Send the statements before you send the story
Catch-up bookkeeping starts with the bank and card statements for every month that is behind. A licensed CPA reviews the rebuild before you see it. The story of the year is useful later. It is not the starting file.
If you are gathering records for a quote, start here: catch-up bookkeeping with a tax deadline. The diagnostic is $499. It is a read-only review of what those records support, and it credits toward the rebuild if you approve the quote in writing.
What belongs in the first pile
- Bank statements for every operating account, for every month that is behind
- Credit card statements for the same months, including cards you used for the business and paid from a personal account
- Loan, line of credit, and merchant processor statements if those accounts moved money
- Payroll reports, if you had employees or contractors paid through a payroll service
- Any existing books, even if they stop halfway through a year
You do not need a perfect chart of accounts before you send this. You need the source documents. IRS guidance on how long to keep records is the floor for what a preparer may still ask for. Banks typically keep about seven years of statements. If a month is missing, order it. Do not fill it from memory.
What to leave out of the first email
Do not spend a weekend recategorizing a dead file so it looks cleaner. A rebuild that starts from edited numbers has to be unwound. Send the statements and the file as it is.
Do not send only the profit and loss someone exported last spring. An export is a summary. The statements are the record.
Do not mix a monthly close into this pile. If the current month is already tidy and the prior years are not, say so. Those are two jobs. Catch-up versus monthly bookkeeping is the split.
What the diagnostic does with that pile
The diagnostic reads the statements and the existing file, if there is one. You get a written findings report: what ties, what is missing, and a fixed quote to finish the rebuild. The $499 credits toward that quote if you proceed. You approve the number before production starts.
Anything without a source document goes in a gap report. We do not estimate a month because the statement is still at the bank.
If you want to see the shape of a finished package before you send records, sample deliverables is a monthly set. A rebuild includes those statements for each year we reconstruct.
Get a fixed quote when the statements are in one place.