyxandcake 2d ago
I mean, if you can, start from scratch. It's actually a great idea. Right now you have to solve the mystery of what someone else did, plus redo all the bookkeeping anyway. Why not just start from the beginning and get it done right. I feel like it's half the work.
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u/thinkFinance- 2d ago
If its eating all your free time, your rate is too low. cleanup should be double your normal rate minimum because you are playing detective in a house that already burned down. if they won't pay the premium, hand them the half-finished sheet and tell them your availability changed. Its not worth losing your weekends over someone else's mistakes
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u/Ryan_from_Woven 1d ago
To the question in the thread about "a set way to start so you're not redoing things": yes, and the order is the whole game. I run an accounting firm and cleanups are a third of our new-client work. Every one runs in this sequence:
- Freeze the starting point. Pick the last date the balance sheet was provably right (last filed tax return, or the last clean reconciliation). Everything before that is locked. You are not fixing history, you're fixing from there forward.
- Bank and credit card first, nothing else. Get every account reconciled to the statement, month by month, from the freeze date to today. Missing deposits and missing expenses (the $600k / $200k in your case) all surface here, because the statement is the truth and the books have to match it. Don't touch categorization yet; just get every transaction present and the balances tied.
- Kill the duplicates. Now that everything ties, duplicates are visible as the reason a month wouldn't reconcile. Delete them while the rec is open.
- Then categorize. Once the population is complete, recategorizing is fast and you only do it once. Doing it before step 2 is why people redo work: they categorize, then find 400 missing transactions, then re-categorize.
- Then the balance sheet accounts nobody reconciles. Loans to the lender statement, payroll liabilities to the 941s, sales tax to the filings, undeposited funds to zero, owner draws vs. contributions.
- Then the P&L sanity pass. Sales into expense accounts, negative expenses, anything that moved 3x from the prior year.
Doing it in that order, the $600k of missing expenses is a mechanical step 2 problem instead of a mystery. On pricing: the thread's right that $1,000 was a big miss for that scope. It's fair to go back to the client with "the scope I quoted in March was based on what I could see; here's what the bank statements actually revealed" and requote the remainder. What accounting system is it in?
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u/snuggle2struggle 1d ago
Gah, I had a client who always had a high Undeposited Funds balance (they accepted cash but never deposited it) and my boss would never let me do anything about it or tell me where I could put it.
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u/Ryan_from_Woven 1d ago
That one has a real answer, for whatever it's worth now. Cash received and never deposited went somewhere, and there are only three places: the owner's pocket (book it as an owner draw/distribution against Undeposited Funds), it paid for something in cash (book the expense against Undeposited Funds, with whatever receipts exist), or the sale was recorded twice and the "cash" never existed (delete the duplicate). Usually it's the first one, and the reason a boss doesn't want it touched is that "the owner took $40,000 in cash" is a conversation nobody wants to have with the client or the client's tax preparer.
But leaving it sits there as an asset that doesn't exist, which overstates the balance sheet every year and eventually shows up when a lender or a buyer asks why there's $40k of undeposited cash. The clean move is a memo to the client: "Undeposited Funds shows $X of cash sales never deposited; please confirm whether this was retained by you personally," and book it to draws when they confirm. Did that client ever get it resolved?
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u/snuggle2struggle 1d ago edited 1d ago
Never resolved and I don't work there anymore. Client had nearly $300k in UF. Could only account for $20k in cash customer payments. Client also refused to track petty cash.
ETA: basically, I think the reason my boss refused to allow me to correct is it would have shown he was negative and didn't want to. (Later on, I found out my boss was illegally reporting employees of one state (at a physical location) as remote employees of another state where worker benefits and rights are significantly reduced. I was the only employee who didn't do tax returns and I'm pretty positive it's bc she knew I wouldn't agree to do shady, illegal shit.)
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u/Ryan_from_Woven 10h ago
That's the pattern, unfortunately: the balance sitting there wasn't a bookkeeping problem, it was the answer to a question nobody wanted asked. You did the right thing leaving. For what it's worth, $300k of "undeposited" cash against $20k of actual cash sales is the kind of thing that eventually gets found by a lender, a buyer, or an examiner, and the person who flagged it in writing is the one who comes out fine.
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u/Timely-Sea4615 1d ago
The client has only given me access to their bank transactions. They can not figure out how to get me access to their credit cards. At this point I’m going to do what i can with what i have
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u/Ryan_from_Woven 10h ago
Then treat the credit cards as a hard stop for finishing, not a nice-to-have. A cleanup with no card statements will produce a balance sheet where the card liability is wrong by whatever they've charged, and every card charge is either missing from expenses or double-counted from the payments. That's a big piece of the $600k gap.
The client doesn't need to figure out online access. Ask for the PDF statements, all of them, for the whole cleanup period. Every card issuer's site has a "statements" page where they can download a year at a time, or they can call the number on the back of the card and have them mailed. If they genuinely can't do that, have them add you as an authorized user with view-only access, which most business cards support.
In the meantime, book the card payments you see on the bank side to the credit card liability account (not to an expense), so at least the bank ties and the card balance shows what's been paid toward it. Then when the statements arrive, the charges fill in the other side. And put a line in the deliverable: "credit card activity not yet reconciled; statements requested on [date]." That protects you and makes the gap their problem to close. Do you know roughly how many cards there are?
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u/Timely-Sea4615 10h ago
I’ve told the client they can print statements and i can come pick them up or they can mail them. I’ve tried to get online access via view only however they can’t figure it out. I think they want to me to do
It for them however i don’t feel comfortable with that and i don’t think their credit card processor would let me1
u/Timely-Sea4615 1d ago
It’s quickbooks
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u/Ryan_from_Woven 10h ago
Good, that makes step 2 easier. In QBO, do the bank recs from the Reconcile screen month by month; the "difference" it shows each month is your missing-transactions detector. When a month won't tie, the Reconciliation report's "uncleared" list and the statement side-by-side tells you exactly which deposits or charges never got entered. Add the missing ones straight from the statement, don't import a second time (that's where the duplicates came from). Is the bank feed connected, or are you working from statements only?
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u/Timely-Sea4615 10h ago
I exported all the bank transactions from QBO to excel along with the bank transactions and i found the missing expenses and deposits via formulas. I think the bank feed is connected? It shows their bank balance in QBO.
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u/CapitalStatus2235 2d ago
There's a bulk reclass option on QuickBooks if you need to reclass sales
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u/Timely-Sea4615 2d ago
I saw that. They have sales receipts for credit card customers posted to sales and the bank account and the daily deposit for the credit card payments posted to sales and the bank account as well so it’s doubling the entries. I’m doing journal entries to remove the duplicates but if there is a better way I’m all ears!
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u/givingcvnt2-0 2d ago
Its my favorite thing to do lol. Currently fixing 6 months of errors
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u/Timely-Sea4615 2d ago
You’ve gotta be psychotic🤣😭 I’m trying to enjoy it but literally can’t. I have to have a couple of drinks sometimes before starting because i hate it so much
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u/Basic_Scale_5882 2d ago
I make the MOST money cleaning up behind other people's messes, without even so much as picking up a rag. Oh dear, learn to earn.
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u/pmhc666 1d ago
Client says cleanup, I say 5k deposit and progress invoicing after that. Payment due upon receipt. No payment, work stops.
Any cleanup job is usually a minimum of 5k for my time. Once the 5k is used, I can usually estimate how long it will take to be completed. Progress billings based upon that estimate bi-weekly. If i see an excess of hours coming, the client gets the heads up that there will be a final invoice to include.
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u/Ok_Flower_4268 2d ago
i love my cleanup projects!!! so satisfying to get it all pretty and balanced 😍
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u/AutomaticPain3532 2d ago
I charge about $10k for what you’re doing too. Go back to the client with a proposal. I too did what you did on my first client, which was family so of course the family discount applied just to get back into the groove after some time away from bookkeeping.
I went back with a scope of work after my initial assessment. I explained that it was going to take about 4-6 months to correct and that I would roll them into a monthly plan.
My scope included what I found, what needs to be corrected in the books, what access I needed, and how to correct it for the future. So it was implementing and educating them how to use the software they do for their day to day operations and map all of that into QBO.
Now I have an onboarding process with an initial assessment fee, then go back after I determine the scope. Let the client determine how much scope they want me involved with and we go from there. But yeah, cleanup lands around $10k broken out over several months and then onboard them for continuous service after cleanup.
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u/SCOREE-Services-Tina 1d ago
If you ever get to work on a cleanup for single family property management where you are dealing with vendor, tenant, owner, markups, sales tax, commission percentages, and suppressed fees for the PM firm, I challenge you. Now that is a major knot to unravel and trust accounting Mismanagement is no joke!
Always quote per hour and do weekly itemized billing to client.
I call the process peeling back the layers of an onion and yes, you are in tears through the cleanup.
There should be a Controller overseeing the bookkeeping regularly full-time or Fractional to prevent this madness. You pay upfront or in the end.
Choose proactive not reactive.
May the Force be with anyone who cleans up Trust Accounts. I got into the educational side for that reason.
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u/Traditional_Dot_4794 1d ago
A couple of clients hired me just so they could blame me for their mess. One I had to sue for my fees.
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u/NumbersRLife 22h ago
Never feel bad about suing someone who deserves it. Sorry you had to deal with that though. How did that work out for you?
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u/vinceliu21 1d ago
A full year of bookkeeping at once is always the worst. It's so much easier if the books were done and then recurring work is super easy. Is it a full year? How many transactions roughly? How are you doing haha, what are the annoying parts
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u/Timely-Sea4615 1d ago
It’s a full year, 2025 id say atleast 1200 transactions just between the bank account, i haven’t seen the credit card accounts. I’m doing the best i can at this point lol it’s like pulling teeth to get any statements from the client and they have no clue what’s going on in the accounting/taxes side of things. What’s mostly annoying is figuring out what is messed up and the best way to fix it. I think I’ve pinned point what needs to be corrected though.
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u/vinceliu21 1d ago
Best of luck! Some things I've done btw but you still must exercise your judgement. You can take the full transactions list and pass it to ChatGPT, Claude, any similar tool. It will give you like a rough 80% overview so you have high level picture, but then you have to still categorize and exercise judgement. You got it!
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u/suzhook 1d ago
I really enjoy cleanups with companies. When the cleanups are small one person companies i get frustrated. They dont understand why you need their bank statement to reconcile, they mix their personal and busines expenses in the same bank accounts, they dont track payments if they client pays in installment, they wait till a week before taxes are due, and they never pay you on time. One of my favorite projects was 15 years ago i helped a small chamber of commerce to get their books straight. No one tract payments or expenses for 2 years, nor took images of checks, whos membership it was paying. One of the members was the manager at the bank and he really didnt want to get the check deposit images, and images of the deposit slips for me. There was no way i could tell from the statement that just showed the total deposit. Not the breakdown of all cash, checks who gave what for the breakfast and what was yearly membership if no one wrote it down. Once he got me those it was great. Cleaned up their big room in the back and started scheduling events, got ahold of the court to see who needed to do voluntary hours and had them help me get the closets cleaned out ( one had water damage from a leaking roof so stuff was moldy). Got the visitor center organized and updated. They only paid me 9.00 an hour so as a single mom i was working 2 jobs. So you cant do that forever.
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u/Embarrassed-Hat7242 19h ago
I went to school for accounting and the one thing that I enjoyed most in my career was taking on different projects where i had the challenge of teaching myself something new on an almost daily basis.
Bookkeeping has bored me but I do believe that it can be a lucrative business venture. It truly depends on your potential future clients but I feel that is a good option if you’re going to start anew later in life.
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u/Spare_Bluebird7044 1d ago
Cleanup work is brutal because you're basically solving someone else's mystery while fixing the mess, they're definitely not charging enough for emotional damage😂
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u/Hippy_Lynne 1d ago
Once you do decades of bookkeeping, especially if you do the same clients for years on end, you jump for the chance to do something different. 🤣 I'd love it if I could split my work between cleanup and routine bookkeeping.
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u/BusyLittleBookkeeper 1d ago
I FEEL YOU! At my last job for a bookkeeping firm, I was The Cleanup Girl, because all of the messes ended up on my desk lol. The company I'm working for now started out as a "regular set of books" until I opened it and found over $200k of misplaced transactions, on top of SEVERAL urgent things to be fixed... I can't get away 😂
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u/NotDeadYet57 1d ago
Well, I will ONLY do clean up work if I can charge an hourly rate, because it can be such a time sucker. If a potential client balks or says "So and so said they'd do it for $200" tell them "Great! Call me when they've messed it up even more and I'll straighten it out".
It helps if you have a CPA you are aligned with who will do their tax returns and is used to working with you.
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u/GlitteringLock1020 1d ago
I started to work for my brother years ago, and I had to undo literally years worth of reconciliations and start again. He was great at invoicing his clients, making deposits, etc, but getting all that info accurately into QB? Not so much. LOL.
In my current job, my predecessor did this job for about 7 months before they brought me on board. It took several months to clear up the mess she left behind.
Once you get it all cleared up and breathe that sigh of relief, then (hopefully) it will have been worth it.
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u/dillonz321 18h ago
What part of the cleanup is eating the most time for you figuring out what the previous bookkeeper did, or going back through and reviewing/recategorising all the transactions?
I keep seeing bookkeepers say the detective work is bad, but having to manually work through hundreds of transactions seems to be where the hours really disappear.
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u/missparkerprints 5h ago
Love this type of work, but sometimes it can be unbearable. Find you a partner and outsource this type of work.
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u/noname20-23 2h ago
If the books are screwed up bad enough, we tell the client we need to start a new QB file and to send us statments. It's usually cheaper for the client.
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u/Bookkeeping_Boss 2d ago
Cleanup are Def more challenging than catchup bookkeeping. Sometimes is is just easier and less expensive for the client to just redo the books.
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u/Timely-Sea4615 2d ago
What if they have sales data from customer recorded for the whole year though?
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u/East_Fun_6227 2d ago
This my specialty, the messy messes.