Your books are behind. Here is the order to fix them in.

Almost every founder who calls us is behind. Not by a week. By months. And the first question is always the same: where do I start.

The instinct is to start at the beginning, with the oldest month, and work forward. That is the worst order. You will spend three weeks on February, learn nothing that helps you today, and lose interest before you reach the month that matters. The oldest months are also the ones least likely to change a decision you are about to make.

Start with the bank, not the ledger

Before you touch a single transaction, reconcile the bank account to today. Not to last month, to today. Every dollar that left the account is real and already happened. If the bank is reconciled, you have a floor: you know what cash actually did, even if you do not yet know what to call it.

This one step usually takes a day, and it immediately tells you how bad the problem is. If the bank reconciles cleanly, most of what you are missing is categorisation, which is mechanical. If the bank does not reconcile, you have duplicate entries, missing transactions, or an opening balance that was never right, and that has to be fixed before anything else is worth doing.

Then the current month

Close the most recent complete month next, not the oldest open one. The current month is the one you will be asked about. It is the one your dashboard shows. It is the one that tells you whether the business is working right now. Getting last month right gives you a real number to argue with, and a real number is worth more than twelve approximate ones.

The gap in the middle can wait. It is uncomfortable to have a hole, but the hole is not making decisions for you. The current month is.

Then the current year to date, in one pass

Once the bank is clean and the latest month is closed, the middle months go faster than you expect. Most of the transactions repeat. The same six software charges, the same payroll, the same two customers. By the third month you have rules for eighty percent of the volume, and the rest is a short list of exceptions.

Do them in one sitting if you can, or one week if you cannot. The reason to batch is consistency. If you categorise March in April and July in November, you will make different calls, and the trend line will be noise instead of a signal.

Leave the prior years alone until someone asks

Old years matter for tax and for diligence. They do not matter for running the business this month. If a lender or a buyer needs them, that is a project with a deadline and a reason, and it can be scoped then. Cleaning 2023 because it bothers you is a way to avoid the work that actually moves the company.

The one exception is a tax filing that is overdue. That has a real deadline and a real penalty, and it jumps the queue.

Write down what you decided

Every cleanup produces judgement calls. That vendor is contract labour, not software. That customer payment is a deposit, not revenue. That charge is a fixed asset, not an expense. Write them down as you go, in one file, in plain language.

The value is not for you. It is for whoever touches the books next, including you in six months when you have forgotten why March looks the way it does. A cleanup without notes gets redone.

What not to do

Do not hire someone to catch up without agreeing what done looks like. Do not buy a tool expecting it to fix a categorisation problem. Do not move to a new accounting system while you are behind, because you will migrate the mess and lose the history that explains it. And do not wait until the books are clean to look at them. A rough number this week beats a perfect number in March.

If you are behind and you are not sure how far, that is exactly what the free Books Check is for. Fifteen minutes, one month of your file, and a straight answer about the order to fix it in.