“Catch-up bookkeeping” is the trade’s name for rebuilding a period that was never kept: taking a year of bank and card statements and turning them into a Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss. In a bookkeeping practice it is called write-up work, and it is billed for the hours it takes. This page is about what those hours cost and why, from the experience of the person who built Rekonix Lite, who did write-up work for small businesses for years before building it.
Where the price starts
For the simplest case, one business, one account, a clean year with no personal spending mixed in, write-up pricing in that practice started at $200 for the year and went up from there. That floor is the time it takes a careful person to prove twelve statements, enter and categorize every line, and produce two statements someone can rely on. A bookkeeper charging less than that is either very fast or not proving the statements.
What pushes it up
- More accounts. Each bank account, card and loan is a separate set of statements to prove and reconcile, and transfers between them have to be matched. Two accounts is not twice the work of one, but it is well over half again.
- More transactions. A consultant with forty lines a month and a café with four hundred are different jobs. Every line is read and categorized.
- Mixed accounts. Personal spending on the business card roughly doubles the sorting, because every line is a decision rather than a glance. See one account for everything.
- Missing months. A statement that is not there stops the work until it is found, and the bookkeeper bills the chasing.
- Reconstruction. Cash that never hit an account, a closed account whose statements are gone, an opening balance nobody knows. Anything rebuilt from memory is slow, and the result carries a caveat.
- Years, plural. Each year is its own job, and a bookkeeper will want them in order because the returns are filed in order.
Put those together and a year that is messy in two or three of these ways runs to many hundreds of dollars, and a multi-year catch-up for a business with several accounts runs well into four figures. None of that is unreasonable for the work. It is just a lot of money for statements the owner needs once.
What you are paying for, and what you are not
Most of a write-up bill is mechanical: reading statements, proving them against their balances, matching transfers, putting a category on each line. A small part is judgment: the unusual item, the owner draw that looks like an expense, the equipment purchase that should be an asset. The mechanical part is where the hours go, and it is the part that can be done another way.
Where $49.99 fits
Rekonix Lite does the mechanical part of a year for $49.99: it reads the statements, proves each statement against its printed balances, matches transfers between your accounts, separates owner draws, and puts a first category on every transaction. The judgment part stays with you, and the product is built so you can do it: you see every line, change any category, and the statements follow. You pay only when you download. It does not do taxes, and it does not replace a bookkeeper or preparer for the items that need one; it means you hand them a finished year instead of a shoebox.
When to hire it out anyway
When the records are not on statements: a cash business, a closed account with no statements, several years of nothing. When the statements need to be on the accrual basis, which bank statements cannot produce on their own. Or when you simply do not want to spend an evening checking categories. In each of those cases, bring the bookkeeper a packet rather than a pile; the mechanical hours come off the bill either way.