Catch-up bookkeeping is almost always priced on a project basis because every situation is different. A business that’s three months behind with clean bank feeds is a completely different project than one that’s two years behind with missing records and multiple bank accounts. That said, you can expect to pay anywhere from $300 to $500 for a few months of backlog on a simple business, and $1,500 to $5,000 or more when you’re dealing with a year or more of neglected books with higher transaction volumes.

The biggest factor is how far behind you are. Three months of catch-up work is manageable and relatively affordable. Two or three years of backlog is a much larger project that requires significantly more time to sort through. Each additional month adds transactions that need to be categorized, reconciled, and reviewed for accuracy.

Transaction volume is the next major factor. A solo consultant with 30 transactions per month is straightforward. A contractor or restaurant doing hundreds of transactions per month across multiple bank accounts, credit cards, and payment processors takes considerably more time to untangle. More accounts and more activity means more reconciliation work.

The state of your records matters too. If your bank feeds are connected and transactions just need to be categorized, that’s cleaner work. If you have a shoebox of receipts, deposits that don’t match invoices, and personal expenses mixed in with business spending, the bookkeeper has to do detective work before the actual bookkeeping even starts. That adds hours.

Whether your QuickBooks file needs to be fixed or built from scratch also affects the price. Some businesses have a file with months of uncategorized transactions that just need attention. Others have a file so messy it’s faster to start over. And some don’t have accounting software set up at all. A QuickBooks ProAdvisor in Jacksonville can assess your file and tell you which scenario you’re in pretty quickly.

One thing worth understanding is that catch-up bookkeeping is a one-time project cost, not an ongoing expense. Once the backlog is cleared and your books are current, you move to regular monthly bookkeeping which is predictable and far less expensive. The catch-up work is the investment that gets you to that point.

If you’re behind because you’ve been putting it off, the cost only goes up the longer you wait. Every month that passes adds more transactions to reconcile. And if you need to file back taxes, your CPA can’t do anything until the books are done. Getting caught up now is almost always cheaper than getting caught up later.