Behind on your bookkeeping? Here's exactly how catch-up works

The 30-second version

Catch-up bookkeeping means bringing a backlog of unrecorded months current: gathering bank and credit card statements, categorizing every transaction, reconciling accounts, and filing anything overdue. At AccruBooks it's priced up front — backlog months at your monthly rate plus 40%, with 20% credited back if you stay on monthly service — and the first step is a quick look at where things actually stand, not a lecture about how they got that way.

How businesses actually end up here

It's rarely one big mistake. It's a busy quarter that ate the hour a week bookkeeping used to take. It's the person who used to handle it leaving. It's a new business where the books were "get to it later" from day one, and later kept moving. None of that is a character flaw — it's just what happens when running the business and recording the business compete for the same hour, and running it wins.

The businesses we hear from are rarely uniquely disorganized. They're normal businesses where bookkeeping slipped for a normal reason, and the gap grew because catching up felt bigger than it actually is.

What catch-up bookkeeping actually involves

None of these steps are exotic. They're the same work regular monthly bookkeeping does, just applied to several months at once instead of one at a time — which is also why the backlog is fixable rather than something to keep avoiding.

Why waiting makes it worse, not better

Two things compound the longer books sit unfinished. First, unfiled HST doesn't expire or quietly go away — it sits there until it's filed. Second, if there's a personal tax balance owing tied up in the mess, the CRA charges daily compound interest starting the day after the balance-owing due date, whether or not the return itself has been filed^[source]. That interest runs on the calendar, not on when you feel ready to deal with it — which is the practical argument for starting now over starting "someday."

There's also a quieter cost: not knowing where the business actually stands. Cash flow decisions, pricing decisions, even whether to take on more work — all of that gets harder to call without current numbers behind it.

What it costs at AccruBooks

We price catch-up the same way we price everything else: plainly, and before any work starts. Backlog months are billed at your monthly bookkeeping rate plus 40%. If you stay on as a monthly client once you're caught up, 20% of that catch-up premium is credited back — so net, catching up runs about 12% more than a regular month would have cost, spread across however many months you were behind. You'll have the exact number before you commit to anything.

Monthly bookkeeping itself starts at $200/month, with HST filings included in the fee — so once you're current, staying current isn't a new problem to solve.

How long it takes

Honestly: it depends. A handful of months with organized statements might move quickly. A couple of years with missing statements, mixed personal and business spending, or multiple accounts takes longer — there's real work in there, and rushing it defeats the point of catching up at all. We'll tell you a realistic timeline once we've actually seen what you're working with, not before.

The first step

You don't need to have it all figured out before reaching out. Two easy starting points: run the free 2-minute books health check to get a quick read on where things stand, or book a 15-minute call through our contact page and just describe the mess out loud — we've heard versions of it before, and neither option requires you to have the statements organized first.

There's no version of "too far behind to bother." The books either get caught up now or later — later just costs more in accrued interest and adds more months to sort through. Now is cheaper.