From an unreconciled QuickBooks file to audit-ready in three weeks
A boutique real estate firm in Austin had grown past its bookkeeping. The file still opened; nothing in it tied.
The situation
The firm had been through two bookkeepers in eighteen months. Each had used a different chart of accounts, neither had reconciled the operating account past the first few months, and property-level costs had been posted to whatever expense line looked closest at the time.
None of that mattered while the business was small. It mattered a great deal when the managing partner needed financial statements a lender would accept, and discovered that the only person who could explain the numbers had left the year before.
The immediate risk was not the mess. It was that a cleanup done badly would produce clean-looking books that did not tie to the prior year - which is worse than a visible problem, because nobody catches it until an auditor does.
What we did
Week 1 - Diagnostic
Before touching an entry, we read the file and produced a written list of what was actually wrong, in priority order: unreconciled accounts, duplicate vendors, misposted property costs and the two competing account structures. The partner saw the scope of the problem in writing before committing to fixing it.
Week 2 - Remediation
Reconciliation of every account across the full 18-month period, with each correction documented. The chart of accounts was rebuilt once and the historic postings mapped across, so prior-year comparatives remained meaningful rather than being silently restated.
Week 3 - Reconciliation and handoff
An opening-balance reconciliation tying the corrected ledger back to the last return the firm filed, property-level margin reporting, and a memo covering every judgment taken during the cleanup - the document an auditor or lender asks for first.
Preksha's team transformed our messy QuickBooks file into audit-ready books in under three weeks. Her CPA and CA qualifications gave us confidence from day one.
Managing Partner · Boutique real estate firm · Austin, TX
Where it started, where it landed
- Operating and escrow accounts unreconciled for most of 18 months
- Two overlapping charts of accounts from successive bookkeepers
- Property-level costs posted inconsistently - no reliable margin by property
- No opening balances that could be tied to the prior-year return
- Financial statements not in a form a lender would accept
- Every bank and credit-card account reconciled through the full period
- Single chart of accounts, mapped to the old structure so comparatives survive
- Costs tracked by property with margin reporting the partner can act on
- Opening-balance reconciliation documenting every correction made
- Lender-ready statements, with the judgments taken written down
Services used in this engagement
Bring us the file you are avoiding.
Fourteen hours, free, on one live client. Most engagements start exactly where these three did.