What a Financial Checkup Finds in Your QuickBooks Books, and Who Needs One

Most books are wrong in small, repeated ways that nobody has time to look for. A financial checkup is a one-time review that finds them, ranks them by dollars, and tells you what to fix first.

Most small-business books aren't wrong in dramatic ways. The errors are smaller and more repetitive: an invoice entered twice, a vendor that started landing in the wrong account in March, a bill that was supposed to arrive every month and quietly stopped. Each one is a small number. Together they change your margins, your tax picture, and what you tell a lender or an investor.

They survive because of how a month-end close works. A bookkeeper's job is to categorize transactions, reconcile the accounts and close the period. That is a different job from stepping back and asking what looks off across a whole year. A financial checkup is that second job, done once, on purpose.

What a financial checkup is, and what it isn't

A financial checkup is a one-time review of your QuickBooks Online company file. Automated checks scan your transactions, your history and your payment timing for patterns that usually mean a mistake. A person then reviews what turned up, sets aside the false alarms, ranks the rest by dollars, and explains what to fix.

It is not an audit, a review or a compilation, and it is not tax preparation. It doesn't produce financial statements or give an opinion on them. It produces a list: here is what looks wrong, here is how much money it touches, here is what to do first.

What a checkup finds

DrillFi's checkup runs 15 checks. These six groups cover most of what turns up in ordinary small-business books:

• Bills and invoices entered twice. The same vendor, invoice number, amount and date booked two times. Forwarded bill emails, bill-pay imports and rushed entry are the usual causes. How to find them yourself.
• Costs coded to the wrong account. A vendor that always books to one account suddenly lands in another, so margins drift without anyone deciding they should.
• Bills that should have come but didn't. Rent, storage, software and retainers arrive on a schedule. When one goes missing, your expenses are understated until it shows up.
• Money in catch-all accounts. Uncategorized expense, suspense accounts, and accounts not mapped to any report hold spending nobody has classified. How to clean them up.
• Payment timing. Customers paying far past due, and vendors paid long before they had to be.
• Odd vendors and personal spending. Near-duplicate vendor names that split your spend and invite double payments, consumer-style vendors, and large purchases that may need to be capitalized.

A flag is a lead, not a verdict. Two identical payments to a landlord might be two different units. A spike might be a legitimate annual prepayment. That is why a person reviews the list before it reaches you: software is good at finding candidates, and judgment decides which ones matter.

Who a checkup is useful for

You have a bookkeeper and want a second opinion

The books get closed on time, but nobody has looked at them with fresh eyes. A checkup hands your bookkeeper a specific, ranked list instead of a vague "something looks off." Done well, it's a favor to them, too.

You're a founder with no controller

You've been the finance department by default. A checkup tells you where your books really stand, what's risky, and what a finance hire or fractional controller would fix first. That also tells you what to hire for.

You're about to raise the stakes

Applying for a loan, raising money, preparing to sell, moving to a new bookkeeper, or heading into year-end and tax season. Finding a duplicate before a lender or buyer does is far cheaper than the alternative.

You're a bookkeeper or CPA

A second set of eyes on your own clients' books, and a way to find fixable problems before a client asks. You stay in charge of the books, the client and the tax work. See the referral partner option.

How our checkup works

1. Request it. Fill in the short form on the Financial Check Up page. We email you next steps, including a payment link for the flat $100.
2. Connect QuickBooks. You authorize Intuit's standard connection to your QuickBooks Online company, the same one any QuickBooks app uses. DrillFi only reads your data. It doesn't create or edit anything in your books, and you can disconnect whenever you like.
3. The checks run. All 15 checks run on your current year to date, compared with last year.
4. You get a report and a call. A written report with findings ranked by dollars, and a walkthrough call where we explain what each one means and what to fix first.
5. You get a fix list. Something you can hand straight to your bookkeeper, with the vendor, amount and date for each item so it can be found in QuickBooks in a minute.

The price is a flat $100, one time, per QuickBooks company, whatever the size of your books. If you continue with the full DrillFi platform or advisory support, your $100 is credited toward your first month. There's no obligation to buy anything beyond the checkup.

A checkup is a snapshot. Monthly use is what keeps the books clean.

Books drift back. New vendors show up, staff change, a bill-pay integration gets reconnected, and a few months later the same kinds of errors return. The checkup tells you where you stand today. Running DrillFi every month is how you stay there.

• Problems get caught the month they happen. A duplicate found in week two is a phone call to the vendor. Found in month eleven, it's a restated P&L and an awkward conversation.
• Budget vs actual on your own categories. Map your budget lines to the GL accounts that actually book the spend, once, and compare against budget or last year at every level. Why that mapping matters.
• Drill from any number to the transaction. Five levels, from a board-level line down to the invoice, without exporting a GL report. Try it on a sample company.
• The same 15 checks on every sync, with each alert linked to the exact row that triggered it.
• KPIs, including working capital. DSO, DPO, cash conversion cycle and inventory turnover built in, plus a builder for your own formulas.
• Statements and subledgers. Balance sheet, cash flow, AR and AP aging, and item sales, from the same synced data as the P&L.
• A monthly package. A downloadable PDF and Excel export you can hand to a board, a lender or an investor.

Many businesses do both: the checkup to find what's wrong today, then the platform so it stays right. See the DrillFi pricing table, or what each piece does in more detail.

When you need more than software

Software finds problems. It doesn't fix them, and it can't tell you what a number means for a decision you're making. Some businesses need a person for that, at least for a while.

Fractional finance support is scoped and priced to what you actually need. It can include month-end close review and oversight, a clear read on where the books stand and what to fix first, distributor and retailer deductions and remittance reconciliation for consumer brands, and budget vs actual and board or investor reporting. It works well as a controller stopgap until you know what a full-time hire should look like. Here's how it works.

DrillFi Financial Check Up is an advisory service. It is not an audit, review or compilation, and it is not tax preparation or legal advice. Sample findings are from a fictional company.