Audit and Review Readiness
Assess whether your trial balance, reconciliations, schedules, contracts, controls, and prepared-by-client package are ready for external accountants.
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For owners, founders, and finance leaders
Bookkeeping Cleanup Assessment
Find the records and account problems that should be corrected before tax, financing, audit, or management use.
5 guided steps
Private in your browser
Official guidance links
Start the free checker
Your free guided checker
Answer a few quick questions below. It is private - nothing is submitted or stored - and takes about a minute.
Informational business diagnostic only; not accounting, audit, tax, legal, investment, lending, or valuation advice.
The questions this tool walks you through
Here is what the checker asks and why each step matters. Prefer to talk it through? Contact us and we will help directly.
Are you in the middle of switching accounting software, or planning to switch in the next few months?
A migration is the one moment when cleanup pays for itself twice - you fix the books once and carry only clean balances into the new system.
Clean the books first, then migrate only reconciled opening balances into the new software.
Official guidance: IRS business recordkeeping
Is more than about two months of transactions unentered, or is the last completed month more than 60 days old?
Two months is a rough line between a routine catch-up and a backlog that needs a dedicated project - confirm the exact gap against your bank feed.
Use the interactive tool above to see how this applies to your situation.
Official guidance: IRS business recordkeeping
Do the same kinds of errors repeat month after month - a chart of accounts that never fit, income booked as a liability, or the same accounts miscategorized over and over?
Recurring, structural errors mean the framework itself is wrong, so entering more months on top of it only multiplies the mess.
Rebuild the chart of accounts and re-post from a clean starting point. Run a full catch-up to bring every account current, month by month.
Official guidance: IRS business recordkeeping
Does the ending balance in every bank and credit-card account currently agree to the matching statement?
If cash and cards reconcile to the penny, the account most likely to hide errors is already clean - the rest is usually cosmetic.
Run a full catch-up to bring every account current, month by month.
Official guidance: IRS business recordkeeping
Are there still uncleared plug balances - an undeposited-funds pileup, a nonzero opening-balance-equity, an ask-my-accountant account, or old receivables and payables no one recognizes?
These are the classic parking lots where miscoded entries hide even when cash reconciles; a nonzero opening-balance-equity almost always signals a prior mispost.
Clear the parking-lot accounts and correct the classifications behind them. Keep a disciplined monthly close and add a light quarterly review.
Official guidance: IRS business recordkeeping
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