Guides · Cleanup pricing
Bookkeeping cleanup cost: what the fee buys, and where your file sits in the range.
A one-time cleanup with us costs $1,800–$6,000, agreed as one fixed fee before work starts. Below: what that fee pays for, the four counts that place your file inside the range, what other firms publish for similar work, and how to test any quote, ours included.
These are our own current prices, not averages gathered from other firms. Your figure is agreed in writing once a free books review has measured the file.
Quick answer
Four counts set the fee: months in scope, accounts, monthly volume, and entries that are wrong rather than late. A year on one or two accounts with late entries sits near $1,800; a year of structural errors across many accounts approaches $6,000. A sound ledger in a misbehaving QuickBooks file may need only the $850–$2,500 file fix.
What the range assumes, and what gets quoted on its own, is set out under what the published range covers.
Market context
What the market publishes.
Other firms put their own figures online. Some lay catch-up out as a ladder by how far behind the books are, one prices it by the month, and two platforms tie it to a subscription. In their words:
- Etisson's catch-up pricing guide, dated April 30, 2026, says: "Catch-up bookkeeping typically costs about $300 to $500 for 1 to 3 months behind, $500 to $1,500 for 4 to 6 months, $1,500 to $3,500 for 7 to 12 months, and $3,500 to $8,000+ for more than a year. Actual cost depends on transactions, accounts, and data quality."
- SDO CPA's catch-up cost guide, updated September 24, 2026, prices its own work by the month: "SDO CPA charges $320 per month of history behind, or $299 per month of history when the books are clean enough for us to work from."
- Xenett's Pulse blog prices catch-up work by backlog: $300 to $800 for a 1 to 3 month low-complexity backlog, $800 to $2,000 for 3 to 6 months (moderate), $2,000 to $5,000 for 6 to 12 months (moderate to high) and $5,000 to $15,000+ for 12+ months (high complexity) (Xenett's catch-up post). On timing, Xenett's cleanup-cost post says: "QuickBooks cleanup typically takes 1 to 8 weeks, with complex issues requiring more time and higher costs."
- Bench's catch-up page says: "Catch-up from January 2026 to the present is free with an annual subscription to Bench." (How Bench's model differs from bookkeeping in your own file is on our Bench comparison.)
- Intuit's help article says of its Full Service bookkeeping: "If you have at least 2 months of data in QuickBooks, there’s a flat fee for cleanup and setup for the first month of service." The amount of that fee isn't published on the Intuit pages we checked.
Our own published range is $1,800–$6,000. For a backlog of a few months, that floor sits well above what these firms publish for a small backlog, and the next section explains why the range starts at $1,800.
Checked: , each quote against the page linked beside it.
Why the floor
Why the published range starts at $1,800.
A cleanup quote rests on a real look at the file: statements against the ledger, the open items, the months involved. Here that look is free, and it closes with a scope and a fixed fee in writing. The $1,800 floor is what lets even a small cleanup carry that review and the documented check before delivery.
Elsewhere the same step is sold on its own: two US bookkeeping firms publish review fees of $599 and $100.00 (checked 2026-09-30), on one firm's diagnostic-review page and the other's clean-up service page.
What the fee buys
What you get for the fee: books your CPA can file from.
Whatever a file costs to clean, it is finished only when your CPA can prepare returns straight from it without repairing it first. Five checks decide that, and a file near $1,800 and a file near $6,000 end on the same five.
In practice that means every period reconciled on each bank, card and merchant account; each transaction coded to the right account; holding accounts cleared, with no balance left unexplained; opening balances that agree with last year's filed return; and support on file for material entries. Anything that can't be closed out, such as a statement the bank can no longer supply, is listed in writing with the reason.
Your CPA keeps the return and every tax decision in it. We keep books and are not a CPA firm: our part is a file your CPA can work from.
How the range is set
How your file is placed between $1,800 and $6,000.
A cleanup fee is our estimate of the work, fixed before we start so that an estimate that runs over is our cost rather than yours. The estimate rests on four counts taken during the free books review.
Months in scope. Every month is proven against its statements, so the length of the backlog sets the least work the job can take. Accounts. Each bank, card, loan and payment-processor account adds one more statement to agree for every one of those months. Transactions. More lines mean more to code and more to check. Wrong entries. This count is what makes the range wide. A month that is merely late can be posted from its statements; a month that is wrong needs each error found, understood and reversed without disturbing the months on either side, and an entry posted to the wrong period also changes the next month's opening balance.
Timing: typically two to eight weeks; the number of months in scope and the speed your statements come in decide where in that window it finishes.
Near $1,800
About twelve months, one or two accounts, ordinary volume, and records that are behind more than they are wrong.
Mid-range
Six to twelve months or several accounts, steady volume, and mistakes spread across many of the periods, the shape of an ordinary operating business that fell behind.
Near $6,000
Up to a year, many accounts, and errors built into the structure. Longer backlogs are scoped as their own engagement, and a file with nothing usable becomes reconstruction.
Price is this guide's subject. The work itself, layer by layer, is laid out on our cleanup service page.
Backlog shapes
Five shapes of backlog, and which of them the range is written for.
Sorted by how far back the gap runs and what survives on file, a backlog takes one of five shapes. The published $1,800–$6,000 is written for the second; the larger ones are scoped as separate engagements once the review has seen the file.
1–3 months behind · light
A short stretch where the account and transaction counts decide the work. With one or two accounts, the fee is the $1,800 floor.
3–12 months behind · the published range
$1,800–$6,000, set by months, accounts and volume taken together. This is the span the range is written for.
12–24 months behind · extensive
At this length the tangle outweighs the calendar, so we quote it as a separate engagement after reviewing the whole file.
24+ months behind · major
Structural problems enter here: several entities, or a chart of accounts that has to be rebuilt before anything can be reconciled. Priced separately once we know what exists.
Nothing usable on file · reconstruction
Books rebuilt from bank statements and source documents alone. That is a financial reconstruction, a different engagement from cleanup, priced once we know which records survived.
For example, a three-month backlog priced at our lowest published monthly fee comes to $550 × 3 = $1,650. Extra accounts, and the time spent correcting rather than simply entering, lift a real file past the $1,800 floor. That explains where the floor sits; it isn't the formula behind a quote, which is fixed in writing once the free review has counted your accounts and errors.
Illustrative example — not client data. Assumptions stated.
Assumptions: each missing month is costed as if it took the same effort as one month of our lowest published monthly bookkeeping fee; one business entity with one or two accounts; entries late rather than wrong; statements on hand for every month. It shows why the floor sits where it does, not how a quote is built.
Inside any shape, one entity with two accounts sits low, while several locations with heavy volume and missing statements can push a file into the next shape up. Until someone has opened the file, any figure is an estimate rather than a price.
Where does your own file fall? The free books review measures it and comes back with one fixed fee and the scope it covers, both in writing.
Free books review
Figure data as a table
| Provider | What it publishes | What sets the figure |
|---|---|---|
| Everholt & Co. | $1,800–$6,000, one fixed fee | Months, accounts, volume and wrong entries, counted in a free review |
| Etisson (pricing guide) | $300–$500 for 1–3 months behind, up to $3,500–$8,000+ for more than a year | Months behind, transactions, accounts and data quality |
| SDO CPA (own rate) | $320 per month behind, or $299 when the books are clean enough | Months of history behind |
| Xenett (Pulse blog) | $300–$800 for 1–3 months, up to $5,000–$15,000+ for 12+ months | Backlog length and complexity |
| Bench | Catch-up from January 2026 free with an annual subscription | The subscription; further back is included with a paid plan |
| Intuit Full Service | A flat first-month cleanup and setup fee; amount not published | Charged in the service's first month |
| Sources: Etisson and SDO CPA pricing guides, Xenett Pulse blog, bench.co, Intuit help article. Checked: 2026-09-30. | ||
Both ends of the range
A file at each end of the range, count by count.
One published range, two very different files. The first grid shows how months and accounts move a file across the range while the entries are late rather than wrong; the second sets a file from each end next to each other.
Illustrative example — not client data. Assumptions stated.
| Months in scope | 1–2 accounts | 3–4 accounts | 5 or more accounts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 3 months | At the $1,800 floor | Bottom of the range | Lower half |
| About 6 months | Bottom of the range | Lower half | Middle |
| About 12 months | Near $1,800 | Middle | Upper half |
| More than 12 months | Scoped as its own engagement after the review | ||
Assumptions: one business entity, ordinary transaction volume for its size, complete statements available, and records that are behind more than they are wrong. Wrong entries move every cell to the right; a year of structural errors across many accounts approaches $6,000.
| Count from the review | A file near $1,800 | A file near $6,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Months in scope | About twelve | Up to twelve |
| Accounts | One checking account and one card | Several bank accounts, cards, a loan and a payment processor |
| What's wrong | Months entered late or not at all; little recorded wrongly | Duplicates, miscoded months and forced reconciliations across many periods |
| Holding accounts | Empty, or a handful of items | A balance that has grown for years |
| Opening balances | Agree with last year's filed return | Don't agree, so the start point has to be rebuilt |
| The work | Post from statements, code, reconcile, review | Find and reverse each error without disturbing the months either side, then reconcile and review |
Both files finish in the same place: every account reconciled to its statements and a written list of anything left open. The gap in price is the investigation, not the finish.
What moves a file up
Three errors that push a file toward the top of the range.
Each one turns a month that could be posted from statements into a month that has to be investigated, which is the difference between the bottom of the range and the top.
The same charge, recorded twice
A card charge is keyed in by hand and then arrives again through the bank feed. Both copies stay in the books period after period, so expenses read higher than they were and prices or staffing get set on margins that look thinner than they are. A file the owner keeps without a monthly reconciliation lets this go unnoticed. The fix: pair every duplicate, void the hand-keyed copy, then prove against each statement that every charge appears once per period.
Card revenue missing from the books
The account where card-sale settlements land was never linked to QuickBooks, so months or even years of card revenue are absent and the business appears to earn far less than it does. The more of its sales a business takes by card, as restaurants, shops and medical practices do, the larger the hole. The fix: link the account, import the historical settlements, match them to daily sales reports, then reconcile each affected period from the first unlinked month onward.
An uncategorized balance that keeps climbing
Whenever nobody was sure how to code something, it went to "uncategorized expense" or "ask my accountant" to be sorted out later. Later rarely comes, and over a few years an account like that can hold thousands of transactions. The fix: check each item against its source document, code it to the right period and category, and assign the class, location or job where those are tracked. A holding balance above zero three months running is the early warning that a file is heading for cleanup.
Naming the job
Behind, wrong, or both: which job you are pricing.
Catch-up work fills months where nothing was recorded. The file is blank for that stretch, so the job is entering, coding and reconciling from statements. Cleanup corrects months that were recorded badly: duplicates, wrong categories, unreconciled accounts, holding accounts that kept growing. The file is full but can't be trusted, and the job is investigative.
Plenty of real files need both. A business fourteen months behind may have some months entered badly and others not entered at all, and one fixed fee covers the two together. The more precisely the job is named up front, the more precise the price that comes back. For a stretch that was never entered, pricing catch-up for blank months covers how that work is priced and the documents each month needs.
Testing a quote
How to test any cleanup quote, ours included.
Hold every quote to the five checks above. Ask which months and accounts it names, whether each account will be reconciled to its statements, what happens to the holding accounts, and what you receive at the end. A quote that can't answer those four has priced a guess.
A cleanup that stops short of the five checks hasn't saved you money. It has moved the unfinished part to your CPA, who then has to finish it before the return can start. Paying for the same months twice costs more than getting them right once. The quote comparison worksheet turns those questions into a grid you can fill in for each firm.
Billing models
Hourly or fixed: which side carries an estimate that runs over.
Firms price cleanups both ways. We fix the fee; plenty of good firms bill by the hour. What matters is knowing which risk each one leaves with you.
| Question | Hourly billing | Fixed fee |
|---|---|---|
| What the quote is | An estimate of hours; the invoice is the price | The price, in writing, before work starts |
| Who carries an estimate that runs over | You | The firm |
| When a new problem turns up | More hours are billed | Covered, unless it falls outside the written scope, in which case it is quoted before any extra work |
| What sets the figure | Time spent | A measured scope: months, accounts, volume and errors |
| What to ask for | A written cap, and what happens at the cap | The months and accounts named in the scope |
A fixed fee works only when the scope is measured first, which is why ours follows a free books review rather than a phone call. To line up quotes of either kind on the same terms, use the printable comparison grid: thirteen questions, one column per firm, with a PDF to print.
Waiting
What waiting costs, even without an invoice.
A cleanup has a ceiling: the fee written into its scope. Books left as they are carry costs of their own, in five places:
Tax preparation that starts with repairs
The books have to be corrected before a return can begin, and that correction lands on your CPA's time.
Decisions on old numbers
Prices, hires and spending set from figures nobody trusts, for as long as the books stay behind.
Slower loan applications
When your financial statements disagree with the returns you filed, a lender has questions before it has an answer.
Notices without a trail
A balance that moved with no record behind it is hard to explain if a tax agency writes, and the reply takes longer to put together.
The weight on the owner
Real, persistent, and no line on any invoice, which is why it gets underrated until the books are finally handed off.
FAQ · Updated October 2026
Cleanup pricing, question by question.
Every rung of our price list is on the published price list. For keeping the books current once they're clean, see our monthly bookkeeping service; more reading in all guides.