You didn't start a business to live inside last year's mess.
Backlog cleared. Accounts reconciled. A clean handoff you and your CPA can trust. Done in QuickBooks. Fixed fee. Free assessment.
If this is your week…
You're not bad at business. The books just stopped telling the truth about your business.
You don’t trust the number
Cash in the bank and the P&L never agree, so every decision feels like a coin flip.
The backlog has a gravity of its own
Every month you promise “we’ll catch up.” Every month the pile gets heavier.
Tax season becomes a hostage situation
You pay for cleanup under deadline pressure instead of on your terms.
The Small Business QuickBooks Cleanup Package
Fixed-fee cleanup for owners who want numbers they can run a business on.
Full diagnostic review
Every account reconciled and every anomaly documented before we change a thing.
Catch-up categorization
The backlog cleared with industry-correct categories, not a generic chart of accounts.
Clean handoff report
A before/after summary and simple monthly rhythm so it stays clean.
If our assessment can’t show you exactly what’s wrong and what it costs to fix, the assessment costs you nothing. No obligation either way.
Your draw, the sales tax, and undeposited funds are not the same money
Friday, you moved the rent money into personal checking because the company login was the one holding cash. That transfer is not a supply bill and it is not a paycheck. It is equity leaving. Equity is the claim between you and the company, and a draw shrinks it. Wages are a different machine: a payroll run creates amounts still owed for taxes, and those amounts clear only when the tax money actually departs. If Friday's transfer was typed as "office" or as wages with no payroll run behind it, both the profit picture and the payroll picture are fiction.
Tax added at the register belongs to the state until you mail it in. It is a debt, set aside, not a boost to sales and not a cost on the day you pay it. Picture a customer total that includes the tax, entered as if the whole total were sales, and the later check to the state entered as if it were a vendor bill. Sales look puffed up. Costs look puffed up. The debt slot, which ought to show anything not yet mailed, shows nothing. Put the rung-up piece on that debt. Put the check to the state against the same debt. Only the unmailed remainder remains. That slot is the sales-tax liability, and it is not a junk drawer.
There is also a holding tray for customer receipts that have not yet been grouped into one drop. The tray is supposed to go empty when the drop clears. Its name in the software is Undeposited Funds. It stays cluttered when a receipt never got included, or when the drop was typed a second time as its own entry. Then the tie-out argues with itself: the software still thinks cash is sitting in the tray, and the bank already counted it. Match each drop to the receipts inside it. Clear the ones that arrived.
Outside helpers are the last snarl. You paid a person who is not on payroll, and the line has a category but no name. The year-end form you may owe that person has nowhere to land. Those are the vendor lines people mean when they say 1099. Flag the nameless lines. You say who it was. The line stops being anonymous. You do not reconstruct the whole register before that flag exists.
None of the four is a character flaw. A draw is equity leaving. Register tax is a debt to the state. The holding tray is only a timing gap. A nameless helper is a missing name. Call them that, and the login stops arguing with the cash.
The form on this page is for a company login that has stirred these four together. Leave them stirred. Sending them stirred is the point.
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Common questions
Is money I pay myself an expense in QuickBooks?
Not if it is a draw. A draw reduces equity. It is wages only when you actually run payroll, because payroll creates liabilities that must clear when the taxes leave the bank. Transfers coded as office expense make profit look worse than it is.
Where should sales tax I collected sit in the file?
On a liability, until you send it to the state. It is not income, and the payment is not an expense. Recording the deposit as sales including tax, and the payment as an expense, counts the tax twice in opposite directions.
Why does undeposited funds never go back to zero?
Payments were received and never grouped into the deposit that hit the bank, or the deposit was entered a second time on its own. The holding pen should empty when the cash arrives. The cleanup matches each deposit to the payments inside it.
How far behind is too far behind?
We’ve rebuilt books from bank statements alone going back multiple years. There is no “too messy.”
Will you judge the mess?
Never. Messy books are a symptom of a busy business. Fixing them is literally what we do all day.
What happens after the cleanup?
You get a simple monthly closing rhythm. Keep it in-house or have us maintain it. Your choice, no lock-in.