The Ultimate Bookkeeping Checklist to Streamline Your Firm +Free Templates

Monthly bookkeeping checklists should include action items on analyzing and resolving any financial discrepancies. This includes in-depth transition reviews, bank statement and credit card account alignment, and balance verification. At tax time, carefully review your company’s full-year financial reports before giving them to your accountant.

Never Forget Petty Cash

This is a very important step in every business’s financial reporting process, as it lays the foundation for next year’s financial and strategic planning. For most teams at a company, the end of the year is a time to relax and wrap up any pending work. However, this is not the case for finance teams and business owners. For them, fiscal year-end means managing multiple accounting processes to ensure a smooth financial transition into the next year. Accounting software like QuickBooks can help you generate financial reports and manage taxes, but for more guidance, see our guide to financial reporting. To keep a handy reference of this checklist, save our infographic below.

Weekly Bookkeeping Checklist

Depending on the size and needs of a business, you typically do bookkeeping for them daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. Here are different checklists containing the accounting transaction analysis tasks and steps involved for each bookkeeping frequency. However, you can cut that down to as little as 5 days if your accounting team has access to automation software.

Bank Reconciliation Template

If your staff members have different ways of completing work, it’s time to standardize your process to improve the quality and consistency of your firm’s work. Standardizing your processes through a checklist will save you from the headache that comes with inconsistent work. If you do not write down unsellable inventory, you are overstating your inventory balance and paying additional taxes that you don’t owe. While you’re at it, identify trouble spots, and make adjustments to improve sales and margins. If you have not prepared a budget, compare your current year-to-date P&L with the same prior-period, year-to-date income statement to identify variances and make adjustments.

1. A payroll service provider can do all this to save you time and ensure accuracy at a reasonable cost.
2. Review the payroll summary before payments are disbursed to avoid making corrections during the next payroll period.
3. Managing your cash flow is critical, especially in the first year of your business.
4. Then, there are the occasions where an approved and processed expense doesn’t end up being paid to the employee when its meant to be paid.
5. While daily invoicing may not be possible, invoicing clients weekly will foster prompt payments and strengthen your cash flow.
6. We collaborate with business-to-business vendors, connecting them with potential buyers.

Working out your cash flow is another staple aspect of business accounting. Missing payments could incur charges or interest, or the damaging of valuable business relationships. Another part of this is to check you’re receiving what you are paying for. This seems simple enough, but as organizations grow and become nynab vs quickbooks online more complex it can be easy to miss certain details. A lot of accounting work is knowing what the necessary process is and being able to follow it effectively. The processes we have listed here range from onboarding accounting staff to invoicing clients, to bank reconciliation and end of year reporting.

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Whether you make payments online or drop a check in the mail, keep copies of invoices sent and received using our accounting software. Keep copies of all invoices sent, all cash receipts (cash, check and credit card deposits) and all cash payments (cash, check, credit card statements, etc.). Many bookkeeping business transaction definition and examples chron com tasks follow weekly, monthly, or quarterly accounting cycles. However, if you’re a full-charge bookkeeper or your clients have a large number of transactions, there are several tasks you should complete each day. In this article, you’ll find a free set of templates to help you get started.

This kind of software can make your life as a business owner much, much easier. But as you grow your business, automation can save you time and costly errors. That way, you can automate processes, such as bank reconciliations and financial statements, and avoid days of manual work. Start a vendors file, sorted alphabetically, (Staples under “S”, Costco under “C,”etc.) for easy access.

If your business has inventory, complete an inventory check before year-end. If you find discrepancies between your count and balance sheet, make adjustments. If collecting payments from customers is difficult, consider offering them a payment plan. The customer might not be able to pay their invoice off all at once. Plus, it shows customers that you understand their situation and care about their needs. Use your balance sheet at year-end to ensure your accounts balance and everything is in order for the new year.

The process of recording transactions includes logging and verifying the money going in and out of the door, as seen in the general ledger. Year-end accounts basically provide a summary of how a company performed financially in the fiscal year. Some items that should be included in year-end accounts are the performance summary, balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, closing entries, and reconciliations. With the right accounting practice management software, firms build accounting workflow automation directly into their most important workflows and streamline their monthly bookkeeping tasks.

Save time when completing weekly reconciliations with this standardized and repeatable workflow. Check out our guides to download a free customizable budget template and profit and loss statement. Some bills may be on auto-pay, but you should still verify these transactions went through and that the payment method hasn’t expired. This task also allows you to monitor labor costs so your clients know whether they’re within budget or need to tweak their scheduling. It is where future projections, built from the accountancy team’s hard work, can be included. There’s also the option of including a letter from the CEO and other details about changing markets, products, and services.