Year End Accounting Checklist
Is your companies year end just around the corner? If so it is time to get your bookkeeping ready to send to your accountant. Below is a list of tasks that should be performed to complete your year end. If this list overwhelms you please contact Bookkeeping by Jan & Co and we can put together a to take the stress of of you, the owner so that you can do what you do best, RUN YOUR BUSINESS.
Record All Transactions
The first step is to make sure that all transactions up to the year end date have been recorded. It is important that you include all current year bills and invoices even if they haven’t yet been paid.
Do a Bank Reconciliation
Performing a bank reconciliation for all your bank and credit card accounts is important to make sure that the transactions you’ve recorded in your bookkeeping software are the same as what is on your bank and credit card statements.
Review Your Financial Statements
Once you have completed your bookkeeping and your bank reconciliations, it’s a good idea to look through your income statement and balance sheet and make sure things appear correct. Go through each line item and look for dollar amounts that don’t seem to make sense. Look for things like:
- Negative account balances
- Account balances that seem too high or too low
- Large differences in account balances from the previous year
Bookkeeping by Jan & Co is available to go through your financials statements for review.
Review Your Accounts Receivable and Invoices
Run an aged receivables report in your bookkeeping software at your year end date. Look through the list of outstanding invoices and consider if you have been paid for each invoice or not.
The most likely place you will find errors or issues is the column showing the oldest invoices. Investigate any items that don’t look correct or if you think some invoices are missing. You’ll probably also want to contact customers who are late in paying while you’re at it! If you are not sure how to enter a bad debt in your computer software contact Jan at Bookkeeping by Jan & Co for assistance.
Check Your Accounts Payable
You will also want to make sure that your accounts payable are correct at the end of the year. Run the aged payables report in your bookkeeping software and go through each item to see if they make sense.
Pay any late bills and make sure to record any missing bills dated on or before your year end.
Perform an Inventory Count
If you have inventory of any kind in your business, it is important to make sure the value of inventory on hand is known at your year end. This is done by physically counting your inventory on (or very close to) the final day of your fiscal year.
Let’s Have a Chat
A clean set of books presented to your accountant will alleviate a big invoice to prepare your year end.
At Bookkeeping by Jan & Co presenting tidy, complete books at year end to your accountant is important, but what really gets us excited is helping business owners achieve success, whatever success means to our clients. It helps to have an outside perspective on things, and sometimes it’s just nice to have someone get excited about your business with you!
Give Jan a call at (403) 358-2860
