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We are halfway through 2020 and in addition to being busy with COVID-19 and combating social injustices, some business owners are also realizing they are behind in their bookkeeping. I feel your pain because I’ve been there as well and it’s nothing to be ashamed of because it’s actually not uncommon. Your bookkeeping should be a focus now though so that you aren’t going into the last quarter of the year needing to catch up even more. Let’s dive into how you can catch up on many months of your bookkeeping! Get ready to get back on track with your bookkeeping!  What we’re talking about Assessing What Needs To Get Done In Your Bookkeeping Doing The Prep Work - Have What You Need Before You Start Getting Started With A Method For Your Bookkeeping Batching Your Work - Macro Batching and Micro Batching Last Steps To Catching Up On Your Bookkeeping Assessing What Needs To Get Done In Your Bookkeeping Before you work on all that you need to catch up on, you need to assess what needs to get done. Identify all of the components of your bookkeeping that are undone, including what accounts you need to do. Start off by making a list of them. Write out all of your accounts, such as your bank accounts, Venmo, PayPal, and credit cards. Any type of account in which there is a transaction should be included.  Once you have your accounts listed out, focus on things you track, such as mileage, home office expenses, split expenses, such as your cell phone, internet, and cash receipts. You will need to include all of these items in order to get caught up!  Doing The Prep Work - Have What You Need Before You Start  You now have a list of everything you will need, so next you need to gather your materials. Have everything you need to do the work before you start on it. If you are using your bank statements, you need to download them year-to-date. If you’re using QuickBooks, make sure your bank is connected and update the system, so that your statements download properly. If you don’t want to download everything, have your login details available and finish the prep work a day or week before to save time.  Getting Started With A Method For Your Bookkeeping We have now reached the doing phase of things! You have what you need and you know what needs to get done. Most people will want to do month-to-month which is a great method if you have one month to do. If you need to catch up on a lot of months, you’ll be switching between too many accounts and it breaks the flow. Try batching by account, not month and only focus on one account at a time.  Batching Your Work - Macro Batching and Micro Batching Macro batching is high level batching in which we focus on one account at a time. You will have a variety of deposits, checks, and transactions, so I suggest you focus on one account at a time. It’s going to be easier to have your checking account on your screen and to look at all of your check images at once, rather than to toggle between multiple accounts. This is breaking up the work, by breaking up the accounts.  Micro-batching is working within each account. An example of working in the account is by doing all of the deposits at once. Start by tackling all of the easy transactions at once followed by all of the recurring subscriptions that are easy for you to categorize or type in. To make this even easier, you can sort alphabetically in QuickBooks. Next, focus on the checks at once so you can look at images at once and not have to search for numbers. Finally, work on your Venmo transactions at once since you have to log into your Venmo account to access the details.  Last Steps To Catching Up On Your Bookkeeping The last step is to do easy stuff. Skip the hard stuff or things you have questions about. If there’s research that needs to be involved in which you have to exit from what you’re currently doing to figure it out, skip it. At the end, once everything is batched, spend a day or two to find the answers to your questions.  Do you feel motivated and less stressed about getting your bookkeeping back on track? LINKS MENTIONED Free workshop: Catch Up Your Bookkeeping in 10 Days https://andismiles.com/workshop/ Why Your Bookkeeping Is Behind and How to Deal With It https://andismiles.com/2016/12/05/why-your-bookkeeping-is-behind/ How to Get Your Bookkeeping Done Quickly & Easily https://andismiles.com/2017/07/17/get-bookkeeping-done-quickly-easily/ How to Get Your Bookkeeping Done In a Time Crunch https://andismiles.com/2016/12/19/get-bookkeeping-done-in-a-time-crunch/