Linda Artesani walks through preparing a QuickBooks Online file for year-end closing on an apartment complex. She reconciles accounts receivable, payable, credit cards, loans, and mortgages, matches security deposits to a tenant spreadsheet, and verifies that depreciation entries from the CPA are posted. Doing these checks monthly or quarterly cuts the year-end workload.
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Hello, Linda Ardesani, Ardesani Bookkeeping, and I just wanted to run through several of the steps that I take to close down a company file at year-end. And this one in particular is for property, an apartment complex that we own. So I'm going to come over to this window, and you do have your little overview here. And you can change the date ranges to see kind of quickly in beautiful living color what's going on, but it's much better to click on your reports and come over to your trial balance. So that's the first place I head so that I can come in and see what's going on in my business for last year. So I would come in here, and of course all of these accounts are going to be reconciled, so that's important. Any depreciation from last year, hopefully your CPA gave you those entries so that you can make sure that those are entered. You know, the depreciation and things like that, you would want to get from your CPA from the past year so that your records match your tax return from the prior period. I would make sure that my accounts receivable and accounts payable are accurate. You will find out from your CPA if he's running things on a cash basis, you might have to make some adjustments there. The credit card is zero. Like I said, this is a small company, but you would make sure that those are reconciled. One of the other things, any loans that you have, you wanna make sure those are correct as well. And you can customize your report to not show zero entries, which I think I have here. So no zero entries. If there is activity in them, the zeros are gonna show. They're going to show. So my security deposit account, I want to make sure that this $6,375 is accurate to My records. So I keep a spreadsheet with the tenants' names on it and the exact amount of their security deposit so that I know $6,375 matches up with the $6,375, so that is correct. This is something that I provide to my CPA when I turn my records over. Now we don't really do that, we just invite them as a user. Any mortgages you want to make sure are accurate and reconciled to your year-end statement from your bank. So that's one of the— those are the things I start to really look into when I get into the balance sheet accounts. Now down here is your profit and loss accounts. So you can come over here and check in. I've run the same report for year-end, last year's date range. And then you can just come into any of these and make sure that, you know, the auto expenses, all my gas that maybe my maintenance man used to go to the apartment building to make sure things are in order. And and you can go in through all of these and just check my grounds maintenance. Yes, who I used. And you just go back and forth and just check your accounts to make sure that you're reviewing them for accuracy. So that's basically what I do with my properties. I go through all of them. I've got one company with several classes or property locations, and I will get a video in there for that. It's a little bit more complicated, but it's basically the same thing. You just have to make sure that all the accounts. are properly classified. So that's it in a nutshell, very quickly, for what I do to make sure a file is ready for the CPA. And I go through these files, make sure there's nothing in a parent account. That's one of the other things that you have to make sure, that if there's a parent account, the subaccounts have the figures in it, but there's nothing in the parent account. The parent account is kind of like the top category, and then you get the detail here. So that is what I do. It's very simple, it's very basic, something you should probably do several times during the year, maybe monthly depending on the file, or in the case of this one, quarterly. And that way it's not so much work at the beginning of the year. So thank you for watching the videos. If you have anything that you'd like me— any topic you'd like me to go over, please add something to my Facebook page and I will try to put that topic in or post it for you. Again, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you.
