14 months unreconciled. Three locations. CPA-ready in nine weeks.
A three-location restaurant group in the Houston area came to WestgateFS with 14 months of unreconciled QuickBooks records, an overdue tax filing, and a line-of-credit application the bank had already put on hold. No single account had been reconciled since their previous bookkeeper left. The owner had stopped reading the P&L because the numbers couldn’t be trusted. This is what happened next.
- Industry
- Restaurant & Hospitality
- Location
- Houston area, Texas
- Business size
- 3 locations · $2.1M combined revenue
- Situation on arrival
- 14 months unreconciled across all locations
- Service performed
- Full historical cleanup → ongoing monthly
- Time to CPA-ready
- 9 weeks from first file access
The situation
A restaurant group that couldn’t trust its own numbers.
The client operated three restaurant locations in the Houston area with a combined annual revenue of approximately $2.1 million. For several years, their in-house bookkeeping had been handled by front-of-house staff covering the work between shifts — a common arrangement that works until it doesn’t.
When their part-time bookkeeper left, they went four months without anyone touching the file before realizing how far behind things had gotten. By the time they contacted WestgateFS, 14 months of transactions across all three locations were unreconciled. Not a single bank account had been matched to a statement since the previous bookkeeper’s last month.
The owner had stopped pulling financial reports because they had learned — through two conversations with their CPA — that the numbers couldn’t be relied on. The CPA had refused to file the previous year’s tax return without a clean file. A community bank had put a $200,000 line-of-credit application on hold pending two years of accurate financials. The business was operationally profitable but couldn’t prove it.
“We knew we were making money. We just couldn’t show anyone — not the bank, not the IRS, not ourselves.”
- 14 months of unreconciled accounts across 3 locations
- Tax return overdue — CPA declined to file without a clean file
- Bank line-of-credit application stalled pending 2 years of financials
- No reliable P&L by location — owner couldn’t determine per-location profitability
- Previous bookkeeper had left no handoff notes or documentation
- QuickBooks file contained 3 locations in a single company file without class tracking
What we found
Opening the file: six categories of problems, all fixable.
The first step in any cleanup engagement is establishing the last clean period — the point from which the file can actually be trusted. For this client, that was 15 months prior: the last month the departing bookkeeper had reconciled. Everything after that date was the scope of work.
We opened the file and conducted a diagnostic pass across all accounts before beginning any reconciliation. What we found was consistent with what we typically see in a restaurant operation that’s been maintained by non-accounting staff: not fraud, not catastrophe — just accumulated disorder from people doing their best without the right training or time to do it correctly.
The primary categories of issues were: duplicate transactions from overlapping manual entry and bank feed, cross-location expense misallocation, uncategorized transactions that had been sitting in a holding account for months, and an entire bank account that had never been connected to the QuickBooks file at all. That last one — a merchant services settlement account used by all three locations — meant that revenue from card transactions had been going entirely unrecorded for 14 months.
- Duplicate transactions: Credit card charges entered manually and again via bank feed — inflating expenses across all 3 locations
- Cross-location misallocation: Vendor invoices for Location 2 recorded under Location 1 and 3 — making per-location P&L unreliable
- Uncategorized holding account: 847 transactions in a clearing account with no classification for 14 months
- Missing bank account: Merchant services settlement account never connected — 14 months of card revenue unrecorded
- Owner draw misclassification: Ownership distributions recorded as operating expenses, understating net income
- No class tracking: Single company file with no location separation — impossible to produce per-location reports
The work
Account by account. Month by month. Fifteen months back.
Cleanup engagements of this scope follow a specific sequence. We began by establishing the baseline: confirming the last clean reconciled period and setting it as the starting point. Then we requested three things from the client: read-only bank statement access for all accounts from the baseline forward, the merchant services portal login, and a list of all vendors organized by location.
We structured the work in monthly passes rather than account-by-account sweeps. Each month was completed and reconciled before moving forward — this prevents cascading errors and ensures every period can be independently verified by the CPA when we deliver. Within the QuickBooks file, we implemented class tracking by location before beginning any categorization so that every transaction entered from that point forward could be correctly attributed.
The merchant services account was connected and the 14 months of settlement deposits were entered and matched against daily sales records the client provided. Duplicate transactions were identified by comparing manual entries against bank feed imports and voided appropriately. The 847 uncategorized transactions in the holding account were reviewed individually — each was categorized and allocated to the correct location and period. Owner draws were reclassified from operating expenses to owner’s equity. The chart of accounts was simplified and standardized across all three locations.
Throughout the process, we documented every material decision — why a transaction was categorized a particular way, why a specific period had an adjustment, what source document supported each entry. That documentation travelled with the file when we handed off to the CPA. A clean file without documentation is only half the job.
Every month was fully reconciled before the next was touched. The CPA received a file they could audit at any level, with source documentation for every significant entry.
- Established clean baseline period (15 months prior)
- Implemented class tracking by location in QuickBooks
- Connected and reconciled merchant services settlement account
- Cleared all duplicate transactions across 14 months
- Categorized and allocated 847 uncategorized transactions
- Reconciled 3 business checking, 2 credit cards, 1 merchant account — all periods
- Reclassified owner draws to equity
- Standardized chart of accounts across all 3 locations
- Produced monthly P&L by location for all 14 periods
- Packaged complete documented file for CPA handoff
The outcome
What happened after the file was clean.
The CPA received the completed file on a Thursday. They confirmed over email the following Monday that it was the cleanest restaurant file they’d received in years. Both overdue tax returns — the prior year and the current year — were filed within eight weeks of the handoff. The client received refunds on one of the two years; the incorrect expense categorization had been overstating deductible costs in ways that actually worked against them in one period.
The line-of-credit application, which had been on hold for four months, was resubmitted the quarter after cleanup with two full years of clean financials attached. The bank approved the $200,000 facility within three weeks of resubmission.
The per-location P&L reports produced during cleanup revealed something the owner had suspected but couldn’t confirm: one location was consistently operating below the margin of the other two. With reliable numbers now available, the decision was made to restructure staffing at that location. Within two quarters it had moved to profitability. The owner described it as “the first time in two years we could actually manage the business instead of just running it.”
WestgateFS now handles ongoing monthly bookkeeping for all three locations. The file is reconciled every month. The CPA receives a clean, documented package at year-end. Tax season is a handoff.
- CPA filed 2 years of overdue tax returns
- Bank approved $200K line of credit
- Owner could identify per-location profitability for the first time
- Staffing restructure at underperforming location — now profitable
- Monthly food cost percentages now accurate — purchasing decisions grounded in real numbers
- Ongoing WestgateFS engagement — file clean and current every month
About this service
Bookkeeping cleanup is a specific type of engagement.
A bookkeeping cleanup is not the same as ongoing monthly bookkeeping. It’s a structured historical remediation: going back to the last clean period, working forward account by account and month by month, and producing a file that can be independently reconciled and audited. It requires a methodical process, source document access, and the judgment to know when an entry needs documentation versus when it can be inferred from context.
WestgateFS performs bookkeeping cleanup for Texas small businesses, nonprofits, and churches that have fallen behind — sometimes by months, sometimes by years. The scope varies. The process doesn’t. Every cleanup ends the same way: a reconciled, documented file ready for the CPA, and a clear picture of what ongoing maintenance costs to keep it that way.
Most cleanup engagements convert to ongoing monthly bookkeeping. The client in this case study continues with WestgateFS on a monthly retainer. The file has been current and reconciled every month since the cleanup completed.
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- Realistic scope and timeline before any work begins