Preparing for a smoother audit in Togo
How long an audit takes is rarely decided during the audit. It is decided in the six weeks before it.
QuickBooks
When your QuickBooks file needs a cleanup
A QuickBooks file rarely degrades all at once. It degrades through small successive concessions, until the day nobody trusts the number.
Cleaning up an accounting file is not a cosmetic exercise. It is about restoring a verifiable correspondence between what the file says and what actually happened. Here are the signals that justify a diagnostic.
The eight signals
- The software's bank balance matches no statement. The most common symptom, and the most revealing: reconciliations have been abandoned or forced.
- The "miscellaneous" or "uncategorised" account holds a significant amount. This is where everything nobody wanted to decide on ends up.
- Manual journals correct the same accounts every month. A sign that the configuration produces a systematic error never fixed at source.
- The chart of accounts is far larger than the business warrants. Accounts created on the fly during data entry make any management grouping impossible.
- Duplicate customers or suppliers. They distort ageing balances and make collections ineffective.
- Prior periods remain editable. With no closing date locked, a statement printed today can differ from the same statement printed last month.
- Unexplained negative customer or supplier balances. Usually a sign of unapplied receipts or credit notes entered incorrectly.
- Financial statements are no longer produced from the software. When the team rebuilds the statements in a spreadsheet, the file has stopped being the source of truth.
What a serious cleanup involves
A proper cleanup starts by fixing a reliable starting point: which period are we restating, and on what basis are the opening balances supported? Then comes rebuilding the reconciliations, reworking the chart of accounts, clearing suspense accounts, merging duplicates, and locking closed periods. Every adjustment must be documented: without an audit trail, a cleanup creates a new problem in place of the old one.
How long it takes
Almost entirely down to the state of the bank reconciliations and the volume of unsupported transactions. A diagnostic first lets us price the work before you commit — which is how we always proceed.