Home / Free Ledger Snapshot
See where your books need attention
Tell us what the business does, then export 7 reports from QuickBooks and send them to us. Within 2 working days, we’ll send back a page identifying balances or records worth checking.
The Snapshot is free. Your QuickBooks password can stay with you.
What to send
- →Account List. Your chart of accounts, with all exported columns intact.
- →Trial Balance 1. Your most recently completed financial year.
- →Trial Balance 2. The financial year before that.
- →Trial Balance 3. The financial year before that.
- →Profit and Loss. From the start of your current financial year to today, with a column for each month.
- →Accounts receivable aging summary. Use today’s date.
- →Accounts payable aging summary. Use the same date as the receivables report.
The form asks for the month your financial year ends, and the export sheet names the exact dates to use. For a December 31 year-end, the 3 completed years are 2025, 2024 and 2023.
What we check
The 7 exports support 8 checks, read against the kind of business you run. A ninth comparison is available when you also supply the matching year-end statements from your accountant.
Year-end movements.
Changes in retained earnings that need an explanation.
Account types.
Accounts whose classification needs checking against their use.
Unusual balances.
Balances that run in an unexpected direction.
Unchanged balances.
Amounts carried across several year-ends that need confirmation.
Old accounts.
Balances in accounts marked as retired or no longer used.
Overdue and unusual items.
Customer or supplier balances that need follow-up.
Receivables totals.
The balance in the ledger compared with the aging summary.
Payables totals.
The balance in the ledger compared with the aging summary.
Year-end comparison.
Where supplied, the accountant’s year-end figures compared with the ledger for the same period.
These checks identify questions. The exports alone don’t establish why a balance differs or whether an entry is wrong.
What comes back
You’ll receive a page naming the observations and the records needed to investigate them. If nothing needs further attention within this scope, we’ll say so.
The quote for the monthly work comes in the same email, priced on what the reports show about the size of the file. Nothing in the Snapshot commits you to it.
A Ledger Diagnostic goes further by examining transactions and source documents. The Snapshot will tell you whether that additional work looks useful.
Snapshot scope
- →Report observations. The Snapshot covers the reports you supply. It doesn’t include checks against bank statements or individual source documents.
- →For your own use. You can share it with your accountant as a discussion note. It isn’t prepared for lending or other third-party decisions.
- →Bookkeeping only. It doesn’t provide legal, tax or investment advice, or an audit or assurance opinion.
- →Free to request. There is no fee or requirement to buy further work. We confirm the scope by email before starting.
Emailed report files are deleted after 30 days unless a paid engagement begins. For shared folders, you control access. We retain a copy of the observations we send you.
Request a Snapshot
About two minutes: what the business is, five quick questions about where the books stand, and where to send the export sheet. It comes straight back by email.
What happens next
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You ask
The form above: what the business does, its website if it has one, five quick answers about where the books stand, and where to reach you. The same balance means different things in different businesses, so this is what lets the Snapshot check the right things.
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The export sheet arrives by email
By return, not in a day or two. It names the seven reports, where each one sits in the QuickBooks menu, the exact dates for your year-end, and the four terms the Snapshot is given under. It takes about ten minutes to work through.
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You send the seven files
Reply to that email with the files attached, or share a folder from your own Google Drive or OneDrive and keep it read-only. Nothing is connected and no password leaves your hands.
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The Snapshot comes back inside two working days
One page, in plain words. If the files do not arrive we send one reminder after three days, and only one.
Rather just write to us? help@offyourplatebooks.ca, and we will send the same sheet by hand.