Your Ultimate Bookkeeping Checklist: Weekly, Monthly & Annual Must-Dos

When we're thinking about bookkeeping tasks, we're thinking what needs to be done this week, what needs to be done this month, and what needs to be done this year. So what are our priorities that are necessary in our ongoing bookkeeping? So first, let's talk about what needs to be done weekly. Very first and most important, in my opinion, is getting your invoicing done. As a small business owner, cash is king. And you can't get cash into your business unless you're invoicing and getting those services out, even if it's for a prepayment or a deposit. Getting those invoices out is going to be so important. So if you have a bookkeeper in your business or you're looking to do this yourself, make sure that invoicing is a priority. Second is making sure that the cash gets into your bank account. So, yes, some of it's an administrative function, some of it's a bookkeeping function, but get those bank deposits into the bank account and make sure that you're recording them in your bookkeeping as well. If you leave this until the end of the year and, and you go back and try and figure out who you were depositing money for, it's not going to work. You're going to be lost. Your clients are going to be upset. You're going to be trying to figure out where all this money came from. You're going to lose out on the opportunity. So get your invoices out, get your cash in the bank, and get those recorded immediately. And then the last one, I would say, aside from payroll, because payroll needs to happen whenever you've got to pay your employees, that's on whatever schedule you have. But the last one would be to go in and do your expense allocations. We love QuickBooks Online. If you plug your QuickBooks Online, you attach it to your bank account, all of your bank feed, all of your transactions should be coming in. They're nice and fresh in your mind. All of those expenses should be able to be quickly allocated to expense accounts. We put them in there quickly, and then you can sort of set them and forget them. That's what we need to do during the weekly process. Monthly. When it comes to bookkeeping, the very first thing and so important if you want accurate financial reporting, one of the things you need to make sure you do monthly is your reconciliations. You want to do this as close to the end of the month as you possibly can. What this does is it captures any of the expenses that maybe went through the bank account but didn't hit QuickBooks for some strange reason, or it hit QuickBooks and never hit your bank account. Why is it outstanding? So it's tracking all the activity that went through both, and it's reconciling the difference between the two, making sure that everything's matching, making sure that it's accurate, and making sure that it's complete. That needs to be done on a monthly basis. You could do it more than that. But what I typically recommend is that you match this up to your bank statement date so that you have documentation you can match it up to. The other thing that you need to do on a monthly basis is create your financial reports. So on a monthly basis, you want to create your profit and loss report, your balance sheet report, and if you want to look at some of the discrepancies between your balance sheet from this month to the previous month, you can do that as well. That identifies your cash flow for you. So every month you've got to do your reconciliations. You maybe want to also deal with some accruals. A good example of an accrual is payroll. So let's say you have five days of payroll in this month, and then the sixth day or the seventh day you go to pay payroll, it actually ends up in the next month. So what we want to do is capture the payroll expense, because it's usually a big one, and make sure that those get in the month that they were actually incurred or the labor was incurred, even though we didn't pay it. The other thing, and lastly, I'll leave it with this, although I'm sure I could add tons of them, is making sure that you get your bills entered into QuickBooks in the period in which you incurred them as well. So, for example, if I have an office supply cost and I work with Brandt Supplies in Peterborough, Brandt's office Supplies, we go and we pick something up for $100 on October 30th, but I don't have to pay that until 30 days from now. It automatically goes on my credit card, but I'm incurring that cost in October. I want to make sure that that bill gets into my QuickBooks file so that the expense takes place in October. That's referred to as the matching principle. Making sure that your expenses are being matched to the period in which they were incurred and also matching to the revenue that required those expenses to take place in the first place. That's everything from a monthly standpoint. Once you get to annually, this is what's required. Okay. You can always do these earlier but looking at adjusting journal entries like amortization expense, making sure that all of your balance sheet items, like your mortgage statements, all attach or all agree to what's on your balance sheet. So for example, you borrow $100,000, you start paying it down. Your payment every month is $1,000 a month. We get down to $88,000. You get a mortgage statement that says $94,000. The difference is interest that we've incurred throughout the period. We need to adjust for that interest that's taking place. Those are our adjusting journal entries. So we need to go through our balance sheet, make sure that everything's reconciled and make sure that everything is good at that point. Because once we get into the year end side, for your bookkeeping purposes, these numbers need to be accurate so they can get to the accountant, which are the basis of getting your taxes filed accurately as well. So weekly, lots of things to take care of, get those invoices out, get that cash in the bank, do your expense allocations monthly, make sure you do your reconciliations. We're maybe doing some adjustments related to payroll, making sure bills get in in the accurate period. And then we're doing our financial reports, our profit and loss, our balance sheet. And then lastly annually would be doing some of those, you know, one time sort of costs or adjusting journal entries like amortization, making sure that our balance sheet agrees to any sort of source documents that we have that will ensure that you have up to date accurate financial information, not only this week and this month, but this year. And you can use this to make really great informed decisions and take your business to the next level.