Balance Sheet Clean Up is the process of preparing a company's books for 📝Weekly Accounting by simplifying accounts and fixing entries at their source so the books can be kept current every week.
The process puts operational efficiency ahead of 📝GAAP accuracy: the books are optimized to be updated 52 times a year, because an audit happens at most once a year. Incorrect entries are edited directly rather than offset with a correcting journal entry, on the principle that two wrongs don't make a right. Transactions are recorded consistently, so all payments to a given vendor land in one account.
Simplicity governs the 📝Chart of Accounts. A company keeps a single equity account rather than one per investor, and a single balance sheet account for state taxes rather than one for each state it pays taxes in. Both are examples of avoiding 📝Too much of the wrong detail.
Two QuickBooks Online techniques handle most account moves. Merging one account into another moves all of the source account's transactions into the destination account. When a merge doesn't work, reclassifying transactions, a feature available to QuickBooks Online Accountant users but not company users, lets a bookkeeper filter an account for a common theme of transactions and move them to another account code, department, or class.
We optimize for the ability to do our books 52 times per year, because an audit only happens once per year, if ever.