Bookkeeping Cleanup Checklist: Six Steps to Get Caught Up

A solution like Jetpack Workflow will generate more accurate reports with more useful information. The payments you make to your employees, such as salaries, wages, and deductions, are documented in your payroll records. By checking your payroll records, you can ensure that all payments and deductions have been appropriately documented and that you comply with all tax requirements.

Practice Management Built for Growth

1. This regular upkeep prevents small issues from snowballing into a future clean-up project.
2. A quick health check can help you figure out how financially fit your business is, while finding ways to improve it.
3. This is a great natural storage system for managing your electronic purchases.
4. Adjusting entries can be a little more technical than what most small business owners should be expected to do.
5. Download our free PDF guide to learn how to avoid 10 common accounting errors.

Ask your vendor to fill that order and send an invoice for the purchase order so you can move the money from your asset account into COGS (Cost of Goods Sold). An open vendor deposit is money your business has sent to a vendor, but the vendor hasn’t sent you a vendor invoice to use that money. The open vendor deposit reports show which orders are yet to be filled. Closing your books at the end of the year is much easier when you understand the process and have an organized accounting system in place.

Collect all your financial records

Once you’ve cleaned your bookkeeping, your business will be better prepared for growth, tax season, and investment opportunities. How often do you reconcile your accounting accounts (e.g., assets)? If you don’t reconcile your books with your external account balances (e.g., bank account), you’re going to be left with bad books. Jetpack Workflow was designed with accountants and bookkeepers in mind and comes preloaded with workflow templates customized for accounting tasks. You can easily customize the templates if the workflows don’t perfectly align with your processes. Ready to reclaim control of your finances and free up valuable time to focus on growing your business?

#1: Review Your Cash Position

This report includes information, such as sales, operating costs, operating profit and overall profits. Budgeting helps you better manage your cash flow and make smarter decisions about how to grow your business. Sorting out expenses can help you see where your money is going and identify ways to be a more profitable business. Finally, if you have any physical records, go through them and organize them. They may help you find any missing information from all of your electronic transactions.

Clean up your company’s books in one simple, coherent checklist by Acuity. This is a great natural storage system for managing your electronic purchases. You can sort everything by date or keyword to help you in your search.

Take a look at this bookkeeping cleanup checklist to get all your financial ducks in a row. Download our marginal revenue product free PDF guide to learn how to avoid 10 common accounting errors. By following the nine (plus a bonus) steps outlined below, you can clean up your clients’ books, and rest assured you’ve taken every step in the process.

In this way, they become a strategic partner, not just a bystander. Ensure all payments owed by your client are recorded and paid for. Ensure all outstanding invoices and overdue bills have been accurately recorded. 👇 Download the Weekly Reconciliation Template from the Karbon Template to streamline your periodic reconciliations. This template can be customized to apply to monthly reconciliations.

Suppose your small business is located in any of the 45 states that collect statewide sales tax or in the District of Columbia. With so many tasks competing for your attention, it can be especially difficult to maintain your quality of work. And for your staff performing bookkeeping, consistency is another goal that can be hard to reach.

Review and categorize all income and expenses into appropriate categories. Avoid generic labels like “other” or “miscellaneous,” as these offer little clarity to tax professionals. Achieving a clean bookkeeping system goes hand-in-hand with ensuring your business is tax-compliant. Don’t worry—you don’t have to spend hours sifting through mountains of paper. For example, for physical receipts and invoices, consider using a mobile scanning app. If you need more accurate, efficient, and integrated bookkeeping, call me.