Six signs your books have fallen behind

Books rarely collapse all at once. They slip a little each month until one day a question you should be able to answer in seconds takes a week.

• You cannot say what last month's profit was without asking someone
• Your bank balance is the only number you actually trust
• Nobody has reconciled the bank account in more than a month
• You are not sure which customers owe you money, or for how long
• VAT return preparation starts with gathering documents rather than reviewing figures
• Year-end takes weeks and always produces surprises

It is less dramatic than it sounds. The work is usually: gather the complete bank statements, rebuild the transaction record from them, match supporting documents to each line, chase the genuinely missing ones, then reconcile each period and close it.

Once the records are current, the monthly routine that keeps them that way is modest: transactions recorded, bank reconciled, month closed, a short report reviewed. The difference is that it happens on a schedule rather than when someone remembers.

If any of the six signals sound familiar, a consultation is a reasonable next step. We will tell you how far behind you actually are, which is often less than people fear.