Cleaning Up 12 Months of Messy Books

Bank and credit card reconciliations for every month. Reclassifying miscoded transactions. Fixing the chart of accounts. Separating owner-paid expenses from business expenses. Resolving uncategorized income. Producing a clean trial balance.

Most cleanups run 2–4 weeks per fiscal year covered, depending on transaction volume and source-document quality. Multi-entity and multi-state businesses take longer.

Missing bank statements. Personal expenses run through the business with no clear category. Loans and capital injections booked to revenue. Inventory or job costing that was never set up correctly.

Clean trial balance. Reconciled bank and credit card accounts. Restated P&L and balance sheet. A documented chart of accounts. A list of recommended adjustments for tax filing.

Without a monthly close cadence after cleanup, books drift back into the same state within a quarter. The cleanup is the start of a system, not a one-time fix.