Rebuild Mode

Rebuild Mode is a scoping scan for engagements where the client has transactions in the QBO bank feed but no populated books yet. It's designed for three situations that look the same from the data's perspective:

• A fresh QBO file you're building from scratch (new client, no prior bookkeeper).
• A migration from another platform to QBO (Xero, Wave, Sage, FreshBooks, etc.) where you've activated bank feeds and pulled transactions back to a start date, but nothing has been categorized and accepted into the register yet.
• A takeover where bank feeds have been running unattended and thousands of items are stacked in the For Review queue.

In all three cases, a standard diagnostic has nothing to analyze. The Trial Balance, Balance Sheet, P&L, and General Ledger are effectively empty because no transactions have posted to the GL. Rebuild Mode reads the For Review queue directly and gives you a per-account scoping view you can use to plan and price the work.

Picking Rebuild Mode

Rebuild / Migration is one of four engagement types you choose from when you create the engagement (alongside Cleanup, Monthly, and Both). Pick it on the New Engagement form and the whole downstream workflow adapts:

• The upload page asks for exactly one thing: Bank Feed - For Review CSVs.
• The scan button reads "Run Rebuild Mode Scan."
• The report page drops the standard health score and cleanup- time ring in favor of a per-account scoping summary.

If you picked Cleanup or Monthly by mistake and actually have a rebuild on your hands, switch the engagement type on the upload page's settings panel; the upload form and scan flow will update immediately. The reverse also works: once the rebuild is done and you have real books, flip the engagement type to Cleanup and re-upload the full report set.

Getting the right output: one finding per account

Rebuild Mode produces one finding per uploaded account so you can scope by card or bank account. The filename of each For Review export becomes the account label that shows up on the finding — QBO names each export with the account it came from, so you don't need to rename anything.

The practical version:

1. In QBO, go to Banking and open each bank / credit card / line of credit in turn.
2. Export the For Review or Pending tab to CSV. QBO caps each export at 300 rows and only captures the items currently visible in the tab. If an account has more than 300 items waiting, click the gear icon at the top of the For Review tab to set rows per page, then page through the queue and export each page until you've captured everything.
3. Upload all of the CSVs to the Bank Feed - For Review slot.

What the scan tells you

Per uploaded account, you get:

• Transaction count, with severity:
  • INFO at 1-10 items
  • WARNING at 11-50 items
  • CRITICAL at more than 50 items, or when the oldest item is more than 90 days old
• Date range of the unprocessed items (oldest to newest).
• Total outflows and inflows for the account.

That's enough to plan the work: ordering categorization by the noisiest account first, flagging dormant / rarely-used cards that can be cleared quickly, and giving a defensible volume number to the client when you price the engagement.

What the scan doesn't tell you

Because there are no populated books, the other detectors cannot run. You will not see chart-of-accounts findings, reconciliation findings, duplicate findings, P&L anomalies, or a health score. That's not a bug, it's the point of the mode: nothing exists for those detectors to analyze. Rescan with a full report set once the books are populated to get the standard diagnostic.

Rebuild Mode also does not estimate hours. The transaction count and account count are scoping inputs, not a billable-hours formula; how long the work actually takes depends on how many unique merchants appear across the queue, whether a chart of accounts exists yet, and how clean the bank-feed data itself is. Apply your own rubric; the blog posts on how to scope a QBO cleanup and cleanup vs catch-up pricing are the reference.

Moving from Rebuild Mode to a standard diagnostic

After you've accepted the For Review queue into the register and have real books, re-export the full set (Trial Balance, P&L, Balance Sheet, General Ledger, Transaction List, Account List) and run the scan again. The Rebuild Mode banner will be gone; you'll get a normal health score, findings across all eight detector categories, fix procedures, and the usual PDF exports. The earlier Rebuild Mode scan stays in your history so you can point a client back at the starting volume if scope questions come up mid-engagement.