A good calculator does one honest thing: it gives you a number to plan against before you spend a dollar. It does not pretend to be a quote — and neither do ours.
What these calculators are for
These tools exist so you can size a QuickBooks problem yourself, in a couple of minutes, without a call or a form. Each one takes a few plain inputs and returns a plain result with every assumption listed underneath — so you can see exactly how it was reached rather than trust a black box. They run entirely in your browser, save nothing, and send nothing anywhere. The point is to replace the anxious guess ("is this going to cost hundreds or thousands?") with something defensible you can plan around, and then show you the one honest way to turn it into a real figure: a free look at your actual file. Where we have not published the underlying number, the calculator says so rather than inventing one — which is why the cleanup tool sizes the job instead of pricing it. If a calculator ever suggests you do not need us, that is a legitimate answer too.
Start here: the cleanup cost calculator
All four calculators are live, and the cleanup one is where most people start. The QuickBooks cleanup cost calculator turns three things — how many months you are behind, how many bank and card accounts you run, and roughly how many transactions land each month — into a scope band: light, standard or complex, adjusted by a complexity setting. Under the result it states the exact rule it used, so nothing is hidden. What it deliberately does not do is print a dollar figure, because that would mean assuming a rate per transaction we do not publish. The one price it shows is the published floor: a standard cleanup starts at $1,500. If you would rather understand the cost drivers in prose first, the guide to what QuickBooks work costs walks through what moves the price and why, and the cleanup service page describes the work being sized.
Why it's an estimate — and what turns it into a quote
A calculator can only estimate, because the honest price depends on what is really in the file: how clean the bank feeds are, how many exceptions there are, whether the opening balances were ever right. So the timeline and monthly-cost tools return a range, deliberately erring toward the cautious middle, and the cleanup tool returns a scope band rather than a price at all. What turns any of them into a single number is the free review — a view-only look that confirms the scope and sets a fixed fee.
Estimate to quote
Read this as text
Three ordered steps: a calculator returns a starting point, a free view-only review of your file replaces it, and the result is a single fixed-scope quote — which can come in below the estimate. Illustrative, not a measured statistic.
That ordering is the whole discipline. The estimate is where you decide whether the work is worth pursuing; the review is where the number becomes real and committed. Because the fixed fee is set from what we actually see — not from an hourly meter — the worse-case fear a range can plant rarely survives contact with the file. If you want the reasoning behind the fixed-scope approach spelled out, our methodology shows exactly how a quote is built and why nothing is billed open-ended.
The other calculators
Three more calculators are live alongside the cleanup estimate, each built the same honest way — a few plain inputs, every assumption shown, and a range rather than a false-precision number. The monthly bookkeeping cost calculator sizes ongoing work from your transaction volume, account count, and reporting frequency. The catch-up timeline calculator projects how many weeks it takes to get current from a given number of months behind. And the migration timeline calculator estimates the weeks to move between QuickBooks products or from another system. Each routes the same way the cleanup estimate does: a clear range, the formula shown, and a free review to set the real number.
Getting an exact number instead of a range
When a range is not enough, the next step is always the same. A free QuickBooks review puts the same hands that will do the work on your actual file, confirms what the work involves, and replaces any estimate with a fixed fee and a committed timeline. Pricing starts from a published floor of $1,500 that the review turns into a firm number for your file — set at the start, not discovered on an invoice. There is no obligation, and if the review finds you do not need the work, we will say so.