Ryan Vaughn explains how to catch up on bookkeeping before tax deadlines. Link your bank and credit card accounts to accounting software, then categorize each transaction. Either do it yourself in dedicated time blocks or hire an accountant. Good books reduce what you owe the IRS.
How can I quickly catch up on my bookkeeping? This is an interesting time of year right after extension deadlines where we get this question a little bit more often because it's twofold. Now it's— we're talking about year-end planning. In order to do good year-end planning, Bookkeeping needs to be up to date. Or it could be from, unfortunately, some percentage of our clients somehow managed to go between January and October 15th not reading a single one of our 73 emails that remind them about filing deadlines. And now it's the, uh, oh, oh no, I, uh, missed the filing deadline. Oh no. I need to do my taxes, but my bookkeeping isn't up to date. So it's a good question, um, because it does at least show there's intention to at least get it right. As you know, bookkeeping is actually really critical. It's critical for the success of your business because it provides information to you. It's It's a journal of the numerical consequences of your business decisions, or you could say monetary consequences of your business decisions. You make a decision that's going to result in better profitability or worse profitability for your business. Bookkeeping reveals that to us. It's also super critical because it's the way we make sure you don't overpay in taxes. Look, having a successful business and a profitable business, which is what we want our clients to have, will likely lead to the need to pay some taxes. But of course, the IRS sucks, so we want to keep that money as low as possible because honestly, IRS sucking goes hand in hand with the government also sucks at spending your money. How about you keep it The economy is better off the more you keep of your money. Okay, so it's critical. If you're not caught up, this video is going to share with you some pretty self-explanatory, straightforward ways in which you can get caught up quickly. Once you are caught up, I would implore you though to have something on an ongoing basis that you maintain that your bookkeeping is kept up to date. So how do you catch up your books quickly? You just got to get it done. There is not a magic bullet here. There's not a magic solution. There's not somewhere you could go online and just click a button and whoop, it's up to date. Now, that being said, accounting softwares are pretty cool because it can link to your bank accounts and credit card statements. And once you link them, It will download and can download a whole bunch of transactions all at once. That is a quick way to catch it up, but that's not the end of the story. Once you import data into your accounting software, you are going to need to have those categorized. And by categorized, I mean, is this an expense for advertising? Was this income? Is this an office expense? Is it travel? Those are different categories that you need to label on your transactions that come over. So that's a quick way, but you got to take the time to set that up. If you've never done that before, it could take you a while to get that done. So if you're looking to get your bookkeeping caught up quickly, and I ask this question to you, how Quick are you with doing your own bookkeeping? If the answer is anything other than quick, so not quick, then you may want to consider hiring an accounting firm to help you get caught up. Now, if it's something that you want to do going forward, sometimes it can be helpful to have the accounting company catch you up quickly, and now you can see where accountants, professionals, were categorizing some of your expenses. It also involved conversations with you, but once you have that in your books, it's kind of a record so that if you wanted to do it yourself, you have a pretty good idea of where expenses should go. Your— the accounting company would have connected your actual accounts to your software, so they kind of did the heavy lifting for you. So that's an option. Look, and if you're like, I don't want to pay an accountant to do it, but I'm not quick at it, then you got to DIY it yourself. That's obviously do it yourself, DIY. But then you got to book out the time. So if you're not quick at it, you got to block out the time in big old chunks. Maybe you're giving up a work week, maybe you're giving up a weekend, but You can't substitute the actual work that needs to go into getting it done. So it's either you're going to do it or you're going to pay someone else to do it. I mean, who knows, maybe you have a friend or relative who'll do it for free, but, you know, I've found in life you get what you pay for, and if someone's doing it for free, it's likely going to be on their timeline, not in a quick So all of that being said, I wish I had a magic bullet and some software you could go to, update my books quickly dot com or insighttaxisthebestfirm.com/updatebooksquickly, and you can magically get your books done like that. Because even when clients hire us to do it, which we love to do, It is quicker if we do it than if they do it, but there will be back and forth, and, you know, it might take a couple weeks to get those up to date. We have a bookkeeping checklist if this is something you want to do. If you want to either do it yourself or stay on top of a maintenance program that another accounting company is doing, our bookkeeping checklist goes over the activities and tasks that should be happening with your bookkeeping based on is that week— what do you do weekly, what do you do monthly, what do you do quarterly, what should you be doing once a year. So it's kind of a checklist, it's free, so look for the link in the description, in the comment section, and that'll give you a good leg forward trying to get your books caught up quickly. Remember, the IRS sucks, The government sucks at spending your money. Good bookkeeping will help you reduce the taxes that you pay. That's one of the reasons why it's so important. Okay, until next time.
