Weekly trips are a decent frequency to help you keep your cash flow healthy and records updated with any paper checks and cash payments. Also, remember to verify if the checks cleared before you spend any more money or pay out any more bills. https://www.bookstime.com/articles/monthly-bookkeeping-checklist The Open Vendor Deposit Report needs to ensure that orders are properly filled by the vendor. Most importantly, by reviewing this, you need to accurately record your COGS and provide an accurate net income at the end of the year.

Aside from Form 1120 (or Form 1065 for partnerships), the other IRS forms that’ll need to be filled out depending on your business and its market sector. It’s useful to consult our expert bookkeeping team to figure out what forms need to be filled out and when. Profit/Loss statements can be generated either quarterly or annually. How often you’ll need to generate these depends on your company structure and its related financial disclosure requirements.

How To Do Billing and Get Paid on Time

All additions and disposals will need to be identified and tracked in your record depreciation expense. Keep track of routine journal entries and calculations done in the previous month to speed up this process each month. In this post, we’ll look at why you need a checklist and provide a list of functions bookkeepers complete to close their clients’ books monthly and how to streamline each step.

Our bookkeeping checklist can help you establish a habit of staying organized and ensuring your numbers are accurate. Review the accounts payable aging report to see which bills need to be paid or scheduled to pay. After your analysis, you may want to show the client these reports to verify that every payment has been applied correctly and what is still outstanding. You will then create and send invoices to follow up on the accounts payable balance to get it paid.

Review WIP Reports

Billing your clients on a consistent schedule can reduce late payments. With weekly invoices, the product or service you provide to customers is still fresh in their minds, so there’ll likely be fewer questions or qualms about the bill. If you wait too long to bill your client, you’re more likely to result in a delinquent payment.

The open vendor deposit reports show which orders are yet to be filled. Suppose your small business is located in any of the 45 states that collect statewide sales tax or in the District of Columbia. Although it seems pretty obvious, this task is often overlooked, which can cause unnecessary complications or emergencies if there is no available cash to spend. You want to review how much cash you need on a month-to-month basis and make at least that much available. If you have any cash-intensive plans in the coming month, you should make allowances for that as well. With so many tasks competing for your attention, it can be especially difficult to maintain your quality of work.

Review Customer and Vendor Invoices

Read on for a breakdown of essential bookkeeping tasks to keep your small business finances in order. The end of the month is the perfect time to review all invoices and understand the balance of aged receivables. Make sure to send email reminders to customers who are yet to pay by the invoice due date, or you can also call customers directly for an update. So if your checkbook, bank accounts, and general ledger don’t align, there’s an error somewhere that needs addressing.

Pay them promptly to avoid penalties, upset vendors, and unwanted debt. You may find your business benefits from certain categories depending on your market sector. Content Snare is a great way to handle these questions without having constant email back-and-forth and ignored requests. It can be set up to when each question was answered or request completed.

The Detailed New Hire Checklist

One of the extra reports my client wants is a running total of all income so he can see on an overarching scale how the business is doing. This task hasn’t been done in the past few months for this client because we don’t discuss them every month that we meet. I want to be respectful of their time, and it’s more efficient just to do a whole bunch of them at once.

• Cross-referencing the books against the bank statement and other source documents to confirm accuracy or reviewing the client’s work.
• All I need to do is log into the bank, get the statement, and reconcile the account.
• If you don’t have a budget, comparing your current income to previous months can be a good way to prepare for the future.
• Before starting the new month, make sure you review your cash status.

For example, one of them is a line plotting your net income for the year and comparing it to last year, and it can even compare it to other industries in the client’s area. Sometimes a transaction will https://www.bookstime.com/ come through and be categorized wrong, or maybe it’s a new vendor that they’ve never had before. In those examples, it requires me to use my knowledge to categorize each transaction accordingly.