A small retail business owner contacted me in a panic: her QuickBooks Online was overrun with uncategorized expenses and unmatched deposits going back 24 months.
She’d been using the “Bank Feed” feature but never categorized or reconciled consistently. As a result, her profit and loss reports were unreliable, and her tax preparer refused to file returns until the books were cleaned up.
My approach was to first back up her QuickBooks data, then I developed a cleanup plan in phases:
Phase 1: Reviewed and cleaned up the Chart of Accounts to remove unused or duplicate categories.
Phase 2: Imported missing bank statements and reconciled every month in chronological order.
Phase 3: Created bank rules to auto-categorize recurring expenses, saving hours of manual work in the future.
Phase 4: Produced clean reports to share with her tax preparer.
After four weeks of diligent cleanup, her accounts were fully reconciled, with all transactions properly classified. She told me she finally felt in control of her finances and was ready to focus on growing her business instead of worrying about bookkeeping errors.