I’m doing the books for my son’s small business and have made a huge mess. I need to pay somebody to help me fix it. I’m in Brisbane. Any suggestions?

Oh boy, this is a long read.  Sorry!

The issue relates back to 2022/23 fin yr where I was asked to change make some minor changes to allocations of payroll costs in order to separate them out of a claim for an R&D grant.  The changes were minimal … just amending some wages from “wages expense” to a sub account “wages expense - BD”.  These changes were made to each monthly pay run for the year and was done retrospectively in July23.

When I tried to process the Jun23 BAS it wouldn’t allow me to due to a negative value showing in W1.  Eventually I worked out it related to the changes I’d made, where the W1 allocation appeared to have dropped off the transaction.  I went back to the journals and corrected the entries, however it did not rectify the error.

To make things worse, I was living overseas in the opposite time zone and with minimal internet for the next 12 months.  This made seeking support difficult as each call or chat to support went on for hours and then often dropped out before it was resolved. QB support eventually told me I would have to unlodge all the BAS/IAS returns for the period.   I was particularly nervous about doing this when I may not be able to contact them should it go wrong.

Foolishly I decided to manually lodge returns through the portal and sort out the problem when I returned to Australia.  Meanwhile, of course, the accountant had closed the books for that year.

So, after putting it off for far too long, I finally bit the bullet and contacted support to have all of the returns UN-lodged.  The accountant said to ensure that when I relodged them I made them exactly the same as what was previously lodged.  Well, that will not be the case.  Obviously some changes have been made along the way which results in different numbers coming up and the system does not let me force the values.  

I am WAY out of my depth on this as I am not particularly familiar with the finer details of Quickbooks.  I’m also dealing with a health issue which is making this particularly hard.  I think my best option is to pay somebody who knows what they are doing to help me rather than make this mess even bigger (if that’s possible).