The most important documents are your bank statements and credit card statements for every month that needs to be caught up. These are the foundation of the entire process. Your bookkeeper will use them to reconstruct transactions, categorize expenses, and reconcile your accounts. If you use online banking, you can usually download statements going back several years. Pull statements for every business account, including savings accounts and any secondary checking accounts.

Credit card statements are just as important. If you’ve been using a personal card for business purchases, gather those too and be ready to identify which charges were business-related. Mixing personal and business transactions is common when books fall behind, and sorting through those takes extra time without the statements to reference.

Prior tax returns help establish a starting point. If your books are behind by a year or more, your most recent filed return gives your bookkeeper a baseline for beginning balances. Without it, they’re building from scratch, which is still doable but takes longer.

Gather any invoices you’ve sent to clients and any receipts you’ve saved for purchases. Even if your receipt collection is incomplete, whatever you have helps fill in gaps. Digital receipts sitting in your email inbox count too. Loan documents and statements matter if you have any business financing, because those transactions need to be recorded properly so your balance sheet is accurate.

If you have employees, pull together payroll reports from your payroll provider for the catch-up period. These include wages, tax withholdings, and employer contributions that all need to be reflected in your books. Similarly, any 1099s you received or issued should be included.

Here’s the reality though. Most people starting catch-up bookkeeping don’t have perfectly organized files. That’s normal and expected. A good bookkeeper can work with whatever you have and fill in the blanks using bank and credit card data as the primary source. You don’t need to have everything perfectly sorted before reaching out.

If you have an existing QuickBooks file or any prior bookkeeping data, even if it’s messy or partially done, share that as well. It’s easier to clean up existing work than to redo it from nothing. As a QuickBooks ProAdvisor in Long Beach, I’ve seen files in every condition imaginable, and having something to start from always saves time.

The bottom line is this: start by gathering your bank and credit card statements. That alone gets the process moving. Everything else you can provide on top of that makes the work faster and more accurate, but don’t let missing receipts or incomplete records stop you from getting started.