Behind on your bookkeeping? It is fixable.

Being behind is more common than you think

Almost every catch-up we take on starts the same way: the business got busy, a bookkeeper left, a year-end got postponed, and then the gap got large enough to be uncomfortable to talk about. The gap is rarely the disaster the owner has been imagining, and the fastest way to find out is to have someone look at it.

Nothing about this requires you to come in and explain yourself. EverStone works entirely remotely from 32615 South Fraser Way in Abbotsford — you send what you have, we tell you what is missing.

What happens while the books are behind

The uncomfortable part is not the bookkeeping. It is what accumulates around it:

• CRA does not wait for your numbers. Where a return is outstanding, CRA can assess the corporation on its own estimate of what you owe — see arbitrary and notional assessments. That assessment is legally valid until you file the real return to displace it.
• Filing obligations do not pause. GST/HST returns and payroll remittances keep coming due on their own schedule regardless of whether the books behind them are current.
• Interest runs from the original due date, not from the day you catch up, which is why the cost of waiting compounds quietly. The penalty and interest rules set out how.
• Decisions get made blind. Without current books you cannot see margin, cash position or whether you can afford to hire, and that is usually the more expensive problem.

None of this gets worse because you called an accountant. All of it gets worse if nobody does.

How far behind is too far?

There is no point at which a set of books becomes unrecoverable. Bank and credit-card history can be retrieved, and where a year is genuinely undocumented there are established ways to reconstruct it and to disclose that reconstruction properly. Where past filings were wrong rather than missing, the Voluntary Disclosures Program exists for exactly that situation and is worth understanding before you file.

What a catch-up actually involves

Most catch-ups run two to six weeks end to end. The variable is almost never the bookkeeping; it is how quickly the missing records can be retrieved.

What it costs

Catch-up work is quoted separately from ongoing fees, because it is a one-time job sized by the number of outstanding months and the state of the records — not something a rate card can price honestly in advance. Ongoing monthly bookkeeping afterwards starts at $300 a month; the fee estimate tool shows the likely range for your volume and payroll, and our published fees set out the rest.

Being behind does not increase your ongoing monthly fee once you are current. It is priced once and then it is over.