Small services company. Bookkeeping has not been touched in eleven months. License renewal is six weeks out, and we will need at minimum clean books to support the renewal, potentially an audit-style confirmation depending on how the free zone handles it. This is not a situation where I am pretending things are fine.
Raw material available: bank statements for the full period, PDF invoices from most but not all suppliers, Stripe and Shopify exports on the sales side, WPS records from the payroll provider, and a sporadic Xero instance that has roughly four months of entries from earlier in the year. Nothing has been reconciled. VAT returns have been filed during this period on rough numbers that will now need to be reconciled against the real books.
What I need is an accountant who can triage this in weeks, not months. Concretely: reconstruct sales from the exports and the bank, rebuild the purchase ledger from supplier PDFs and card statements, reconcile everything against the bank, identify where input VAT claims need to be amended, produce clean year-to-date financials that the free zone will accept at renewal, and flag any compliance exposure that needs to be addressed before renewal rather than after.
Secondary ask, after the emergency is over: I want the same accountant (or the same firm) to take over on a monthly retainer so this cannot happen again. I am not trying to DIY this and then hand it back in eleven months. One person, one workflow, one monthly close, one point of contact.
Honesty matters more than optimism here. If six weeks is not realistic for your team given the mess I just described, tell me at the first call so I can adjust the renewal conversation with the free zone proactively. And if this is a situation you have rescued before for companies of our size, please reference it.
