You're not the only one, and it's fixable. The fastest path is getting someone to do a clean read of where things actually stand right now, rather than trying to reconstruct every month yourself.
This tends to happen slowly. A few months of falling behind turns into a year, and then it feels too big to fix. The instinct to keep pushing it off, or to feel embarrassed about how far behind things are, is the wrong instinct. A good bookkeeper has seen worse than yours, and the sooner it's dealt with, the cheaper it is.
Get a current snapshot before worrying about the backlog. Where do things actually stand right now: cash position, what you owe, what's owed to you? That matters more urgently than reconstructing every transaction from six months ago. Then figure out what you actually need for taxes versus what would just be nice to have. Full historical clean-up is sometimes overkill; a clear read on tax-relevant numbers plus a clean starting point going forward is often the realistic, affordable path.
Fix the system, not just the backlog. If whatever caused this doesn't change (no separate account, no consistent process), you're back here again next year. The fix has to include what happens differently going forward.
This isn't about being judged for how things got here. It's about knowing where you stand now, and not ending up here again.
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