How businesses end up here
The route is almost always the same and almost never negligence. A business grows quickly, the person who was doing the books leaves, and three months pass before anyone notices the gap. Or a company was set up for a purpose that changed, ran quietly for two years, and has now been told it needed to file all along. Or the bookkeeping was outsourced to a provider who processed transactions but reconciled nothing, and the ledger has been accumulating differences ever since.
What these have in common is that nothing dramatic happened. The records simply stopped keeping up, and the cost of that only became visible when a deadline arrived.
Who this is for
Businesses with unfiled or incorrectly filed returns. Companies that have just discovered a corporate tax registration obligation and now need several years of accounts to support the returns. Businesses whose bookkeeper left mid-year. Companies preparing for an audit, a sale, or an investor, where somebody else is about to look at records that will not survive it.
Also, straightforwardly, businesses whose ledger has stopped reconciling and who have concluded — correctly — that carrying on adding to it will not help.
What the work involves
How we run it:
- Establish the scope honestly. How many periods, what exists, what is missing. We do this before quoting, because an open-ended backlog engagement is bad for everyone.
- Rebuild from the bank. Bank statements are the one complete record almost every business has, and they anchor the reconstruction.
- Reconstruct sales from invoices, contracts, platform reports or receipts, and identify anything invoiced outside the accounting system.
- Reconstruct purchases and expenses, matching to bank payments and chasing missing documentation where the amounts justify it.
- Rebuild the balance sheet — assets, loans, related party balances and equity — which is usually the hardest part and the part most often skipped by cheaper providers.
- Reconcile and identify what cannot be reconciled, so the remaining uncertainty is known rather than buried.
- Produce financial statements for each period.
- Quantify the compliance position — which returns are due, what they will show, and what the exposure is.
- Hand over to a recurring cycle, so this does not happen again.
What we do when documents are missing
Some records will not be recoverable, and pretending otherwise produces a set of accounts that looks complete and is not. Our approach is to reconstruct what can be reconstructed, estimate where estimation is defensible and disclosed, and document what remains uncertain.
That matters because the accounts will be used — for a tax return, an audit, or a transaction — and a known limitation is manageable while a hidden one is not. An auditor told about a gap can plan around it; an auditor who finds it cannot.
- Bank statements can usually be obtained from the bank even for closed accounts
- Sales can often be rebuilt from platform reports, contracts or customer confirmations
- Supplier statements substitute for missing purchase invoices in many cases, though not for input tax recovery
- Where an amount cannot be supported, it is disclosed rather than smoothed away
- Input tax cannot be recovered without a valid tax invoice, whatever the payment evidence shows
The compliance consequences come after the accounts, not before
Businesses in a backlog frequently want to know their exposure before committing to the work, which is understandable and mostly impossible. Until the records exist there is no computation, and until there is a computation any number is a guess.
What we can do at the outset is identify which obligations exist and roughly what scale of exposure is plausible, so the decision to proceed is informed. What we will not do is quote an exposure figure to win the work and revise it upwards once the records are built.
Once the accounts are done, the position is quantified properly and the options — voluntary disclosure, waiver application, or simply filing and paying — are set out with what each costs.
What goes wrong
These are the failures we are brought in to correct, in rough order of frequency:
- Filing returns from unreconciled records to meet a deadline, which converts a records problem into a filed misstatement.
- Starting a recurring service on top of a backlog, so the new work inherits whatever was wrong underneath.
- Reconstructing the profit and loss and ignoring the balance sheet, which is the corner most commonly cut and the one that fails an audit.
- Waiting for a deadline to force it. Backlog work under time pressure costs more and produces worse records.
- Assuming missing invoices can be substituted with bank payments for input tax recovery. They cannot.
- Fixing the records without fixing the process, and being in the same position in eighteen months.
The timing
Before a deadline forces it, if there is any choice. Backlog work is slower and more expensive when it is racing a filing date, because the sequencing has to be compressed and there is no room to chase missing documents.
Where a deadline is already close, we prioritise: the periods that drive an imminent filing first, the rest in order. That is a worse outcome than starting earlier, but it is considerably better than filing from records nobody has verified.
Deliverables
- Reconstructed ledgers for every period in scope
- Bank and subledger reconciliations, with unreconciled items identified rather than absorbed
- Financial statements for each period
- A written note of limitations, estimates and missing documentation
- A quantified compliance position with the options and their cost
- A clean opening position for the recurring cycle
What we need from you
Nothing exotic, and most of it you already have:
- Bank statements for every account, for every period in scope
- Whatever sales records exist — invoices, contracts, platform reports
- Purchase invoices and expense receipts, in whatever state they are in
- Payroll records and WPS files
- Loan, lease and financing agreements
- Trade licence and registration details
- Any prior financial statements or filed returns, however incomplete
What it costs
Fixed scope and fixed fee, quoted after we have seen the extent of what exists. That assessment is deliberately done first, because an hourly backlog engagement gives the provider no reason to be efficient and gives you no ability to budget.
Where the backlog spans several years, we scope it in phases so you can see progress and cost together rather than committing to the whole thing on trust.
Related
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you rebuild several years of accounts?
Yes. We scope it first — how many periods, what exists, what is missing — then quote a fixed fee. Multi-year backlogs are usually phased so you can see progress and cost together.
What if we have lost invoices?
We reconstruct what can be reconstructed, estimate where estimation is defensible, and disclose what remains uncertain. Bank statements can usually be recovered even for closed accounts. What cannot be substituted is a valid tax invoice for input tax recovery — payment evidence is not enough.
How much will we owe once the accounts are done?
We cannot tell you before the records exist, and any firm that quotes you a figure at that stage is guessing. What we can do up front is identify which obligations apply and the plausible scale, so the decision to proceed is informed. The proper number comes with the accounts.
Will you report us to anyone?
No. We are engaged by you and the work is confidential. What we will do is tell you clearly what your obligations are and what we think you should do about them — and we will not file something we know to be wrong.
Is it cheaper to just start fresh from this year?
It is not an option where returns are due for earlier periods, and those obligations do not lapse. Starting fresh also leaves an opening balance sheet nobody can support, which fails at the first audit or transaction.
How long does backlog work take?
It depends on the number of periods and the state of the records, but the main variable is how quickly missing documents can be gathered — which is largely on your side. A single year with reasonable records is weeks; several years reconstructed from bank statements alone is longer.
Will this happen again?
Not if the process changes. We hand over to a recurring monthly cycle at the end, and that is the point of the engagement — fixing the records without fixing the process just schedules a repeat.
Tell us roughly how many periods and what exists. We scope before we quote, and the fee is fixed rather than hourly.
Check my compliance status 058 101 9570
Last reviewed 27 July 2026. Rates, thresholds and deadlines change — the e-invoicing provider deadline has already moved once. Confirm current requirements with the Federal Tax Authority before acting, or ask us to check your position.