General ledger maintenance

The core deliverable is a ledger where every balance means something. Journal entries are reviewed for the correct account, period, and supporting documentation before they post. Every balance sheet account gets substantiated each period with a reconciliation or supporting schedule, not left to whatever the running total happens to show. A standing close checklist runs the same way every month, so the process does not depend on whoever happens to be doing the close that period. Prior-period adjustments are tracked in a written log with an explanation, rather than absorbed quietly into whichever month someone finally notices the discrepancy. None of this is bookkeeping in the transaction-entry sense; it assumes transactions are already being recorded, and adds the review, substantiation, and consistency layer that turns a working file into a ledger a lender, investor, or incoming accountant can actually rely on without re-checking everything first.

We start by reviewing the current state of the ledger: how the chart of accounts is structured, which balance sheet accounts already have supporting schedules, and which do not. Where the ledger has drifted, that gets flagged as a catch-up cleanup step before ongoing maintenance begins, because reviewing entries on top of an already-wrong opening balance just carries the error forward. Once the ledger is in a known-good state, the monthly cycle runs on a fixed checklist: entries get reviewed before posting, balance sheet accounts get reconciled or scheduled, and any variance from the prior period gets investigated rather than assumed. Where we are not also doing the underlying bookkeeping, we set a clear handoff point with whoever is: what documentation we need by which day of the month, and what happens if a reconciling item cannot be resolved before the close deadline.

This fits a business whose bookkeeping runs fine day to day but has nobody checking whether the ledger, taken as a whole, actually holds together, a solo bookkeeper with nobody reviewing their entries, a business that switched accounting software and never fully reconciled opening balances, or a company preparing for a lender or investor review that wants confidence the numbers will survive a closer look. It also fits businesses bringing accounting in-house from a previous provider, where the incoming team wants an independent check that the ledger they are inheriting is actually clean before they take ownership of it. It is a poor fit as a standalone service for a business with messy, unreconciled bookkeeping and no other provider maintaining the transaction layer; in that case, monthly bookkeeping or a catch-up cleanup needs to happen first.

The most common issue is a balance sheet account with a number on it and nothing behind it, a prepaid asset that has been the same figure for six months because nobody set up an amortization schedule, or an accrued liability that was estimated once and never trued up against the actual bill. The second is drift after a software migration: opening balances that were entered as a lump sum instead of reconciled line by line, so every subsequent period inherits a small, unexplained variance. The third is silent absorption of prior-period errors, where a discrepancy from two months ago gets quietly folded into this month's numbers instead of tracked and explained, which makes trend analysis meaningless. The fourth is a chart of accounts that has grown by accident, with duplicate or overlapping accounts that make it impossible to tell what a number on a report actually represents.

General ledger maintenance works inside whatever system already holds your data. QuickBooks Online and Xero cover most small and mid-size ledgers well, with built-in reconciliation tools we use directly rather than exporting to a spreadsheet. NetSuite and Sage Intacct fit larger or multi-entity ledgers where consolidation and intercompany eliminations need to tie out cleanly across entities. Bill.com feeds accounts payable data into the ledger with the documentation trail a reviewed entry needs. We do not require a switch to a proprietary platform; if your ledger already lives in one of these systems, we work in it as it stands. Where a business runs a system outside this list, we scope a short review before committing to ongoing maintenance, so both sides know upfront whether the fit is right.

General ledger maintenance is usually scoped as part of a broader engagement rather than priced entirely on its own, since the level of review depends on transaction volume, entity count, and how much cleanup the ledger needs at the outset. Where the underlying bookkeeping already runs cleanly elsewhere, this can be scoped as a standalone review layer. Current published tiers on the US rate card start at Essentials for a single entity under fifty thousand dollars in monthly expenses and scale to Growth and Scale as transaction volume and entity count increase. Any catch-up cleanup needed before ongoing maintenance starts is quoted separately and confirmed in writing before that work begins.

The test is simple: could someone who has never seen this ledger before, a new accountant, a lender's analyst, an incoming controller, pick it up and understand every balance without asking us to explain it first. That means every balance sheet account has a current reconciliation or schedule attached, every journal entry has documentation behind it, and every prior-period adjustment has a written note explaining what changed. We track whether the close checklist actually ran the same way each period, not just whether the numbers came out looking reasonable. A ledger that is internally consistent but wrong is still a failure; the substantiation behind each balance is what lets anyone verify it is also correct, not just plausible.

Most engagements start with some degree of drift already present, and pretending otherwise just builds ongoing maintenance on top of a broken foundation. We treat the first period as a diagnostic: reconcile every balance sheet account back to a supporting schedule or third-party statement, whether that is a bank statement, a loan servicer's amortization table, or a vendor invoice, and correct what does not tie out. Anything material gets a written note explaining the correction, not a silent adjustment buried in the entry log. Where the drift is extensive, personal and business expenses mixed together, transfers between accounts recorded as income or expense, this becomes a formal catch-up and cleanup engagement, scoped and quoted separately, before ongoing maintenance takes over.