QuickBooks Setup & Cleanup

What We Look At First

The discovery call includes a look at your current QuickBooks file: how far back it's reconciled, how the chart of accounts is structured, whether jobs or classes are being tracked at all, and how invoicing and payroll are currently recorded. We give you a straight answer about what shape things are in — not a scare tactic, just an honest assessment — and a fixed price to get current if cleanup is needed.

Chart of Accounts, Rebuilt for a Trade Business

A chart of accounts built for a generic small business doesn't distinguish between material for a job and a supply purchase for the shop truck, or between subcontractor cost and equipment rental. We rebuild it around how an electrical contractor actually operates — cost of goods sold split by material, labor, subcontractors, and equipment, with overhead kept separate so job margins aren't distorted by rent or insurance getting mixed into cost of work.

The item list gets rebuilt the same way, matched to how you actually bill: service call, hourly T&M, flat-rate repair, fixed-price project, and change order, each mapped to the right income and cost accounts so reporting works automatically instead of requiring manual sorting every month.

Turning On Job Costing

Once the chart of accounts is right, we turn on project tracking (or class tracking, depending on your QuickBooks Online plan) and connect every open job to it. This is the step that makes job-level profitability reporting possible — see Job Costing for Electrical Contractors for what that unlocks once it's running.

Historical Cleanup

If months or years are unreconciled, we work backward to get every account current: bank and credit card reconciliations, uncategorized transactions sorted, duplicate or missing entries fixed, and payroll records matched against your payroll provider's reports. We tell you upfront how far back cleanup will go — usually to the start of the current fiscal year at minimum, further if your CPA needs clean prior-year comparatives.

How Long Cleanup Takes

Most cleanups covering a single fiscal year of unreconciled activity take two to four weeks, depending on transaction volume and how much documentation is missing (bank statements are usually recoverable directly from the bank; a fully reconstructed job list from scratch takes longer). We give you a realistic timeline on the discovery call once we've seen the file, and we flag early if something looks like it'll run longer than expected rather than let a project quietly stretch.

Integrations Worth Setting Up

Depending on how your business runs, we'll often set up a few QuickBooks Online integrations alongside cleanup: receipt-capture apps so field purchases get photographed and coded at the point of sale instead of arriving as a shoebox at month-end, time-tracking apps that push labor hours straight into job costing instead of a manual timesheet re-entry, and payment processing that matches deposits to invoices automatically. None of these are required, and we won't push add-ons you don't need — but where they remove a manual step that's currently eating your office manager's time, we'll flag it.

What Happens After Cleanup

Once your file is current and job costing is on, you're ready to move into monthly bookkeeping without starting the cleanup cycle over every year. Most contractors move directly from cleanup into ongoing monthly service — the discovery call covers both so you know the full cost of getting current and staying current before anything starts.

Moving From Another Bookkeeper or Software

If you're moving from a different bookkeeper, a different accounting software, or a desktop version of QuickBooks, we handle the migration as part of cleanup rather than treating it as a separate project. That includes exporting historical data where the source system allows it, rebuilding what doesn't transfer cleanly, and confirming your prior-year numbers still tie out for your CPA's comparative reporting. We also coordinate directly with an outgoing bookkeeper if you'd like a clean handoff rather than a cold cutover.