Year-End Accounting and Bookkeeping Checklist

Ensure you correctly identified and accounted for all the products in your inventory. After you’ve reviewed everything in your client’s accounts, their accounting data is ready for tax season. Unearth any unpaid bills to ensure they get processed in the correct accounting period before you close out your year. If you’re using QuickBooks Online, you can close your books through the Settings menu. Under the Advanced tab, choose the option to Edit under the Accounting section.

Instead of scrambling to get your year-end processes complete, use a year-end accounting checklist to organize the way you wrap up the year. Cloud-based accounting system , you should consider it for next year. State all of your asset accounts appropriately to reflect your present value and inventory levels.

Closing year-end can be an overwhelming task without the time or right resources to help you out. While you might think this post is an end of financial year checklist for bookkeepers, it is directed toward small business owners. Reviewing bank and credit card statements to confirm that they match.

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Our Block Advisors small business services are available at participating Block Advisors and H&R Block offices nationwide. But you don’t have to round out your business’ books on your own at year end. Block Advisors small business certified tax pros can simplify your bookkeeping tasks—keeping your finances on track and letting you focus on the business you love. If you use Block Advisors’ professional payroll services, we can take the load off this somewhat complex task. Ask your accountant to review your accounts and reclassify transactionsas needed. Get up and running with free payroll setup, and enjoy free expert support.

Follow these simple steps and bring your CPA the cleanest set of books you ever had. One last thing, don’t forget that tax review before year end…it’s just that important. Go through your customer accounts to check that you’ve issued, logged, and stored invoice copies for all completed services, projects, and orders. You need to attend to your bookkeeping before year-end and do some tax planning.

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Some of what you’ll see on the profit-and-loss statement includes revenue, cost of goods sold, operating expenses, tax expenses, and other financial costs. You might want to write off any uncollectible balances on the Accounts Receivable aging report. Review your asset accounts to ensure nothing is booked to an asset account incorrectly. Do any of your clients have uncollectable debts during the current period? You can write off uncollectable invoicesto take care of bad debt. When you’re ready to close out the year, close your firm’s books to prevent unwanted changes before filing your taxes.

Closing the books at the end of the year means that you’re locking transactions that occurred before the closing date, so transactions can’t be added or edited. Closing the books includes transferring journal entries to the general ledger, preparing trial balances, and using closing entries to clear revenue and expense accounts. While most business owners leave this task to their accountants, others opt to use accounting software , which simplifies the process. To file 1099s on time, you’ll need to reconcile your clients’ bank accounts for the year to ensure all payments are included when you issue the forms. If you’ve been keeping up your clients’ books throughout the year, you should be ready to get those 1099s out promptly.

Complete an Inventory Inspection

In the long run, digital copies will be significantly easier to deal with, as modern accounting technology can access them and expedite processing their contents. The more prepared a professional can be for the worst, the better off the entire process will go. This is by no means an exhaustive list; the steps required can also vary depending on the nature of the business going through the year-end accounting process. Integrations CPACharge is integrated into industry solutions to create an elevated accounting software user experience. However, an accounting year does not necessarily need to follow the start and end dates of the twelve month calendar year. Most organizations can choose to have their accounting years begin and end on any dates.

Video technology is more accurate than humans are and sports organizations like FIFA are already using it to regulate games. COVID, difficult customers and low wages have made finding waitstaff difficult, but that is not the only thing that is causing a decline in restaurant workers. According to Recruiter.com, parking enforcement positions have been declining since about 2004 and have decreased by nearly 25 percent nationwide. There will be 2,360 jobs lost by 2029, which is a decrease of about 3 1/2 percent over the next few years. You may still see people handing out parking tickets every day, but that is a job that will likely be automated in the coming years.

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Another tip that will prepare you for the new year is collecting from customers who have not paid yet. You’ve got to take care of all your uncleared transactions, unpaid bills, and unpaid invoices. You will need to put in some effort if you want to collect past due totals. But it’s worth it since you’ll have more working capital to expand your business in the coming year. When it comes to cleaning up your end-of-year accounts, the best place to start is with source documents like receipts and invoices.

You must collect the owed money from the customers before the new year. This will ensure that you get enough room as a business and be able to report strong earnings. In case you are using financial software to manage your accounts, you can extract all this information with just a click of a button. Once this is sorted out your on your way to ensuring accounts receivable is accurate. Lastly, you must have all important documents on hand so that you can give them to your bookkeeper.

Since bookkeepers are always involved in year-end physical inventory accounting, you will want to confirm your clients are reviewing their inventory. Having a well-documented checklist will increase your team’s efficiency and client satisfaction. We’ve outlined 8 key year-end steps to complete for each of your clients.

• Go through each line item on your income statement and balance sheet and review the transactions in each account for accuracy.
• Whatever you decide to do, make sure you have a plan in place to back up those precious accounting records for your business.
• Year-end accounting is a series of steps performed to ensure that your financial transactions are up to date and recorded correctly.

Confirm That You’ve incremental costd the Books – It’s best to confirm that you have closed and locked your books for the year. If you make changes after your accountant has started on the year-end with the info that you provided, it will significantly increase the accounting work. If your accountant charges you hourly, this means your bill will be higher too. Supporting Documents – Include supporting documents for any applicable balance sheet account items. For example, an inventory count and cost calculation to support the inventory balance on hand at the year-end.

You’ll need to carefully review your clients’ books to verify the appropriate entries got recorded. Keeping accurate records is key in accounting, whether you are a small business owner or a large corporation. Year end tax planning gives you the opportunity to position certain transactions to save you in taxes.

It might be worth sending an email to your team to check if there have been changes. Employee contact information must be correct in order to send out W-2s and 1099s before tax season. Be sure to pay your contractors in full before you close your books and go through a payroll year-end checklist as well. Obviously, this is challenging, as you won’t always have control over whether your clients pay your bills on time . If you have invoices yet to be paid, your best bet will be to categorize them based on how likely you think a payment will be before the end of the fiscal year. Generally speaking, the younger the unpaid invoice is, the more likely you’ll be able to coerce a payment out of the client in question.