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Tools · scope quiz

Which books repair is yours? Five questions sort it.

Catch-up, cleanup, both, reconstruction — or genuinely nothing? The words get used interchangeably and priced differently, so the first honest step is naming the job. This quiz runs the same first five questions a senior operator asks, and gives you a classification — deliberately never a dollar figure.

Runs in your browser; your answers never leave the page. The methodology is published in full below — with JavaScript off, the page still teaches you to classify it yourself.

Classification, never dollars Methodology in the open

The five possible results

Catch-up · a tidy gap

Months never entered, records sound — the most DIY-viable repair.

Cleanup · or both

Months entered wrong — alone, or interleaved with a gap. One project, one fee.

Reconstruction · or healthy

Records gone entirely — or, honestly, books that just need their rhythm kept.

The quiz

Five questions, honest answers.

1 · When did an account last genuinely reconcile to its bank statement?


2 · The records themselves — what state are they in?

3 · Do you trust the reports the books produce?

4 · Payroll or collected sales tax in the affected months?
5 · Is a real deadline driving this — a filing, a loan, a sale?

Whatever the quiz says, the free review is where classification meets your actual file — a senior operator, the real answer, and a fixed fee in writing if there's a job to do.

Free books assessment

The methodology, in the open

How the classification works — no black box.

Records gone beats everything: if any records are missing entirely, the job is a reconstruction — collection before bookkeeping — whatever the other answers say. Then the split that decides most files: months never entered with trustworthy recorded history reads as a catch-up; months never entered with drift in what was recorded reads as catch-up plus cleanup, scoped together. Everything else keys on the reconciliation question: reports you don't fully trust, or an account that hasn't proven out against a statement in a year — that's a cleanup, because unreconciled months that look fine are where drift hides. And if the records are complete, the reports trusted, and last month reconciled — the honest result is that you don't have a repair job; you have a rhythm to keep, which is monthly bookkeeping or your own disciplined close.

The two modifier questions change the handling, not the category: payroll or collected sales tax in scope raises the prove-it standard on those accounts (what's owed and filed stays with your CPA and the Comptroller — the books make their answers trackable), and a live deadline re-sequences the work so the periods your date needs land first. The mechanisms behind every rule here are taught free: the six signs, the behind-on-books triage, and the cleanup checklist.

Scope quiz FAQ · Updated July 2026

Direct answers about the quiz.

Which repair job your books need — a classification, deliberately not a price. The five answers sort your situation into the same categories our free review uses: a tidy catch-up (months missing, records sound), a cleanup (months present but wrong), the combined project, a reconstruction (records themselves gone), or — honestly — healthy books that need a rhythm rather than a rescue. Naming the job correctly is worth more than a premature number, because the four jobs have different methods, different DIY-viability, and different honest prices.
Reliable at what it does, and plain about what it doesn't. The questions are the same first five a senior operator asks on a real review — when the last reconciliation happened, what survived, whether the reports are trusted — and they sort the large majority of files correctly because the categories are genuinely that distinct. What the quiz can't see is your actual file: the edge cases, the mixed situations, the drift that hides behind months that merely look done. That's what the free review reads. Treat the quiz as the right starting category, not the final word.
Nothing leaves this page. The quiz runs entirely in your browser — no answers are submitted, stored, or attached to you. The only thing recorded is a single anonymous analytics event noting that a result was shown and which of the five classifications it was, so we can tell whether the tool is genuinely useful — never your individual answers, and never anything that identifies you. If you go on to book the free review, you tell us your situation yourself.
No — and that result is the most common one for books more than a few months behind, so the pricing convention matters. Catch-up rebuilds the months that were never entered; cleanup corrects the stretch that was entered wrong; on a real file the two interleave, so we scope them as one project with one fixed fee in writing, set after the free review. Two separately-quoted jobs on one file is how owners end up paying for the same untangling twice.
That's information, not a failure — it usually means one answer deserves a harder look. The most common between-case: 'the reports seem fine' paired with 'never really reconciled,' which the quiz reads as cleanup because unreconciled months that look fine are the classic hiding place for drift. If your gut disputes the classification, run the one honest test that outranks the quiz: pick your main account's last 'good' month and try to reconcile it to the bank statement. Ties to the penny — trust your gut. Doesn't — trust the quiz.

Rather skip the quiz and have the classification done on your actual file? The free assessment — a senior operator, one business day.

Keep reading

The methods behind each result.

Signs your books need cleanup

The six mechanisms behind question three — how to read drift early, before the quiz would even be needed.

Keep reading

Behind on bookkeeping? What to do first

If your result was catch-up — the triage order that works: first hour, first weekend, the rebuild.

Keep reading
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