Start by collecting everything you’ll need. Bank statements, credit card statements, receipts, invoices, payroll records. Most banks allow you to download statements going back several years, so even if you haven’t saved anything, the data is usually recoverable. Get all of it in one place before you start entering anything.

Find your starting point. If your books were accurate through a certain month and things fell apart after that, begin there. If you’re not sure when the records went sideways, look for the last month where your account balances reconciled correctly. Starting from a known-good point means you’re building on solid ground instead of compounding old errors.

Work month by month, oldest to newest. This order matters. A payment received in August might clear an invoice from June. An expense in November could reimburse something you paid personally in September. Going chronologically keeps these connections intact and prevents confusion.

For each month, the process is the same. Import or enter transactions from all accounts, categorize everything, match payments to invoices and bills, then reconcile each account against its statement. The reconciliation step is not optional. Your ending balance in QuickBooks or Xero needs to match the bank statement exactly. If there’s a discrepancy, fix it before moving on. Small errors left unfixed turn into big problems that take hours to untangle later.

Don’t get stuck trying to make everything perfect on the first pass. Get the transactions recorded and roughly categorized. Reconcile the accounts. You can refine expense categories and clean up vendor names afterward. Forward progress matters more than polish when you’re behind.

How long this takes depends on your situation. A simple service business with one bank account might catch up three or four months in a single focused afternoon. A business with multiple accounts, inventory, and employees will take longer. If you’re six months or more behind, have complex transactions, or are approaching a tax deadline, professional catch-up bookkeeping often makes more sense than spending weeks figuring it out yourself.

Once caught up, the priority becomes staying current. Set a recurring time each week to review and categorize transactions. Reconcile monthly at minimum. A Scottsdale bookkeeper can handle this ongoing work if you’d rather focus on running your business. The longer you wait between sessions, the more daunting each one becomes, and the easier it is to slide back into the same pattern.