Monthly Bookkeeping: Understanding the Tasks Involved

SynkBooks simplifies this process and allows bookkeepers to easily calculate your estimated financials for the year. This can easily be imported into a form 1120-W to estimate your income as accurately as possible to avoid penalties. Understanding your cash flow helps your business more effectively manage its budget. Monitoring and revising your cash flow budgets ensure your small business can use its retained earnings to grow sustainably.

Today I’m going to share with you exactly what I do each month for one of my bookkeeping clients using my own checklist. This list has been helpful for me to keep up-to-date and on track with my client’s books. Just as you record any invoices sent to the client, document all customer payments as soon as the payment is received. This should take place before completing bank reconciliations and reviewing bank credit card accounts. Doing so prevents you from mistakenly contacting the client for a presumable past due or losing track of your recorded payments received.

Maintaining Your Books: A Daily, Weekly and Monthly Accounting Checklist

These days, the software options are pretty advanced and it’s possible to handle the books on your own, even if you don’t have any formal training. Not sure whether to hire an accountant or keep your bookkeeping to DIY? Our article, When To Hire An Accountant For Small Business may have the answers you need. Between utilities, rent, and invoices from vendors, small businesses bills can accumulate quickly.

• Here’s a story of why one accountant paused a family game to send her client some paperwork.
• Imagine having a clear checklist of the tasks you need to complete every month for your clients.
• Therefore, it’s important to review bills weekly to check for errors, note the deadline, and schedule payment accordingly.
• With this, bookkeepers will be able to ensure that all the necessary data and information to be used in bookkeeping will be gathered.

Merchant Maverick’s ratings are not influenced by affiliate partnerships. The size and complexity of a business, as well as the tradeoff between time and financial resources are important considerations to deciding if a bookkeeper is right for you. Growing businesses in particular may find hiring a bookkeeper valuable so they can focus on other aspects of operations. A journal entry in the general journal should accompany any financial transaction made by a business. If you are looking for an easier way to implement this template in your firm and share it with your team try our accounting workflow management solution, Financial Cents, for free.

Weekly bookkeeping to-do’s

Kathryn loves all things business and productivity and has been able to combine her love for creating content into writing for accounting firms looking to improve their businesses. Not only do you need to check to see if there are any customers who owe you, but you also need to make sure that you haven’t missed any payments to vendors that you owe. You may find that you’ve received retainer deposits that you’ve not applied to a  client invoice, https://www.bookstime.com/articles/monthly-bookkeeping-checklist or you may only have used a part of the deposit. An open client deposit report will point this out so you can calculate your revenue with more accuracy and better manage the client’s funds. This best practice template was featured in Efficient bookkeeping workflows with Karbon and Hubdoc. Watch the video to learn a recommended process that brings the best of Karbon and Hubdoc together that will help you fine-tune your own bookkeeping processes.

The primary objective of bookkeeping is to create recorded data of operations that can be summed and used for multiple reasons—generating financial reports. However, bookkeeping requires certain data and figures to be accurate. Hence, bookkeepers use a bookkeeping checklist to track their bookkeeping tasks.

Enter new transactions

Keeping on top of payroll helps ensure all your staff are paid on time. The frequency of this task depends on how often you pay your employees. However, categorizing your transactions https://www.bookstime.com/ 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.

Ensure that everything that needs to be recorded, uploaded, and categorized is properly squared away, and you haven’t missed anything over the past month. If other people are contributing to the software, confirm that they’ve also done their part to the fullest. The vendors that appear on this list were chosen by subject matter experts on the basis of product quality, wide usage and availability, and positive reputation. I estimated the time it would take me based on the maximum amount of time it would take. Fixed-rate pricing is so much easier than an hourly rate, and this is a prime example of how it can benefit you as a bookkeeper. It usually takes me about five minutes to get the statement and about fifteen minutes or less to reconcile the account.

What are the two types of bookkeeping system?

They have a book where they record all that information, and then it comes to me, and I put it into QuickBooks. After reconciling your bank and credit statements, turn your attention to Age Accounts Reports. These reports split between accounts payable and accounts receivable.

Similarly, if you have data regarding revenue generated every month, you may be able to produce ideas to help you in revenue expansion. The next step is to get my client’s bank statement from the bank website and reconcile the bank account. All I need to do is log into the bank, get the statement, and reconcile the account. My client’s credit card is hooked up to the bank account, but I get the credit card statement and am able to categorize all the transactions from there.

It’s also important to hold a customer to their payment terms because this can have a big impact on your cash flow. This is also a good time to re-evaluate your collections process to see if it is effective or whether any changes need to be made. A handy bookkeepers’ checklist to keep you on the right track at month’s end. Here are some of the most common places to keep your bookkeeping checklist… It’s important to have an efficient bookkeeping system in place if you want your firm or business to grow and succeed.