Taking on a client who is a year behind, or catching up your own books before a filing deadline? Convert the whole stack of PDF and scanned bank statements into OFX, CSV or Excel, keep the running balance on every month, and start the cleanup with data instead of a pile of documents.
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A bookkeeping cleanup rebuilds books that fell behind, and it always starts from the bank and credit card statements, because they are the only complete record of what happened once the bank feed window has closed. The practical bottleneck is not judgment, it is getting twelve or twenty four PDF statements turned into transaction data you can import and reconcile. Convert the statements first, oldest month first, then categorize and reconcile month by month so each period ties to the statement balance before you move on.
Every catch up engagement hits the same wall in the first week. The accounting file is empty for the period that matters, the bank feed will not reach back that far, and what you actually have is a folder of PDFs.
Bank feeds typically pull only recent activity, commonly around 90 days. For anything older the connection is no help at all, and the PDF statement is the only complete record of the period you are rebuilding.
Fourteen months across a checking account, a savings account and two cards is more than fifty statements. Handling them one at a time is what turns a week of work into a month of it.
A cleanup that does not start from a verified opening balance will not reconcile at any point after it. That balance comes from the month before the period starts, which is the statement people most often forget to pull.
Import March twice and the register looks plausible while the balance is quietly wrong. Formats without a unique transaction identifier make this easy to do and hard to spot.
The further back you go, the more likely a statement is a scan or a phone photo rather than a clean digital download, which rules out copy and paste entirely.
Online retention varies by institution and a closed account can vanish from online banking. Requesting replacement copies mid engagement adds weeks nobody quoted for.
The goal is to remove the data entry hours without removing the audit trail, so every row still traces back to the statement it came from.
Load up to 50 files in one batch on the Plus plan, each up to 50 MB, instead of feeding a year of statements through one at a time.
Treat twelve monthly PDFs for the same account as a single extraction, so you produce one import file per account rather than one per month.
Each transaction keeps its date, description, amount and running balance, so every month can be reconciled against the statement it came from.
The OFX export gives each transaction a unique identifier, which is what lets accounting software recognize a row it has already imported and refuse the duplicate.
PDF, JPG, PNG, BMP, HEIC and TIFF, which is what older archived statements usually are.
Export OFX for clean reimports, and CSV or Excel for review and categorization.
Oldest month first, one account at a time, reconciling as you go.
Pull all bank and card statements for the period plus the month before it, for every account, before any data entry starts.
Tip: Closed accounts first, since those are the ones that disappear.
Upload the statements, check the extracted rows against the printed totals, then export OFX for import or Excel for review.
Tip: Use the merge option to get one file per account instead of one per month.
Load the earliest period into the accounting file, confirm the opening balance matches the prior statement, then work forward.
Tip: Keep a log of which months went into which account.
Tie each month to the statement balance, then categorize. A month that ties is a month you will not have to reopen later.
Tip: Flag anything with a personal or mixed purpose for the client rather than guessing.
Catch up work concentrates around filing deadlines, financing applications, and the month a business finally hires a bookkeeper.
Cleanup engagements are quoted on volume, so the faster the statement stack becomes data, the better the job prices out.
A client arrives in March with no books and a year of statements. The return cannot be prepared until the period is rebuilt.
Catching up before a loan application, an investor request, or an extension deadline, usually working from downloaded PDFs.
Onboarding often includes rebuilding a prior period so the opening balances in the new system can be trusted.
Work account by account, month by month, oldest first. Pull every bank and credit card statement for the whole period, convert them into transaction data, load them into your accounting file, categorize, then reconcile each month before you touch the next one. The order matters: if you categorize before you reconcile, you end up recategorizing after every correction. Reconciling first forces each month to tie to the statement balance, and a month that ties is a month you never have to reopen.
| How far behind | Statements to gather | What usually decides the effort |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 3 months | 3 to 9 files across accounts | Usually still inside the bank feed window, so the work is mostly categorizing |
| 4 to 12 months | 12 to 36 files | Past most feed windows. PDFs become the only complete record |
| 1 to 2 years | 24 to 72 files | Opening balance research and prior year tax returns start to drive the timeline |
| More than 2 years | 72 or more files | Closed accounts and statement retention limits, not data entry, are the real risk |
Catch up bookkeeping is almost always priced on transaction volume and the number of months, not on a flat rate, so two clients who are both a year behind can differ by a factor of five. The drivers are the number of bank and card accounts, monthly transaction count, whether payroll and sales tax are in scope, and how much of the source paperwork actually exists. Ask any firm quoting you to price the months and the accounts separately, because that is what makes an estimate checkable.
If you are the one doing the work, the honest way to think about it is hours. Data entry is the part that scales linearly with the statement count and it is also the part software removes. Reconciliation, chasing missing statements, and deciding how to categorize an ambiguous vendor are the parts that stay human. Converting the statements does not make a cleanup trivial, it moves the hours from typing to judgment.
Every month in the period you are rebuilding, plus the month before it. The extra month gives you a verified opening balance to start from, which is the single most common thing missing when a cleanup will not tie. If a prior year tax return was already filed, the closing balances on that return set your starting point and anything you build has to agree with it.
Download the statements before you start rather than as you go. Banks retain online statements for a limited window, and a closed account can drop off entirely. Getting a replacement copy later means a written request and a wait, which is how a two week cleanup becomes a two month one.
Partly, and it is worth being precise about the gap. A statement line proves that a payment happened, on a date, for an amount, to a named payee. What it does not carry is the business purpose or the breakdown of what was bought, which is what substantiation actually turns on. For most routine operating expenses the statement plus a short note on the purpose is a reasonable record. For travel, meals, and anything with a mixed personal and business character, the missing receipt is a real gap and worth flagging to the client rather than quietly categorizing.
This is why a cleanup that starts from converted statement data tends to be more defensible than one rebuilt from memory. Every line traces back to a document, and the extracted description preserves the original payee string the bank recorded rather than a guess typed months later.
The most expensive mistake in a cleanup is importing an overlapping period twice, because the second copy looks plausible and the balance is off by an amount nobody can find. Formats differ here in a way that matters. OFX gives every transaction a FITID, a unique identifier that lets accounting software recognize a row it has already seen, so an accidental reimport is caught. CSV carries no identifier at all, and Quicken states plainly that its CSV import does not check for or match existing transactions, so every row in the file is added even if an identical one is already in the register.
The practical rule: prefer OFX when the software reads it and the same account will be loaded more than once or your date ranges might overlap. Quicken cannot import OFX, so for Quicken, and for any CSV import, keep a simple log of which months you have already imported into which account. If you need the data in a spreadsheet for review first, export Excel or CSV for the review copy and import the OFX. For a deeper look at where dates go wrong across programs, see the bank statement date format fix.
A cleanup is the one job where converting statements one at a time is genuinely painful, because the file count is the whole problem. The converter on this page reads PDF and scanned statements, and on the Plus plan you can load up to 50 files in a single batch, each up to 50 MB. There is also a merge option that treats several files as one extraction, which is what you want when twelve monthly PDFs belong to the same account and you would rather produce one file per account than one per month.
Export options are OFX, CSV and Excel. QuickBooks Desktop Web Connect reads only a QBO file issued by the bank, so no converter file loads there. If your destination is QuickBooks Online, the import path and its line limit per file are covered in how to import a bank statement into QuickBooks. If you are handling a genuinely large engagement, the bulk bank statement converter page covers batching in more detail, and the bookkeeper workflow page covers the per client side of it.
Catch up bookkeeping is the work of recording and reconciling a period of business activity that was never entered at the time. It usually means rebuilding several months or years of books from bank and credit card statements, categorizing every transaction, reconciling each month to the statement balance, and producing financial statements the owner or their tax preparer can rely on. Cleanup is the related job of correcting books that were kept but kept badly.
It is priced on transaction volume and the number of months rather than a flat fee, so the honest answer is that it depends on how many bank and card accounts are in scope, how many transactions run through them each month, and whether payroll and sales tax are included. Ask for a quote that prices the months and the accounts separately so you can check it.
The timeline is driven less by data entry than by how complete the source documents are. Gathering statements for every account across the whole period is usually the long pole, especially when an account has been closed or the period reaches past a bank online retention window. Converting the statements and reconciling month by month is the predictable part.
Gather every bank and credit card statement for the period plus the month before it, convert them into transaction data, import them oldest first, categorize, then reconcile each month against the statement balance before moving to the next. Reconciling before you finish categorizing saves rework, because a month that ties is a month you never reopen.
For a short period with a single account and low transaction volume, yes. The judgment calls are what make longer cleanups hard: setting a defensible opening balance, deciding how to treat owner draws and transfers, and handling anything that crosses a filed tax return. Once a prior year return is involved, the cost of getting it wrong usually exceeds the cost of help.
Every month in the period you are rebuilding, plus the one immediately before it so you have a verified opening balance. Download them all before you start, because online statement retention varies by institution and closed accounts can disappear from online banking entirely.
Yes. It reads PDF and image files including scans and phone photos in PDF, JPG, PNG, BMP, HEIC and TIFF. That matters in cleanups, where older statements are often paper that somebody photographed rather than a clean digital download.
OFX, CSV and Excel. For repeated or overlapping imports prefer OFX, because it gives each transaction a FITID that accounting software uses to recognize a row it has already imported. CSV carries no such identifier.
Convert up to 50 statements in one batch.
The per client bookkeeping workflow.
Why OFX imports cleanly and CSV does not.
Stop dates transposing on import.
Get the converted file into QuickBooks.
Get started converting bank statements to OFX.
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