My client has a company selling several million dollars worth of different types of stone to retail and commercial landscaping and builders which are bought in US and Cnd dollars. They previously had a good system (up to July 31, 2023 year end) and an experienced bookkeeper that kept everything running smoothly for the many years I have been doing their tax returns. That bookkeeper switched from the previous system (don’t know why but she must have had her reasons) to Quickbooks Online and was running both sets of books for the July 31, 2023 year end. I got the original set of books on the old system and filed the July 31, 2023 tax return with no problems. That bookkeeper retired and the new bookkeeper they hired is much less experienced. The original bookkeeper can not come back in to help figure out what the new bookkeeper has done and how to fix it. I have been trying to help the new bookkeeper reconcile things but she is in Calgary and I am in West Kelowna and there is only so much I can do over the phone and by email. She is trying so hard to fix it but she doesn’t understand what the system is doing in the background and has no idea how to fix it. We ended up having to brute force reconcile the new system with adjusting journal entries to the figures I filed the July 31, 2023 tax return so that it was at least starting with the right figures as the parallel system evidently wasn’t so parallel and didn’t match in significant ways. We also ended up simply brute force fixing the July 31, 2024 books by reconciling all the balance sheet items to outside sources like bank statements. Not ideal but the only thing we could do.
It is a huge mess and the transactions from Aug 1, 2024 to date aren’t any better so the owner is looking for a solution. He is currently thinking of fixing the current set of books in Quickbooks and an outside bookkeeper offered to fix it for $6,000. I am not sure whether that is back to the start or just from Aug 1, 2024 onwards. Having poked around in Quickbooks online trying to get it to reconcile myself I have to say it has got to be the worst system I have ever encountered. There has got to be a better way to this but I am not familiar with the systems currently on the market. Any recommendations for a better system to use that has a good inventory and payroll system that can also handle foreign exchange transactions?
My tendency is almost to recommend my mother’s accounting system that my parents wrote originally in DOS in the mid 80’s and subsequently converted to run in a windows environment. I still use it today and the last time the software was updated was 15+ years ago. The CD disk I use to install it on new computers is dated Dec 27, 2011. It is simple and it works but it requires a bookkeeper that intuitively understands how double entry bookkeeping works and I am not sure that is this new bookkeeper.
Your customer needs to find a Quickbooks Online Accountant user that can access the clients books. $6,000 should sort our a fairly large mess! I would enjoy doing that if I had the time.
In my experience, I’ve worked with many messed up files and it can seem hard to believe, sometimes starting over is the best thing to do, can move to a completely new QBO file, or another software on the market if QBO isn’t working for the client. You would start at the last point you trust the numbers from.
I cleaned up one file, that would have taken so long to unwind, starting over was cleaner, quicker, and more affordable for the client, we ended up moving to a new system because there was also a bad taste to the current.
This! Starting over is often the best solution. A more powerful software system may be in order, but that will come with a learning curve, if you’re not familiar with it. I don’t like QBO, but really like QB Desktop and am saddened at the news that 2024 is the last year they’re doing it, as I may have to find something else in a couple of years. It works well for my clients, but none are over $3 Million in annual revenue, except one, and they use NetSuite, which is very good for inventory and not as friendly to accounting.
Starting over really is dependent on the volume of transactions…if there are only a few hundred…not an issue at all. A few thousand? Maybe. More than a couple of thosand? Dubious.
Sometimes the best thing is just to ensure all balance accounts are correct … becuase anything else flows to P&L anyway. Do a kind of mini-Review and go from there.
I worked with one really messed up QBO system a few years ago. Data was entered by the owner who had no accounting experience! I landed up extracting the data into Excel and reorganized it in Excel in order to get the data I needed to file her tax return. After that, she terminated her QBO account and simply gave me her data for me to do the bookkeeping using my Excel system which worked well in her situation!
Needing to slow down as I approaching retirement, I’ve disposed of all my clients with messy accounting, stating retirement as the reason. The time and stress without any hope of improvement from the client took it’s toll on me all these years without realizing it.Wish I had done it sooner.
Unfortunately there are 40k transactions so starting over is not a possibility and neither is excel. I have been reconciling and brute force fixing the balance sheet accounts as SmallBizGuy suggests. This is likely to be a client I fire in June if it can’t be sorted out in May.