Free · Canada-specific · no signup
How much will your accountant charge to clean this up?
A rough cost estimator for handing your accountant a year of spreadsheet chaos. The math is empirical — minutes per transaction depending on whether it's categorized, has a receipt, and is cleanly business vs. personal. Use it to decide whether to clean up yourself or pay someone else to.
What actually makes a year messy.
Bookkeepers don't charge by transaction — they charge by hour. But hours scale with three things:
- Missing receipts. For every uncategorized transaction without a receipt, the bookkeeper has to ask you what it was, wait for an answer, and document the response. A typical receipt-chase loop costs 3–5 minutes of professional time per line.
- Uncategorized transactions. CRA wants T2125 categories. Every uncategorized transaction needs a judgment call — sometimes a quick one ("Adobe = software"), sometimes slow ("$847 to Home Depot — was that the home office or the personal kitchen reno?").
- Mixed accounts. If your business spending sits in your personal chequing account, every transaction needs a split decision. A clean separate business account eliminates this overhead almost entirely.
The good news: each of these can be solved with 5–10 minutes a week during the year, instead of dozens of hours of cleanup at year-end. The bad news: most freelancers don't.
Common questions
Is this accurate for my specific situation?
It's a rough model based on typical Canadian bookkeeper workflows for freelancer engagements. Real quotes vary with the accountant's software, whether they bundle T2125 prep with cleanup, and how organized you are at handoff. Use this number to decide whether to ask for quotes, not as the quote itself.
What's the cheapest way to keep cleanup costs low?
Three habits, in order of leverage: (1) separate business account from day one; (2) photo the receipt the moment you pay — most apps auto-attach to transactions; (3) categorize weekly, not annually. A freelancer who does these three things typically has under 10 hours of year-end work, regardless of revenue volume.
What if I don't even know how many transactions I have?
Pull your business-account statements and count the lines. For a typical full-time freelancer with one business account, expect 300–600 transactions per year (one client invoice per week, two or three expenses per week, occasional transfers). If you don't have a business account at all, count your personal account and multiply your mixed % by 100.
Should I do this myself or hire someone?
If the cleanup estimate is over $1,000 and you bill more than $75/hr, hiring usually wins on opportunity cost — that's a week of client work you don't lose. If you're under $1,000 in cleanup or have time on your hands, DIY is reasonable and you'll learn something about your business. Either way, fix the habits next year.
Make next year's cleanup under an hour.
MapleBooks gives you a weekly inbox of uncategorized transactions, attaches receipts via OCR, and produces a T2125-ready package on demand. The cleanup tax goes away when there's nothing to clean up.
Start your 14-day free trial