Catching up 12 months of bookkeeping, fast

The client says the words every bookkeeper has heard: "I haven't really kept up this year." What follows is twelve months of statements, several accounts, and a deadline.

The instinct is to open the oldest statement and start typing. That is the slowest possible route, because it interleaves three different kinds of work — data entry, categorisation, and reconciliation — and every context switch costs you.

Do them in three passes instead.

Pass one: get everything into files

Collect every statement for every account, oldest to newest, and convert them all before you categorise anything. Downloading twelve PDFs from one bank in one sitting is fast; downloading one, converting it, categorising it, then going back for the next is not.

Watch for gaps as you go. If March is missing, you will discover it now — while you are already logged into the bank — rather than in the middle of pass three.

Pass two: verify each month closes

Before any transaction reaches the books, confirm each statement is complete: beginning balance plus every transaction equals the ending balance. A statement that does not close is missing something, and it is much cheaper to find that now than after everything is categorised.

Two additional checks worth doing at this stage:

• Month-to-month continuity. Each month's ending balance should equal the next month's beginning balance. A break means a missing statement.
• Sign conventions on cards. Credit card statements report debt as a positive number. Purchases should end up negative and payments positive before import.

StatementSnap shows the balance check as a badge on every parse, so pass two is mostly a matter of scanning down a list of green badges and stopping at the first one that is not.

Pass three: import and categorise

Now import. QBO files are worth the extra step over CSV here, because they carry a unique id per transaction, so re-importing an overlapping period does not duplicate anything — and with twelve months in flight, you will re-import something.

Categorise last, in one sitting, working newest to oldest. Recent transactions are the ones the client can still remember, and the patterns you establish there ("this vendor is always software") apply mechanically as you work backwards.

What makes this finish

The reason the three-pass order works is that each pass is uniform. Pass one is clicking and saving. Pass two is looking at badges. Pass three is judgement calls. Uniform work is fast work, and — more importantly — it is work you can stop in the middle of and resume tomorrow without losing your place.