A Month-End Close Checklist for Busy Bookkeepers and Accountants

The first step to filing your year-end tax returns is to generate your annual profit/loss statement and other financial reports. If your business needs to pay quarterly estimated tax payments, your bookkeeper must keep on top of this. Small businesses often struggle with the workload of logging all transactions. Keeping on top of these by recording your daily income and expenses in your accounts is a great way to handle this.

Or if an employee submits fraudulent expenses that generate a material loss for your business. These weekly tasks aim to keep an eye on cash flow for all business operations to keep your business running smoothly. You can track everyday business expenses from communication tools, contractors, and rent in one seamless dashboard.

Business Bookkeeping Checklist Template

But that can only happen if you put in place proper
mechanisms to combat some of the common bookkeeping mistakes. To help you with
that, we’ve compiled a full list of checks and balances that have worked for
most of our clients drawn from the manufacturing, real estate, and IT sectors. Paying employees every week (or every other week) also helps prioritize payroll tax withholding and check employee timesheets.

Want to be at the top of your bookkeeping game all year long and equip your employees with the right tools? You can download 32 workflow templates here for free – it includes a bookkeeping checklist template that will make accounting easier for you going forward. Creating budgets for various expenses, activities and projects isn’t hard, but sticking to these budgets can be difficult.

Task 6: Use “Ask My Accountant” for Questions

Savvy Bird Consulting, LLC is not responsible for the implementation or outcomes this material may have. Comparing your current month’s balance sheet — October 31, 2022, for example — to a balance sheet from the prior month (September 30, 2022) can tell you how well you manage assets and liabilities. The primary role of a controller, accountant, or bookkeeper is to safeguard company assets. These controls can range from access management to internal audits and enhanced cybersecurity protocols. These annual checks mainly cater toward regulatory and compliance requirements, along with reporting of performance to shareholders.

• This also includes other financial statements, such as running balance sheets and profit and loss statements.
• There is also the issue of unauthorized overtime pay – if an employee works more than 40 hours a week, you can be held liable to pay for overtime even if you haven’t authorized it.
• Doing some accounting tasks daily will make your recordkeeping easier, make inventory management more efficient and expose costly mistakes sooner.
• Most small businesses use a tax accountant during tax season to make sure all their documents are accurate and filed properly.

You may also utilize legends to make your bookkeeping checklist more precise. The same way you record and maintain accurate balances for
each of your clients, you need to record the business expenses correctly and
accurately. I know this for sure – not all businesses update their
customer accounts on time. Sadly,
most people get dodgy when it comes to paying for supplies received several months
ago.

Monthly Bookkeeping for Interior Designers: Must-Dos

Download the bookkeeping checklist templates for the use in the accounting purpose. A monthly bookkeeping checklist template will help you create a standardized, efficient, and quick workflow process to complete monthly bookkeeping for your clients. These organized files will make it much easier when it’s time to do taxes. Every week, the business should set aside time for miscellaneous bookkeeping tasks such as emailing clients account statements.

Along the top of the spreadsheet are the months so I can easily see and check off that I’ve done everything I needed to that month for my client. From here, you’ll need to translate your taxable income to a tax return form – either Form 1120 or Form 1120, depending on your corporation structure. This will vary by business and by location but something to keep in mind to be completed regularly.

Organizing your transactions helps you understand where your business is spending and receiving funds, and gives you a better overview of your financial health. In the same vein, recording expenses and bills right away are also extremely important. Record the date, vendor, and amount of all expenses in your daybook when the bills or check comes through.

• Pay and schedule all monthly bills and any vendor payments that are due for the month.
• By keeping track of what moves quickly and what doesn’t, it’s easier to make adjustments so that you don’t sell out of popular items or hold onto too much inventory.
• When customers pay your invoices, recording the payment receipts as soon as possible is a great practice.
• This helps to determine how much inventory must be ordered, what is selling, and can be instrumental in identifying seasonal trends in your business.
• They keep track of accounts payable and receivable to ensure accurate financial statements.

Check inventory and ensure it matches the amounts in your inventory report. This helps to determine how much inventory must be ordered, what is selling, and can be instrumental in identifying seasonal trends in your business. If you are withholding and paying taxes regularly, make sure you file the appropriate forms and issue payments each month. One of the extra reports my client wants is a running total of all income so he can see on an overarching scale how the business is doing. This task hasn’t been done in the past few months for this client because we don’t discuss them every month that we meet. I want to be respectful of their time, and it’s more efficient just to do a whole bunch of them at once.

Weekly accounting checklist (4–8 hours per week)

There are two deposit schedules for taxes, monthly and semi-weekly, and business must figure out which schedule they are required to use each year. Understanding your cash flow helps your business more effectively manage its budget. Monitoring and revising your cash flow budgets ensure your small business can use its retained earnings to grow sustainably. Leaving this to the end of the week or the end of the month makes it harder to keep track of what you owe, and risks late payments to your vendors.

The temporary accounts need to be closed out so that the next period can start from zero. Be sure to make any required payroll, federal, or state tax payments or filings to the appropriate agencies. Also, annual, quarterly, and monthly sales tax returns must be filed with the state where your business is conducted. Record and categorize all monthly and annual revenue and expenses for the month so that you can keep up with the financial status of your business on a monthly basis. This includes credit card revenue transactions and individual credit card purchases. Next, If you have any past due invoices, there is no better time to send them a reminder.

What Happens If You Don’t Do Bookkeeping?

You want to review how much cash you need on a month-to-month basis and make at least that much available. If you have any cash-intensive plans in the coming month, you should make allowances for that as well. Need a little assistance with organizing your finances but don’t know where to start? https://www.bookstime.com/articles/monthly-bookkeeping-checklist Check out this handy checklist covering what to do Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Annually for your business. Taking stock of your company’s performance and health is essential for further planning and strategizing, so it is necessary to make sure that the data presented is accurate.

Content Snare is a great way to handle these questions without having constant email back-and-forth and ignored requests. It can be set up to when each question was answered or request completed. You may find that you’ve received retainer deposits that you’ve not applied to a  client invoice, or you may only have used a part of the deposit. An open client deposit report will point this out so you can calculate your revenue with more accuracy and better manage the client’s funds. Suppose your small business is located in any of the 45 states that collect statewide sales tax or in the District of Columbia. The goal is to show acknowledge their importance in the
business, not just through confessing it but by actually demonstrating it in
terms of fair and timely remuneration.

Kathryn is a Chartered Professional Accountant with over 7 years of experience in both public practice and industry accounting. She has had the opportunity to work with a wide variety of individuals and companies, which gives her a unique perspective on what it takes to be successful in the industry. Kathryn loves all things business and productivity and has been able to combine her love for creating content into writing for accounting firms looking to improve their businesses. Your balance sheet gives you insight into how much your business is worth (based on assets, liabilities, and equity).