Books months or years behind? This is fixable.

Why books fall behind, and why that is not the story

Books get behind for reasons that have nothing to do with how good you are at running a business. A bookkeeper left partway through the year. The business grew faster than the admin around it. A health issue, a bereavement, a divorce, a bad year. Software that stopped syncing and nobody noticed. A previous accountant who went quiet. Every one of these is something an accountant sees regularly.

If the returns themselves are outstanding rather than only the bookkeeping, that is a defined job with its own page. See what to do when you are behind on taxes.

What matters now is not why it happened. What matters is that the gap stops growing, and that someone tells you honestly where you stand. Avoidance is the only part of this that genuinely gets more expensive over time — the work itself does not become impossible, it just becomes larger.

What actually happens

The process is deliberately unglamorous. There are no surprises built into it:

1. A free 30-minute call. You explain roughly how far behind you are and what still exists. You will not be asked to justify anything. The point of this call is to size the work, not to assess you.
2. A written scope and a fixed quote. Once the size of the job is clear, you get the scope in writing with a fixed price attached, before any work starts. You decide from there, in your own time.
3. Records are gathered. Mostly bank statements, credit card statements and any payroll or sales records. Missing receipts are normal and are worked around rather than treated as a dead end.
4. The ledger is rebuilt. Period by period, in cloud accounting software, reconciled against the bank so the numbers actually tie out rather than merely looking tidy.
5. Filings are brought current. GST returns, payroll remittances and outstanding year ends are prepared and filed in the right order, oldest first, so the CRA sees a business coming back into compliance rather than one still missing.
6. You get told where you stand. A plain-English summary of what was found, what is now filed, and what is still outstanding, including any balance owing, so there are no unpleasant discoveries later.
7. It stays current. Optional, but this is the part that stops the same conversation happening again in three years: monthly bookkeeping so the ledger never accumulates a backlog.

Backlogs take longer to clear when personal and business spending share an account, because every transaction needs a decision. Separating the two before the catch-up starts makes the rest of the work faster.

Who you are dealing with

Questions people ask before they call

Related reading

Guides and tools that go deeper on what this page covers.

The forms and the dates

The order is fixed by the deadlines: overdue GST/HST returns first, because the CRA withholds refunds and assesses arbitrary amounts on unfiled periods; then any unfiled T2s, which carry a late-filing penalty of 5% plus 1% a month on the balance; then T4 and T5 slips. Where returns are years late and were never assessed, the Voluntary Disclosures Program can remove penalties if the disclosure is complete and made before the CRA asks.

Who this is for in the Fraser Valley

The catch-up files are Fraser Valley businesses that fell behind for ordinary reasons: an Abbotsford contractor whose bookkeeper left mid-year, a Chilliwack shop that grew faster than its spreadsheet, a Langley or Surrey corporation that has never filed since incorporating, a Mission owner with three years of bank statements in a drawer. The work is the same in each case — rebuild the periods in order, reconcile them, file what is overdue — and it is scoped and quoted before it starts.

What sets the fee

Catch-up is quoted per period after a free look at the bank statements, which is enough to see how many months there are, how many accounts, and how much of it was ever entered. The two things that set the fee are transaction volume and how far back the unfiled returns go; three years of a two-account sole proprietorship and eighteen months of a corporation with payroll and two credit cards are different jobs. The quote is written, fixed, and separated from the monthly bookkeeping fee that starts once the books are current.