Why your books look "off" during onboarding

If you've peeked at your reports during onboarding and something looked strange — sky-high margins, an odd net profit, or a nearly empty P&L — take a breath. While we're catching up your books, your reports are a work in progress and will look incomplete for a little while. This is completely normal.

Why your margins look too high

The most common surprise is profit that looks way too good. Here's why it happens: your revenue gets categorized before all your expenses do. So for a stretch, the books show most of your income but only some of your costs — which makes profit look inflated.

As we finish categorizing the remaining expenses, that number comes back down to a realistic figure. Nothing is wrong; the picture is just still filling in.

Your books aren't tax-ready yet

If your P&L looks empty

An empty-looking P&L is almost always the report-period filter defaulting to the current year. Switch it to the full date range and your numbers will appear. See Reading your Profit & Loss and Financial Overview for the steps.

What happens, and when your numbers become final

Here's the path from "in progress" to "source of truth":

1. Catch-up categorization — we work through your transactions (with your help answering questions).
2. Cleanup & initialization — once categorization is done, your account moves to our cleanup team to reconcile everything and produce an accurate set of books. This typically takes about 5–7 business days.
3. Tax & your bookkeeper — from there your account moves to tax and to your dedicated bookkeeper for ongoing monthly work.

How to speed it up

You have a real say in how fast this goes. The biggest levers:

• Answer your questions promptly — this is what unblocks categorization.
• Upload requested documents when we ask for them.
• Grant account access as soon as you can, so we're never waiting on data.

What's next