QuickBooks Cleanup · South Carolina Trades
A one-time QuickBooks cleanup for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing and general contractors. We sort out the months nobody reviewed, put costs back on the jobs they belong to, and hand you a file you can hand to anyone. Fixed scope, fixed price, and a date it is finished by.
What a cleanup is
People rarely call us because they want a monthly bookkeeper. Something has forced the issue — a tax preparer asking for figures, a lender asking for statements, a partner asking a question the file cannot answer as it stands.
A cleanup is the work that fixes that. One project, one price, one delivery date. Here is what usually needs sorting out.
Bank and credit card activity that has been downloaded but never actually categorized, matched or reconciled. We work through it period by period until every account ties to the statement.
Materials, subcontractors, equipment and permits landing in general expense accounts. Once they sit on the jobs that caused them, the profit-and-loss finally says which work paid and which did not.
Money collected before a job starts is a liability, not revenue. Booking it as income inflates a good month and leaves a hole in the next one.
Money held back until a project closes gets treated as cash already earned. We move it where it belongs so the numbers reflect what you can actually spend.
Payments scattered across accounts with no W-9 on file. We pull them together so 1099 season is a filing exercise rather than an investigation.
Personal spending running through the business file drags the profit-and-loss out of shape. Separating it is usually the single biggest change to what the reports say.
Cleanup pricing
Which tier you land in depends on how far behind the file is and what is inside it. Every figure below is a starting price.
1–3 months behind, low transaction volume, no payroll complications.
4–8 months behind, payroll running, 1099 subcontractors in the mix.
9–18 months behind, high volume, payroll needing correction.
18+ months behind, multi-year reconstruction from the ground up.
How it works
Fill in the form at the bottom of this page. We send a secure request for accountant access to your QuickBooks file — you approve it, and that is the last thing we need from you for a while. No call required.
Within one business day you get a written account of where the books actually stand: what is reconciled, what is not, what is miscategorized, and what a cleanup would involve. It is yours to keep whether or not you hire us.
A fixed quote for the whole project, with the scope written down so there is no argument later about what was included. Half up front, half at delivery.
You get progress updates without having to chase them. At the end you get clean statements, a reconciled file, and a short walkthrough of what changed and why.
What you end up with
Not just tidier — usable. When the cleanup is done, this is what is true about your books.
Every account reconciled through the end of the cleanup period, with the differences found and explained rather than plugged.
To a lender, a bonding agent, a tax preparer or a buyer — without talking them through why three lines look odd.
Costs sitting on the jobs that caused them, so you can tell which work to chase, which to reprice, and which to stop bidding.
Set up for how contracting actually works — materials, labor, subs, equipment, permits, deposits and retainage each with a home.
Payments consolidated and W-9 gaps flagged, so filing season is straightforward instead of a scramble.
The expensive part is the catch-up. Once it is done, staying current is a fraction of the cost — whether you do it, your office manager does it, or we do.
Questions
Cleanup is priced as one project, not by the hour. The four tiers start at $750, $1,800, $3,200 and $4,500, and the tier depends on how far behind the file is and what is in it — payroll, subcontractors, loans, retainage and job costing all add work.
Those are starting prices, not quotes given sight-unseen. We look at your actual file first, then give you one number and a delivery date. Once we have agreed on it, the price does not move.
No. The cleanup is a standalone project and plenty of people stop there. When it is finished the QuickBooks file is yours — keep doing the books yourself, hand them to your CPA, or put them on a monthly plan with us. We will tell you what we think, once, and then leave it alone.
A Light cleanup is usually turned around in a couple of weeks. Standard and Heavy projects run longer, and a multi-year reconstruction longer still. You get a specific delivery date in the quote rather than a vague range, and the main thing that moves it is how quickly missing statements and receipts come back to us.
For the free diagnostic, accountant access to your QuickBooks file — we send a secure request, you approve it, and you can remove it yourself at any time. Nothing else at that stage.
For the cleanup itself we will need bank and credit card statements for the period, and whatever documentation exists for loans, payroll and subcontractors. We never ask you to email or text us a password. You enter your own credentials yourself, and you can remove our access at any time from Manage Users in QuickBooks.
No. Multi-year reconstruction is the Major tier and it is a normal piece of work — rebuilding the ledger period by period, reconciling each account, and producing statements a tax preparer can actually use. It costs more because it is more work, not because anything is wrong with you.
The longer it sits the more it costs, so the diagnostic is worth doing even if you are not ready to start.
That is a cleanup too, and it is a common one. A file can be perfectly up to date and still be telling you the wrong thing — costs sitting in one general pile instead of on the jobs that caused them, customer deposits booked as income before the work starts, owner draws mixed into expenses, retainage counted as money you already have.
The fix is the same process: read the file, quote the work, correct it, hand it back.
We work in QuickBooks Online day to day. If you are on Desktop, that is worth raising at the diagnostic — Intuit runs a migration service for moving a Desktop file to QuickBooks Online, and we can talk you through whether it makes sense in your case before any cleanup work is quoted.
Because the patterns repeat. Progress billing, change orders, retainage, materials versus labor, equipment purchases, 1099 subcontractors, deposits taken before a job starts — those show up in nearly every contractor file and hardly ever in a retail or professional-services one. Working in one lane means we recognise the mess faster and price it more accurately.
The diagnostic is free, it does not commit you to anything, and you keep the answer either way.
Start with a free diagnostic →Tell us roughly where things stand. You will get a written read on the file and a fixed-price cleanup quote within one business day — no call required.
Prefer to talk? Email hello@flowbookkeepingservices.com or call (843) 749-8691.
Expect an email from hello@flowbookkeepingservices.com within one business day.