Two years behind: cleaning up the books of a growing landscaping company

A landscaping company grew faster than its paperwork. Two trucks became five, one crew became three, and the owner was too busy quoting jobs to reconcile anything. The books hadn't been touched properly in nearly two years.

It all came to a head when he applied for equipment financing. The bank asked for financial statements. He didn't have any that he trusted — and neither did the bank.

Personal and business spending ran through the same account. E-transfers from customers sat uncategorised. Cash jobs were half-recorded. Several large equipment purchases had been expensed in full instead of capitalised, distorting both profit and the balance sheet.

On paper, the company looked either wildly profitable or nearly broke depending on which month you looked at. Neither was true.

We started from the source: two years of bank and credit card statements, pulled directly from the institutions so nothing was missed. Every transaction was re-categorised against actual documents, not guesses.

We separated the owner's personal spending into a proper shareholder loan account, capitalised the equipment correctly and set up depreciation, reconciled every account month by month, and rebuilt clean Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet statements for both years.

We also found money: missed GST Input Tax Credits and legitimate business expenses that had never been claimed, which reduced his tax bill enough to more than cover our cleanup fee.

With clean, defensible statements in hand, the financing was approved. More importantly, the owner now gets a monthly reporting package and actually knows which jobs and crews make money.

Falling behind doesn't make you a bad business owner — it usually means the business outgrew the system. The fix is rarely as scary as the avoidance.