Bob Gauvreau says the key to a smooth year-end is keeping bookkeeping current. Every balance sheet item needs supporting docs: a bank statement showing your $100,000 balance, for example. Complete records let your accountant file quickly instead of rebuilding everything from scratch.
Chapters
So one of the questions we get asked is what should we do to prepare for our year end and help really support an effective and efficient year end process? And the answer is really, you have to have up to date bookkeeping records. So for your business, if you have up to date bookkeeping records, that's going to be step one. If we have to recreate bookkeeping records, which we need to do in order to get to the corporate year end filing, that's going to take a lot more time, a lot more energy and a lot more cost. So if you have bookkeeping completed, whether it's throughout the year with an outsourced bookkeeper like our team, or you're doing it yourself, it just needs to be complete. And what happens is we get to the year end date and as part of the year end we've got that profit and loss, which is no problem, but we've got our balance sheet and on our balance sheet we've got assets, liabilities and equity. What we need to do to properly support a year end file and you need to go through that balance sheet, identify all of the items which are assets or liabilities. I'll give you an example of bank account. There's a bank account that shows up on the balance sheet. You need support and you need to provide support as to why that balance sheet number is what it is really simple example, let's say you have a GIC for $100,000 in your business, you should be able to get a statement that shows here's my GIC for $100,000, submit that with your bookkeeping documents and that's sufficient support in order to make sure that that balance is a. Okay, so going through a couple other ones, for example accounts receivable, accounts payable, you should be tracking those, you should have listings for those. Every number on the balance sheet as an asset or liability, you have to provide support for. That's how we make sure that everything is accurate, complete and properly reported. So again, as part of the corporate year end package, what we have to do is we have to include a balance sheet and an income statement and make sure that everything balances nicely. Once we have all of that documentation and all of the support, we package it together, we do some retroactive tax planning to make sure you're minimizing your taxes and then we file the corporate year end and we're on to the following year.
