If your clients collect payment electronically, you can match up deposits with the deposits received by the bank to ensure accuracy. Review upcoming tax, reporting, and registration deadlines to ensure your business is in good standing and are filing necessary forms and paying taxes on time. He has over 15 years of business experience spanning multiple sectors.

Task dependencies help maintain the flow of the bookkeeping process and prevent bottlenecks caused by incomplete or out-of-order tasks. Creating an accounting checklist for small business operations might look different than one for larger bookkeeping checklist enterprises, but the fundamental principles remain consistent. The year-end process is where accounting schedules examples and templates become invaluable as you document and support each balance sheet amount. This task gives you real-time visibility into how much money is coming in and going out of the business, especially when combined with your cash reconciliation data. Doing this daily lets you spot any possible issues early and resolve them promptly. Last but not least, take some time each month to review and update your business documentation.

Financial software that helps you run your business and pay your team better.

• However, without a structured routine, bookkeeping can quickly become overwhelming.
• If your clients operate in one of these states, you need to calculate, collect, and pay sales tax on their behalf.
• You have a few options when it comes to keeping tabs on your daily bookkeeping checklist.
• Ensure you’re well-informed about tax due dates, including payroll taxes and income tax filings.
• After completing the week’s work, you should back up your clients’data.

This also includes other financial statements, such as running balance sheets and profit and loss statements. A monthly bookkeeping checklist is a simple method for keeping track of what needs to be done. No monthly bookkeeping process would be complete without preparing your financial statements. These can include income statements, cash flow statements, balance sheets, profit and loss statements, and a budget comparison.

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Monthly account receivable reports are necessary to determine who owes your business money. These intervals can vary depending on your corporate structure, such as a S-corporation, but monthly account receivable reports should be a minimum expectation across the board. A business may be able to get by for a few years without keeping track of its books, but it will catch up to you. You won’t know if you are applying the appropriate markup to your customers. Interest paid on loan payments are tax deductible, yet many businesses don’t report this information to their bookkeeper, accountant, or tax advisor.

A checklist brings structure and accountability to everyone touching finances in the back office. Before you know it, tax season arrives and you’re stuck scrambling through receipts, spreadsheets, and late-night fixes. That’s why consistent, proactive bookkeeping isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a must-have. And the best way to stay on track is with a trusted, thorough, and repeatable checklist.

Catch-up Bookkeeping Checklist

The labels will serve as indicators of what data are placed under it. For bookkeeping checklists, it usually includes dates, categories, description of bookkeeping activities, status, completion dates, and remarks. You may also utilize legends to make your bookkeeping checklist more precise. Review outstanding loans, make sure payroll liabilities are correctly accounted for, and adjust any deferred revenue or expenses. These entries can get overlooked if you’re only focused on cash flow.

Reconcile your accounts

However, bookkeeping requires certain data and figures to be accurate. Hence, bookkeepers use a bookkeeping checklist to track their bookkeeping tasks. It ensures you stay organized, complete tasks on time, have accurate financial reports, and can effectively manage your clients’ finances. You can also use this checklist to train new staff to promote consistency and quality in your bookkeeping services.

Generate Profit/Loss Reports:

At the end of each month, it’s useful to review your accounts receivable and track how much your customers owe you. However, categorizing your transactions in this way can be incredibly time-consuming and tedious. Your SynkBooks custom bookkeeping team can sort through your income and expenses and categorize them for you. We automatically logs your transactions in useful, IRS-recognized categories for you. The bookkeeping & accounting you do today will be quicker than what you put off until next week, next month, or the end of the year.

Business Templates

• You can complete these forms once you reconcile the client’s books at the end of the year and know how much they paid out to each entity.
• The sooner you can get a customer to pay their invoice, the more likely they are to pay.
• Key monthly tasks include reconciling bank and credit card accounts, categorizing income and expenses, uploading receipts, and reviewing financial reports to ensure accuracy.
• It can be helpful to conduct weekly reconciliation (and consider it as a subcategory of monthly bookkeeping).
• Accurate reporting for the entire year is necessary for tax filing, and it’s usually an emergency situation that needs to be done quickly.

Just like with bank reconciliation, ensure your credit card statements align with your small business bookkeeping records. The process is similar, involving matching transactions on your credit card statement to corresponding entries in your accounting system. Here’s everything you should include in your monthly bookkeeping checklist so you can be confident in the process and your bookkeeping services. 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 tasks and steps involved for each bookkeeping frequency.

Accurate payroll records are crucial not just for ensuring your employees are paid correctly but also for tax compliance purposes. Match each credit card charge to a corresponding receipt to ensure accuracy. Get instant access to all the tools that make monthly bookkeeping tick with a free trial or demo of Karbon.

That’s a start, but those spreadsheets are often prone to errors and swearing-out-of-frustration. Our easy-to-use software has been known to streamline and automate your way of recording your business transactions as smoothly as that new choreography you’re trying to master. Being organized is key to ensuring that nothing is being missed and you are handling your clients’ accounting efficiently. Running a small business requires wearing many hats, and one of the most important responsibilities is keeping your finances in order.