Worked example · catching up
Seven months behind: what catching up actually involves.
Catching up is three jobs, not one. Rebuild what the records can prove. Ask for what only the business can supply. Then be explicit about what neither of those settles. The third job is the one usually left out, and leaving it out is exactly what makes a caught-up set of books look finished when it is not. Below, seven months are brought current: what could be reconstructed from bank data, what had to come from a person, four things nobody was looking for, and the nine items still open on the day it was called done.
Illustrative worked example. Not a customer case study. Quillon Systems is an invented eleven-person software services company, and every month, supplier, figure and finding below is invented with it.
“Seven months behind” almost never means seven months of nothing.
January was closed and reconciled. February through August were not. What that actually looked like on the day the work started is worth setting out, because the phrase suggests an absence and the reality is usually a surplus of unusable material.
- The bank feed was still connected and still importing. 1,912 transactions across three accounts sat in the accounting system, present and uncategorised — recorded in the sense that a photograph of a room records its contents.
- Ninety-six sales invoices had been raised, sent and, in most cases, paid. They lived in a separate invoicing tool and had never reached the books.
- Supplier bills were in two inboxes and a shared drive, filed by nobody in particular.
- Payroll had run every month through a bureau. The reports had been downloaded and never posted.
- No account had been reconciled since January, so no figure in the system had been agreed to anything outside it.
How it happened does not need a villain. Two large projects landed in March, the person who had been keeping the books moved onto delivery work, and the first month left undone made the second one harder. Nobody decides to fall seven months behind; it happens one busy month at a time. The mechanics of that compounding are a separate subject, set out in why bookkeeping gets reconstructed at month-end.
The bank is the spine. It is not the story.
The order of the work is decided by what is provably complete. Bank and card data is complete by construction: the bank holds every movement whether or not anybody wrote it down, and nothing is missing because a person forgot to mention it. Everything else in a catch-up is partial until proven otherwise. So the rebuild starts from the bank and hangs the rest off it.
What that spine can and cannot carry is the whole craft of the job. A bank line proves an amount moved, on a date, between two accounts, under whatever narrative the payer happened to type. It cannot say what the money was for, whether it was a business cost at all, which period the cost belongs to, whether it was a purchase or a repayment or a transfer between the company’s own accounts, or whether an invoice exists behind it. Every one of those is supplied by something else.
| Source | Completeness at the start | How the gap was closed |
|---|---|---|
| Bank and card movements — 1,912 across three accounts | Complete. Held by the bank regardless of what anybody recorded. | Downloaded in full for the whole period and used as the spine everything else was matched against. |
| Sales invoices — 96 issued | Complete, but outside the books entirely. | Exported from the invoicing tool, entered in date order, then agreed line by line to the customer receipts on the bank. |
| Supplier bills — 214 found | Partial. The bank showed 47 payments with no bill behind them. | Retrieved from supplier portals where they existed, and requested from 19 suppliers directly. 39 recovered. 8 never were. |
| Card and expense receipts — 306 card transactions | Sparse. Support existed for roughly a third. | Recovered wherever a portal, an emailed confirmation or a subscription record existed. 41 remained unsupported and are recorded as such. |
| Payroll — seven monthly runs | Complete, from the bureau. | Posted from the bureau reports, then agreed month by month to what actually left the bank. |
| Owner drawings and injections | Recorded nowhere. | Identified from the bank, then confirmed one at a time with the owner. A transfer to a personal account does not explain itself, and guessing at one is how a loan becomes a cost. |
Reconstructing from bank data is legitimate, and it is frequently the only route left. It is not equivalent. An entry built from a bank line and a plausible category is a different object from an entry built from a bill, and the difference should stay visible in the books rather than being smoothed flat by the fact that both look the same once posted.
Four things nobody was looking for.
A catch-up is the only occasion on which somebody reads every transaction a business made, in order, with the documents beside them. It finds things, and they are rarely the things anyone expected it to find.
One. A supplier that existed twice. Northgate Cloud appeared as two supplier records — one created automatically by a bank-feed rule under the name on the statement, one entered by hand under the registered name. Spend across the period read as two modest relationships rather than one substantial one. Underneath that, two monthly subscriptions to the same service had been running in parallel since May, and an annual contract had renewed in April onto a higher tier that nobody had reviewed because nobody was looking at a total. Whether any of it comes back is the vendor’s decision and the owner’s negotiation. The books’ job was to make it visible and quantified.
Two. A personal cost paid from the business account. Seven monthly payments of 340 to a service the business does not use — a family subscription set up on the company card two years earlier and never moved. This should not be delivered as a moral finding, because it is not one. It is a classification with a settlement attached: the cost is not a business cost, so it does not sit in the profit and loss, and the amount stands against the owner’s account until the owner decides how to clear it. The classification is not the owner’s to choose. How it gets settled is.
Three. A VAT period boundary. Three sales invoices, together material, fell within days of the end of a VAT period for which a return had already been submitted. Which period they belong to depends on rules that differ by jurisdiction and on facts about when the work was actually delivered — which is precisely why it was written up rather than decided. Both positions were prepared with the workings and the underlying delivery evidence behind each, and the file went to Quillon’s appointed tax agent. Whether a correction is needed, and what form it takes, is the agent’s call and the owner’s decision. At Par does not submit filings on a client’s behalf, and a bookkeeping reconstruction is not the place a filing position gets quietly chosen.
Four. Work delivered and never billed. A project completed in May had a signed acceptance, a hit milestone and no invoice. The person who raised invoices had spent that month writing code. 26,400 of work, delivered and never asked for. It is the only item on this list the owner enjoyed hearing about, and it is worth stating that a catch-up is not purely a cost centre — though nothing about it should be sold as though findings like this are the expected outcome. Frequently there is nothing of the kind.
Nine open items, and what “current” was allowed to mean.
Seven months of a real business does not resolve completely, and a catch-up that reports otherwise has usually made the awkward decisions quietly. Nine items were still open on the day the work was handed back, in five kinds.
| Still open | Why | How it is carried |
|---|---|---|
| 41 card transactions with no supporting document, 6,880 in total | The documents were never obtained and for most of them no longer can be — a portal that only shows ninety days, a receipt that was never emailed at all. | Recorded as having happened, with the evidence marked absent rather than assumed present. Countable, and counted. |
| 8 supplier payments with no bill behind them, 11,240 | Four suppliers did not reply. Two no longer trade under the same name. | Recorded against the supplier and the account indicated by the payment history, and flagged as unsupported so nobody later mistakes them for evidenced entries. |
| 2 payments to a payee nobody can identify, 2,100 | The narrative is an abbreviation and a reference number that matches nothing in the records. | Held as unidentified. Not allocated to a plausible account in order to shorten a list. |
| A run of cash withdrawals, 4,500 across five months | The owner recalls the general purpose and not the individual ones, which is an ordinary and honest answer seven months later. | Recorded against the owner’s account pending whatever evidence appears. Deliberate, documented, and reversible if it does. |
| The VAT period boundary | A judgement for the appointed tax agent, not for the bookkeeping. | Both positions prepared with workings, handed over, and carried as an open obligation with a date on it rather than as a closed question. |
Against that, what the word current was allowed to mean was stated precisely, because it is a word that does a great deal of quiet work in this trade:
- Every month from February to August is reconciled to the bank and to the card, and each closing balance agrees to the statement.
- Each month is closed on its own date and carries its own profit and loss, balance sheet and reconciliations — seven readable months rather than one blur at the end.
- Every entry that has evidence is linked to it. Every entry that does not is marked unsupported, so the gap is a number rather than an impression.
- Nine items are open, each with a reason, an owner, and a statement of what would settle it.
- Every correction made to something already recorded stands beside the original with its reason, rather than replacing it.
And what it was not allowed to mean, which matters more:
- Not that the figures will never move. Three of the nine open items will change a figure when they settle. Each will do so as a dated correction, visible as one.
- Not that earlier filings were right. A return already submitted on figures that have since been rebuilt is a separate matter for the owner and the tax agent, and it stays open until they have decided.
- Not that every document exists. Forty-nine entries rest on a bank line and nothing else. That is stated on the record instead of being implied away by the tidiness around it.
- Not that the books have been audited. They are reconciled, evidence-backed and organised so an auditor or a lender can review them. That is a smaller and more defensible claim, and it is the only one being made.
A catch-up that hands back zero open items is worth reading carefully rather than admiring. Somewhere in it, decisions were taken on the owner’s behalf and the owner was not told which ones they were.
Where At Par fits — and the limits.
This is what catch-up bookkeeping is at At Par. The period rebuilt month by month from the bank outwards, each month closed on its own date with its own statements, evidence attached where it exists and marked absent where it does not, corrections standing beside the originals rather than overwriting them, and everything unresolved handed over as a named list with a reason against each. A qualified accountant (ACCA) is accountable for the work. Getting level is a project; staying level is a rhythm, and the second one is bookkeeping and month-end close.
The honest limits. How long a catch-up takes depends on the volume and on how much evidence still exists, and any provider quoting a duration before seeing the period is guessing. Some documents are gone and no amount of diligence brings them back; where that matters for a tax position, it is worth knowing early rather than at a year end. And a rebuilt set of books cannot make a decision that was never made at the time — it can only put the choice in front of the person entitled to make it. Where the difficulty is not months of backlog but a single line that will not resolve, that is what should happen when a bank transaction cannot be matched.
Asked by owners whose books stopped somewhere in the spring.
Can bookkeeping be reconstructed from bank statements alone? +
Partly, and it is often the only route left. Bank data establishes that an amount moved, on a date, between two accounts, which is enough to build a complete population of transactions and reconcile it. What it cannot establish is meaning: what the money bought, whether the cost belongs to the business, which period it falls in, or whether it was a purchase, a repayment or a transfer between the company’s own accounts. Entries built that way should be marked as resting on a bank line rather than on a document, because the two are not the same evidence.
Which order should months be caught up in — oldest first or most recent first? +
Oldest first in the normal case, because each period opens on the balances the previous one closed with, and reconciling a later month against unproven opening figures produces work that has to be redone. The exception is real: where a deadline, a lender or an investor conversation needs the recent period and nothing downstream depends on the old months, the sensible answer is to run the current period in parallel and work backwards behind it. What should not happen is that the sequence is chosen by whichever month somebody opened first.
What happens when a business expense turns out to be personal? +
It comes out of the costs and goes against the owner’s account, which is a classification rather than an accusation. The reason it matters is that a personal cost sitting in the profit and loss overstates expenses, understates profit, and can create a problem with a tax position that nobody chose to take. How the balance is then cleared — repaid, offset against something owed to the owner, or treated in another way with the tax consequences that carries — is a decision for the owner, usually taken with whoever advises them.
Will catching up change figures that have already been reported or filed? +
Sometimes, and that possibility should be raised at the start rather than discovered at the end. Rebuilt books can move a figure that was previously estimated, misclassified or missing, and where that figure fed something already submitted, the position needs revisiting by the business and its tax agent. A bookkeeping provider’s job is to isolate exactly which periods and figures are affected, prepare the workings behind both the old and the new position, and hand that over. Deciding what to do about it, and doing it, sits with the business and its appointed agent.
How long does it take to bring several months of books current? +
It depends on transaction volume and on how much of the evidence still exists, and those two vary far more than the number of months does. A quiet year with one bank account and complete records is a smaller job than four busy months with three accounts and a third of the receipts missing. A provider that quotes a duration before seeing the period is guessing. What can reasonably be committed to is a sequence and a first checkpoint: which period is being rebuilt first, and what will be shown at the end of it.
What is the difference between books being behind and books being wrong? +
Behind means the work has not been done: transactions are sitting unrecorded or uncategorised, and nothing has been agreed to a statement. Wrong means the work was done and produced a record that does not reflect what happened — misclassified costs, invoices recorded twice, balances that have never reconciled and have quietly carried an error forward. Behind is a volume problem with a definite end. Wrong is an investigation, because every figure has to be tested rather than simply entered, and the two need to be priced and scoped differently.
How does a duplicated supplier record distort a set of books? +
By splitting one relationship into two smaller ones, which makes it invisible to every check that relies on size. Spend against the supplier looks unremarkable in both halves, contract renewals and price rises pass without review, and two parallel subscriptions to the same service can run for months because no single view of the vendor ever shows both. It typically happens where a bank-feed rule creates a supplier under the name on the statement while somebody else enters it under the registered name. Merging the records is straightforward; noticing they exist is the actual work.
Can a business carry on trading normally while its books are being caught up? +
Yes, and the current period should be run in parallel from the first day rather than after the backlog is cleared. Otherwise the arrears simply move: three months of rebuilding produces three new months behind, and the business finishes where it started with a larger bill. Practically, that means the incoming month is recorded on a normal rhythm while the historic periods are rebuilt alongside it, and it is the single scoping question most worth settling before any catch-up begins.
Tell us the last month that was actually reconciled.
Not the last month anyone touched — the last one that was agreed to a bank statement. We will tell you what rebuilding the rest would involve, in what order, and what we would expect to be unable to settle.
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Reviewed by an ACCA on the At Par team · Last updated 29 July 2026 · Illustrative worked example. Not a customer case study. Quillon Systems, every figure and every finding on this page are invented. See what we actually do.