Case Study 21 – Reconstructing Accounting Records

How To Recover Lost Accounting Records from A General Ledger Report

Many small businesses fail to upgrade their accounting software for many years until they are no longer able to keep the system. Upgrading legacy software has always been a nail-biting experience when critical data is involved. Instead, it seems cheaper to keep using the old software and create workaround solutions when new features are needed. However, the patchwork of exporting to spreadsheets and importing data into alternative software solutions to provide accounting and reporting solutions leads to an increasing set of problems with data accuracy.  Eventually, this can lead to a complete loss of data access when the system has a fatal failure.

Saved over $60k in income taxes over estimated tax returns by reconstructing accounting records from scratch after a system failure.

I had a client that had been doing tax return estimates for about 3 years for six different companies he owned. He had been doing his accounting on an AS-400 computer system and failed to do updates since it was too expensive for him.  Eventually, his system no longer had any technical support due to the age of the software without updates. So he downloaded all his data into a general ledger report among others, and started looking for someone who could reconstruct his accounting system so he could begin accounting again.  In the meantime, he was doing his bookkeeping on Quickbooks Online.  Due to the fact that his companies had started shrinking, he did not want to invest in another expensive accounting solution. The solution I found to his problem was to translate his reports into data that could be imported into Quickbooks Enterprise and used to reconstruct the financial reports he needed with minimal data loss.  That, combined with his accounting paper files, restored his old accounting system. As a result of this effort, we were able to reconstruct annual financial statements for all his companies for the past 3 years and with the accounting errors we fixed in the process, we were able to save him over an estimated $60k in taxes paid from his estimated tax returns. It pays to keep good accounting records.