Fixed-Fee Bookkeeping Cleanup: How It’s Priced and How Long It Takes

A fixed-fee bookkeeping cleanup works like this: a two-hour diagnostic produces a one-page summary of what’s wrong and a fixed price, quoted per month of catch-up. Then the work runs, usually two to four weeks from the day we get access, and the price is the price. If someone has quoted you an hourly cleanup with no end date, you’re being asked to fund an open-ended project with your own anxiety.

We run an accounting firm, and cleanups are about a third of our new client work. Here’s exactly how ours are priced and scheduled, so you can hold any proposal up against it.

What is a bookkeeping diagnostic?

The diagnostic is two to three hours of work before anyone fixes anything. It answers one question first: what is the last date the balance sheet was provably right? Usually that’s the last filed tax return, sometimes earlier. Everything before that date stays as it is. The cleanup fixes forward from it.

From there, the diagnostic measures the problem:

• Every bank, credit card, loan, and merchant account, and how many months of each are unreconciled.
• The uncategorized total, and whatever’s parked in “Ask My Accountant” or its equivalent.
• Duplicates: the same expense entered from a check and again from the feed, the same sale recorded twice.
• Loan balances in the books versus the lender’s statement.
• Payroll liabilities versus the payroll reports. Sales tax payable versus what was filed.
• Cash received and never deposited, or deposited and never recorded.

The output is a single page: what’s wrong, in what quantity, from what date. And a fixed price. The diagnostic has a small fee of its own, and it’s credited against the cleanup if you go ahead. If you don’t, you still have a page that tells you what you’re dealing with, which is more than most owners had before.

Should a bookkeeping cleanup be hourly or fixed fee?

Fixed, and quoted from the diagnostic. The reasons are practical, not philosophical.

An hourly cleanup with no end date makes the client nervous about every email. Each question feels like it costs money, so questions go unanswered, so the cleanup takes longer, so it costs more. And it removes the firm’s incentive to be efficient: the slower the work, the larger the invoice. Nobody in that arrangement is working toward a finish.

A fixed fee changes both sides. You know the number before the work starts. We’re motivated to finish, because the fee is the same whether it takes twelve hours or twenty.

The fee itself is scaled by two things: how many accounts there are, and how much volume runs through them. A single checking account with forty transactions a month is a different cleanup than three banks, two cards, a line of credit, and a merchant processor. The diagnostic counts all of that, which is why the price comes from it and not from a phone call.

There’s a change-order rate, and it applies only when the scope changes: you add an account you didn’t mention, or you want a filed year reopened, or the loan you said was one loan turns out to be three. Scope changes get a written note and a number before the extra work starts. They don’t get quietly added to the bill.

One more thing the fee assumes: that you’ll answer the question list within a couple of weeks. A cleanup that waits two months for answers isn’t a cleanup, it’s a subscription.

The work

Once the price is agreed, the cleanup runs in a fixed order. Order matters, because doing these out of sequence means doing something twice.

1. Statements. Every account, every month from the starting date, matched line by line to the bank’s own statement. Missing deposits and missing expenses turn up here, before anything gets categorized.
2. Duplicates. Removed, with the surviving entry tied to its source.
3. Categorization. Everything gets a category and a vendor. Rules get written as we go, so the same vendor lands the same way every time from now on.
4. Tie-outs. Every balance sheet account tied to something outside the books: loans to lender statements, payroll liabilities to payroll reports, sales tax to filed returns, credit cards to their statements. Owner activity booked as what it is.
5. The memo. What was wrong, what was fixed, what your tax preparer needs to know, and what has to change so it doesn’t happen again.

If a proposal doesn’t mention a starting date, statements, or a memo, ask why.

How long does a bookkeeping cleanup take?

Most finish in two to four weeks from the day we have access to the accounts. The calendar time is mostly waiting: for statements a bank makes hard to download, for a lender’s payoff letter, and for the question list to come back.

The staff time is much less than the calendar time suggests. Earlier this year, ahead of the September 15 deadline, we did full-year cleanups for four restaurants, cash-heavy, check-heavy, multi-entity, in under ten hours of staff time combined. That’s not a typical result and we don’t quote from it. It’s what a fixed order, a diagnostic that’s already found the problems, and a client who answers questions in one sitting make possible.

What makes a cleanup take longer than four weeks is almost never the books. It’s an account nobody mentioned, a year someone decides to reopen halfway through, or a question list that sits.

What a CFO does with this number

The cleanup ends with a memo, and the day the memo lands is the day the advisory relationship can start. Before that, there’s nothing for a fractional CFO to work with. A forecast built on unreconciled cash is fiction. A margin analysis built on uncategorized expenses is a guess.

After the memo, three things become possible immediately: a real profit number by month, so you can see which months made money and why; a 13-week cash forecast, because the bank balance and the books finally agree; and a fourth-quarter tax estimate built from this year’s actual numbers instead of last year’s safe harbor. That last one is often the single biggest cash decision of the year, and it’s only available from clean books.

Where we come in

Send us access this week and the diagnostic runs this week. You’ll have the one-page summary and a fixed price by Friday. Most cleanups finish inside a month, every one ends with the memo, and every one ends with a conversation about the monthly close that keeps it from happening again. If you’ve been quoted hourly for a cleanup and don’t know what the number will be, reach out. We’ll tell you what you’re dealing with before you commit to anything.

Frequently asked questions

Hourly or fixed fee?
Fixed, quoted from a diagnostic; hourly cleanups with no end date punish the client and remove the firm’s incentive to be efficient.

How long does a cleanup take?
Most finish in two to four weeks from access; four full-year restaurant cleanups took under ten hours of staff time combined.

What is the diagnostic?
Two to three hours finding the last provably correct balance sheet date and measuring the problem, producing a one-page summary and a fixed price.