The judgement-free catch-up: what to do when you haven’t looked at your books for six months.
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It’s easy enough to do - the busy season hits and you’ve got a million promises to fulfill. Everything else is back-burner. Materials are purchased, jobs are completed, you’re rocking and rolling! But when things finally quiet down, you turn and face the pile of bookkeeping that’s accumulated. Details are foggy. Nothing totally makes sense. And everything takes twice as long when you’ve put off dealing with it. A few weeks has turned into six months, and now you officially need a professional bookkeeping clean-up.
But don’t worry! It happens more often than you think, and it can be fixed. That’s where SWIFT comes in.
Let’s look at what happens when you sign on for a ‘clean-up’ or ‘catch-up’ service.
If you normally keep pristine books that are reconciled monthly, but simply fell behind for a few months, that’s considered a ‘catch-up.’ When the bookkeeper opens this set of books, the Balance Sheet is in balance, the transactions are correctly categorized, and everything is in order. They just need a few extra month’s worth of bookkeeping.
If you have had a lot of hands in your books, or have guessed a lot at categorizing and where to put things, that’s a clean-up, and it’s a bit more complicated, because sets of transactions will need to be reclassified to the correct accounts, and the details of each entry will need to be confirmed as accurate.
When you open a set of messy books, it’s best practice to check all of the details.
What happens next?
With a catch-up:
Each month that requires bookkeeping goes through the same process:
The transactions and receipts are uploaded to Quickbooks, and checked for accuracy.
The bank feeds are downloaded for the same time period.
The accounts are reconciled.
Reports are run and sent.
The books are closed.
With a clean-up:
We begin with the last tax return filed, and verify every transaction since that time for accuracy, completeness and proof (usually in the form of a receipt or invoice). Once we have verified that the transactions are accurate and complete, we reconcile the accounts against the bank feeds. Next, we run the reports.What happens once you’re all caught up?Leave it to a professional, and never worry about it again.
If your tracking isn't airtight, you could be leaving thousands of dollars on the table.
Old-school logging rarely works.
If you're using sticky notes, snapshots or 'commitments to memory' to log your miles, you may forget them as soon as you leave your vehicle.
Trying to keep it straight is stressful.
The details of your mileage tracking often take a backseat, then snowball into a quagmire of forgotten trips at the end of the year.
The IRS has zero tolerance.
If you can't prove the provenance, dates, and exact business purpose of every trip, that valuable deduction, potentially worth thousands, vanishes instantly.
In a paperless back office, tracking mileage requires exactly ZERO mental effort. (And I mean zero).
At SWIFT, we don't just connect bank feeds. We optimize your operational stack. We wean you away from your note pad and remove every drop of logging detail from your life. You're instantly free from having to remember any of it.
Using an app to log your mileage is like having an assistant by your side 24/7, picking up the details for you and making sure they land in the right place, so at the end of the year, or whenever you want to check your mileage log, its waiting for you, updated and ready for tax season.
Meet your new assistant: MileIQ
It runs in the background of your phone.
Simply download and start using.
It logs every every drive automatically.
MileIQ logs the exact route of every drive you take.
Connected to QuickBooks.
Simply swipe for business or personal. That's it - you're done!
MileIQ runs quietly in the background of your phone, automatically logging the exact route of every drive you take.
At the end of the week, you simply swipe right for business or left for personal.
That’s it.
100% compliant. Zero paperwork.
Maximum legal tax deduction preserved without a single minute of wasted time.
Still running like it's 1996?
Let's automate the friction away!
Avoid tax season stress.
Guessing your mileage is an open invitation for tax-season stress or an IRS audit nightmare.
Set it and forget it.
In a productized cloud back office, mileage tracking requires exactly zero thinking.
Easy training.
At Swift Bookkeeping, we train our clients on automated mobile stacks like MileIQ.