The Ultimate Small Business Accounting Checklist

accounting checklist

As you get everything in order, you may want to grow your knowledge of financial accounting, especially if you’re new to it all. If so, check out our article on how to understand financial accounting. Sending invoices notifies your customers about a payment, but you’ll still need to find a way to accept that payment.

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  1. Crunched accounting software can automate the financial management process, and make it easy to manage your books all year long.
  2. Timely preparation and submission of required tax payments and forms for the current month are essential to avoid penalties and help you facilitate smooth audits.
  3. Your profit and loss statement (also known as P&L or income statement), both for the current month and year-to-date, tells you how much you earned and how much you spent.
  4. Bookkeeping is when you record expenses and earnings to determine your overall profit or income.

Closing the month can be overwhelming due to the sheer number of tasks that must be handled. Discrepancies in your financial reports could lead to inaccurate data for future decisions, a mistake that could quickly spell disaster for any business. The month-end closing process is just as essential, especially if you want to avoid the headache and overwhelm of last-minute error corrections spanning months during tax seasons. While the year-end closing process is familiar to most due to tax reporting, it’s not the only necessary period-end process a business should have.

At the end of the day, what separates a good monthly bookkeeping process from a great one—other than a robust checklist—is how much you’re able to automate your processes. As soon as you receive payments from customers, record them immediately in your bookkeeping software. This task keeps you from making the mistake of contacting customers who have already paid you for the same invoice. Bookkeeping is when you record expenses and earnings to determine your overall profit or income. It also helps you determine the cash flow of your business, or how much money comes in compared to going out.

Forecasting how much cash you will need in the coming weeks and months will help you reserve enough money to pay bills, including your employees and suppliers. Plus, you can make more informed business decisions about how to spend it. Here’s everything you should include in your monthly bookkeeping checklist so you can be confident in the process and your bookkeeping services. If you’re new to bookkeeping checklists, this is a great place to start your journey towards being more efficient.

Monthly Accounting Tasks

It also lets you record pending invoices not posted into the accounting system. Since businesses pay more than they borrow, you must record the interest expense as it accrues or gets paid. You must also record the principal repayments promptly to ensure your business reports the proper hire quickbooks consultant balance it owes. Use year-to-date financial data to determine a client’s quarterly tax obligations. Fill out a 1040-ES and make any necessary payments to help your client avoid fines or penalties. If the client uses a separate payroll processing company, they complete these reports.

accounting checklist

Accounting practice management software can save your firm thousands of dollars per year per employee. Wondering what tasks you should (and shouldn’t) automate at your accounting firm? A big part of not letting anything slip through the cracks is updating your bookkeeping software. It can only help you as much as you keep it updated with all possible aspects of your monthly finances.

However, please review each task carefully and feel free to edit them to fit your firm’s unique needs. Learn more about Jetpack Workflow to discover how you can save regain control of client work, save hours of admin time, and make sure critical tasks are never missed again. A suspense account temporarily holds transactions yet to be classified or discrepancies you need more information about. Because it is a temporary account, any transactions here should not sit in this account for extended periods. Year-end is a busy time for accountants, so here are two of the most important tasks to complete and bring the year to a close.

Aging reports can be used to keep track of these payments and give you an overview of where they stand. Take some time each month to review your aged accounts so you don’t get too far ar days simple behind on payments, and you can take necessary steps to collect when needed. Accounting software like QuickBooks Online can help you generate financial reports, manage taxes, and handle other small business accounting tasks.

Automating monthly bookkeeping with accounting practice management software

These reports provide information on employee wages, tax withholdings, and other payroll-related details, ensuring compliance with labor and tax laws. Notify your client if any invoices remain unpaid after an extended period. This what is gross income and how to calculate it way, they can take further action, such as contacting a collection agency. Some bills may be on auto-pay, but you should still verify these transactions went through and that the payment method hasn’t expired.

If you check regularly (and compare to prior months’ numbers), it’s easier to make adjustments, so you are neither short nor overloaded. Business bank reconciliation makes it easier to discover and correct errors or omissions—either by you or the bank—in time to correct them. Save time when completing weekly reconciliations with this standardized and repeatable workflow. Lessons learned on how top firms grow fast, build stronger teams, and increase profit while working less. 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.

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