Using a cleanup checklist for successful QBO cleanups

If you’ve been outsourcing your bookkeeping, it’s time to find a new accountant. If you’ve been keeping the books yourself or with in-house personnel, it’s time to get some extra training for the person who’ll be managing things from here on out. For now, you may well need to take control of the process yourself, at least for a little while. For most small businesses, a simple accounting software package is all you’ll need to get things back on track. If that means investing in new software, choose a program that allows you to create retrospective ledger entries (more on that in step 5). No bookkeeping cleanup checklist will ever be enough if you do not stop the systematic errors that got your books to this point.

• When you sign up to do a bookkeeping clean up with us, you are in good hands.
• Your particular chart of accounts enables you to classify transactions and creates the basis for your financial statements.
• Adjusting entries can be a little more technical than what most small business owners should be expected to do.
• When it comes to QBO cleanups, using a cleanup checklist will help you to stay organized and in control, and lead to successful QBO cleanups.
• It’s wiser, though, to take a breath at this point and ensure that your books suffer no further damage.

When it comes to tidying up your books, create a checklist to help you track what needs done and cross items off your to-do list. You can also create adjusting entries to record https://www.bookstime.com/ depreciation and amortization, an allowance for doubtful accounts, and accrued revenue or expenses. Try to aim for reconciling your accounts each month for tidy books.

Payroll

To fix bad books due to errors of omission, comb through your records (e.g., receipts). Record any omitted entries in your books for the correct accounting period. You can find these types of errors by double-checking your work and preparing trial balances at the end of each reporting period. Download our free PDF guide to learn how to avoid 10 common accounting errors.

• You have followed through the checklist thus far and all before year-end…good for you.
• Get up and running with free payroll setup, and enjoy free expert support.
• Though the free template will work, teams should look at automated workflow management software to make the process more efficient.
• Before officially concluding the Clean-Up process, take the time to review and document all the efforts made during the Clean-Up.

Good bookkeeping is essential if you want to lower your tax liability and run your business based on the numbers, not hopes and dreams. Finally, with a steadier hand keeping the books and all incoming source documents fully accounted for, you can start addressing the problems you’ve found. This guide can’t anticipate every bookkeeping clean up problem you might have discovered, but we can give you some ideas about issues common to businesses in your situation, and how you should plan to correct them. It might have seemed efficient to have invoices sent directly to one department, billing statements to another, expense reports to still another, and so on.

#6 Have a Tax Plan in Place

It’s a bit more work at the end of an already-long process, but it’s worth it. Submit your information here If you would like help evaluating your catch-up bookkeeping needs . Or Learn More About The Bookkeeping catch-up experts in our team. When a business’s accounting records fall out of order, its books no longer provide the guidance they were meant to. Nor do they provide compelling support for the business’s tax return filings in case of an audit. Sloppy or incomplete books may even prevent a business from qualifying for the loans, lines of credit, and investor funding on which its future growth rests.