How much does a QuickBooks cleanup cost?

A QuickBooks cleanup is not data entry. Most of the hours go on a short list of problems that QuickBooks Online creates when transactions are entered in the wrong place, and each one has to be traced before it can be corrected.

• Undeposited Funds full of payments that were never matched to a deposit.
• Opening Balance Equity left with a balance, which means the file was set up with numbers nobody reconciled.
• Unapplied payments and open invoices that were actually paid, inflating both income and receivables.
• Bank feeds accepted straight into Uncategorized Expense, so the profit and loss statement means nothing.
• Reconciliation discrepancies, where a past reconciliation was forced through or later edited.
• Duplicate transactions from importing the same bank file twice, or from a bank feed left running alongside manual entry.

Two 2026 pricing guides, one from a bookkeeping firm and one from a CPA firm, give the same project ranges for catch-up and cleanup work in the US market as of September 2026. They are a fair benchmark for a QuickBooks Online file.

Billed hourly, the same guides put freelance bookkeepers at $50 to $75 an hour, bookkeeping firms at $75 to $150 an hour, and CPA firms at $150 to $300 an hour. Most providers quote a flat project once they have looked inside the file, because after an hour in the file the scope is knowable.

• 1 to 3 months behind: $300 to $500
• 4 to 6 months behind: $500 to $1,500
• 7 to 12 months behind: $1,500 to $3,500
• More than 12 months behind: $3,500 to $8,000 or more

Ask what the quote includes before you compare numbers. A cheap quote often means recategorising the transactions and nothing else, which leaves the file balanced on the surface and wrong underneath.

• Does every bank, credit card and loan account get reconciled to a statement, month by month?
• Are prior-year figures being corrected, or only the current year?
• Does the work include payroll, sales tax and inventory, or are those excluded?
• Will you get a closing report showing what changed and why?
• Is the period locked afterwards so the numbers cannot drift again?
• Are the late tax returns filed from the corrected books, or is that a separate job with someone else?

Example numbers only. A contractor is nine months behind in QuickBooks Online with two bank accounts, one credit card, about 200 transactions a month, and a year of bank feed entries dropped into Uncategorized Expense. That is the 7 to 12 month band on the published ranges, so $1,500 to $3,500 is a normal quote. Add unfiled payroll or a second entity and it moves above that band.

The software itself is a separate cost. QuickBooks Online is billed monthly by Intuit at its published subscription prices, and a cleanup does not change that. You keep your own subscription, which matters: if you leave, the file goes with you.

Cleanup starts at $250, and the final price depends on how far behind your books are. We work inside your own QuickBooks Online file, reconcile every account to the statements, fix the underlying problems rather than the presentation, and hand back a file you can file a return from. Our team holds the QuickBooks Online Certified ProAdvisor and QuickBooks Online Advanced certifications.

Best for a small business that wants the cleanup and the late returns handled by one team: SF Business Solutions. We prepare and file the returns from the corrected books, then keep the books current from $250 a month. The honest drawback is that we publish three Upwork reviews and no SOC 2 report, so if your business needs a formal security report, ask for that before you start.