Bookkeeping Checklist
What are the various bookkeeping tasks that need to be completed on a daily, weekly, monthly and/or yearly basis?
Daily Tasks
Cash is like blood for your business and cash flow is like blood circulation. So, it is a good idea to manage your cash flow in and out of your business on a daily basis. Managing cash requires you to enter all the available transactions into your books and do a soft reconciliation of the transactions in your books against your bank and credit card accounts. In order to effectively manage cash flow, you would also need to enter bills received from your vendors, generate invoices you need to send to your customers, receive payments from your customers, pay bills that need to be paid, make deposits to your bank, etc.
Weekly Tasks
Continue daily tasks and in addition prepare reports that show list of unpaid bills and unpaid invoices, and send to business managers for review. Pay bills that need to be paid. Prepare and send invoices to customers. Enter employee and contractor timesheets. Ensure enough funds in the bank account and process payroll as necessary. Compare your transactions against your physical receipt records to ensure that all receipts are in order and have the appropriate notations.
Monthly Tasks
In addition to daily and weekly tasks, do a reconciliation of your books against your bank and credit card PDF statements, and close your reconciliations for the month. Prepare YTD reports showing Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet by month to review, identify & fix discrepancies. Generate Profit & Loss Detail, Balance Sheet Detail, Payroll Costing, Accounts Payable Aging, Accounts Receivable Aging and Bank Reconciliation reports in Excel format and save them to a cloud share. Review receivables to send appropriate reminders to customers. Review inventories to reorder or markdown items as necessary. Pay sales taxes as necessary. Generate and file payroll reports and taxes as necessary. Backup your accounting system data in QBM or other portable format.
Annual Tasks
Prepare detailed and summary annual reports. Review summary annual reports and compare data by month to identify and fix discrepancies. Generate annual tax reports and send to your CPA for review. File 1099’s for vendors and W2’s for employees.
Needless to say, doing these tasks requires experience, diligence, time and a ton of patience. Our daily update plan is a full service bookkeeping plan that can cover all these tasks.
