Catch up bookkeeping on a bank account starts from the opening balance printed on the oldest statement, entered as the starting balance. It moves forward only while each opening equals the closing before it. Evidilo adds up every row of a statement against the balances the bank printed; a bank feed is the alternative, for the months it reaches.
What catch-up bookkeeping has to hold together
A client arrives with a shoebox, a folder of PDFs or a login and no books for a year. Whatever the source, the bank account in the ledger has to end where the bank says it ended, and it can only do that if it started where the bank says it started. Two figures carry the whole job.
The first is the starting balance. The oldest statement you hold prints an opening balance, which is what the account held when the day before that statement’s first day closed. Enter that figure, dated to match, and every transaction after it has something to add to.
The second is the chain. Each statement opens with the balance the previous one closed on. When the two agree across every pair of months, no statement is missing between them and none is in the pile twice. When they disagree, stop there: the books cannot be right past that point until you know why.
The chain from one statement to the next
The table below is an illustration, generated for this post and not taken from any client’s file. It starts twelve monthly statements at $12,345.67, then removes May 2025 and puts September 2025 in the pile twice. Checking each opening against the closing before it finds both, and nothing else.
| Statement | Follows | Previous closing | Its opening | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| June 2025 | April 2025 | $12,762.83 | $14,258.20 | A month is missing between them |
| September 2025 | September 2025 | $15,012.66 | $14,606.65 | The same statement is in the pile twice |
The test has one blind spot. A missing month whose deposits and withdrawals cancel out to the cent leaves the chain intact, so read the statement dates as well as the balances.
Evidilo, a bank statement to accounting import file converter, works on the other half of the problem: whether one statement agrees with itself. It adds up every row it read against the opening, closing and daily balances the bank printed and marks the first day that does not tie out, and it reads a PDF, a scan or a photo of a paper statement into QBO, IIF, OFX, QFX, QIF, CSV or Excel. It does not compare one statement’s opening with the last one’s closing, and it does not reconcile the account; that pair check stays with you. What a tied-out statement tells you covers what the single-statement check proves. When the same account has already been converted for a period the new statement runs into, the download step names the earlier dates, so a repeated month can show up there before it reaches the books.
Opening balance on QuickBooks, Xero, Wave and FreshBooks
Every tool has somewhere to put the starting balance. Of the four help pages we could read, no two put it in the same place or date it the same way. We read each one’s own help page on 25 October 2026 and recorded the answer with the sentence it came from.
| Tool | Where you enter it | The date it applies to | What it is posted against |
|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks Online | Chart of accounts, New account, Opening balance field | The As of date: the day you start tracking the account | Opening Balance Equity |
| QuickBooks Desktop | Chart of Accounts, New, Enter Opening Balance: Ending date and Ending balance fields | A date older than the oldest transaction you want to track | Not stated for that window; the page’s journal entry route uses Opening Balance Equity |
| Xero | Not read: the help page returned no text | Not read | Not read |
| Wave | Transactions page: an income transaction described Starting balance | The start of the business’s fiscal year | An equity account the user picks in the Category field |
| FreshBooks | Accounting, bank reconciliation set-up: Reconciliation Start Date and Opening Balance | The Reconciliation Start Date, suggested as the first day of a recent statement | Opening Balance Adjustments (Equity) |
Only FreshBooks ties the date to a statement in so many words. Its bank reconciliation set-up guide tells you to enter the date of the statement’s opening balance or balance forward line as the start date, and the balance on that line as the opening balance. Wave dates its starting balance to the start of the fiscal year, and its article adds that a transaction dated earlier in that year means moving the starting balance so it stays the account’s first transaction. For a catch-up that begins mid-year, that is the row to move. Xero’s article on conversion balances is built in the browser by script and gave neither our fetch nor a plain download any text, so the Xero row is left empty rather than filled from someone else’s summary.
How to enter opening balance in QuickBooks
The two QuickBooks products word it differently, and the wording matters for a catch-up. Intuit’s page for opening balances in QuickBooks Online asks for the balance in the Opening balance field and a date in the As of field, the day you start tracking the account. It says that QuickBooks tracks every account’s opening balance in an Opening Balance Equity account, and that an account set up without one can be given one later with a journal entry. For a catch-up, the As of date is the oldest statement’s first day and the amount is the opening it prints.
QuickBooks Desktop’s opening balance article uses a statement’s own words instead: an Ending date and an Ending balance, on a date older than the oldest transaction you want to track. The figure that fits is the closing balance of the month before your oldest statement, which is the same amount as that statement’s printed opening. The page closes with a check worth keeping: the Opening Balance Equity account shouldn’t have a remaining balance once the opening entries are in.
Bookkeeping clean up checklist for one bank account
- Find the last month the books are right for this account, or the date the account opened. The catch-up starts the day after.
- Gather every statement from that date to today. Where the client has a bank feed, see how far back a bank feed reaches; the months before it come from statements.
- Put the statements in date order and list each one’s first day, last day, opening and closing. If you work in a spreadsheet, open the Excel file rather than the CSV so the dates and amounts arrive as dates and amounts.
- Check each opening against the closing above it. Where one differs, find the missing or repeated statement before going further.
- Enter the oldest statement’s opening as the account’s starting balance, in the place and on the date the table above gives for your tool.
- Check each statement against its own printed balances before you import it. Evidilo marks the first day that does not tie out; the routes into QuickBooks, and what keeps a month from going in twice on each, are compared in getting a PDF bank statement into QuickBooks.
- Reconcile month by month in the accounting tool, oldest first, with each statement’s closing as the ending balance.
How was this checked?
On 25 October 2026 we read the opening balance help page of QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, Wave and FreshBooks and recorded, for each, where the balance is entered, the date it applies to and what it is posted against, with the sentence each answer came from. The table and its sources are in dataset.csv, and the script check.py re-reads the pages and confirms every quote, and rebuilds the generated chain shown above as an illustration.
Catching up a client’s bank account: five questions
How far back should a catch-up start?
From the first month the books do not already have right for that account, or from the day the account opened if they never had it. Evidilo reads statements rather than connecting to the bank, so a statement from before the client’s feed started converts the same way as last month’s. A bank feed is the quicker source for the months it does reach.
What opening balance do I enter in QuickBooks Online for a catch-up?
The opening balance printed on the oldest statement, with the As of date set to that statement’s first day. Evidilo checks that same printed opening when it adds up the statement’s rows, so a misread opening shows up as a statement that does not tie out. QuickBooks Online posts the other side to Opening Balance Equity, per Intuit’s help page.
What does it mean when a statement’s opening does not match the last closing?
A statement is missing between the two, the same statement is in the pile twice, or one of them belongs to another account. Evidilo does not compare the two figures, but when the same account has been converted for a period the new statement runs into, its download step names the earlier dates. A missing month gets no such notice, so the pair check on your list of openings and closings is the one that finds it.
Why is there money left in Opening Balance Equity after a catch-up?
Because some opening entry in the books has not been fully accounted for: Intuit’s QuickBooks Desktop article says the Opening Balance Equity account shouldn’t have a remaining balance. Evidilo writes import files of a statement’s rows and makes no opening entry of its own, so every figure in that account is one typed in the books. Start with the starting balances and their dates, since a wrong date moves money between years.
Can Evidilo reconcile the catch-up months?
No. Evidilo checks each statement against the opening, closing and daily balances the bank printed and marks the first day that does not tie out, which is a check on the reading rather than on the ledger. Reconciliation happens in the accounting tool, for instance FreshBooks bank reconciliation, whose set-up asks for the same start date and opening balance.