Accounting Tips to Finish the Year

Make sure you have kept up with bookkeeping

Time to go through your yearly bookkeeping and make sure you have everything that you are needing for the end of the year. You may have missed a month or two (or more) throughout the year and now is the time to get caught up. Cross-reference your bank accounts and your credit card transactions with your accounting records. This is a good practice to ensure that you haven’t been double charged or missed a transaction.

This is the time of the year to make sure that you have all of your books in order so you can begin to plan for the next year with the correct financials.

Take a 60,000 ft view

Take a step back from the day to day tasks of the company and look at your financials and goals from a 60,000-foot view. Look over the year as a whole and see if your company has followed your vision. Reflect and ask yourself, what did we do well this year? What do we need to improve upon? Where did we struggle the most? Which goals did we meet/not meet?

Taking the time to step away from the daily tasks and look at your company as a whole is vital to your year-end tasks. This enables you to see how well you and your employees are tracking and where your focus for the next year needs to be.

Create SMART Goals

Goals are vital to enable your company to know where you are striving to be over the next year. It is time to set up SMART goals for you and your company as a whole.

Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely goals are what you need to focus your goals around.

• Specific goals allow little to no room for interpretation and aid your company in knowing exactly where you want to be to attain this goal. For example, “I want to increase our sales margin by 5% this year”.

• Measurable goals allow you and your employees a way to track your progress via a numerical or specific amount of percentage. “I want to increase our sales margin by 5% this year.”

• Attainable goals are reachable and seen as something that could actually happen. Setting challenging, yet attainable goals are especially rewarding.

• Relevant goals focus on improving areas of weakness or expanding areas of strength. These focus on what is important to your business.

• Timely goals set a firm time frame in which these goals should be attained. You need to be able to set a time frame in order to keep track of where you stand on achieving your goals. Think about making monthly or quarterly goals.

Set a Budget

In order for you to reach your goals, you need a plan to get there. And, a part of that plan should be a budget. We all know what a budget is. An estimate of future income and expenses for a set period of time.

But what you do with your budget is what makes it an important task on your year-end accounting checklist.

Because you set SMART goals, they should be aligned with your budget.

Just like your goals, your budget should be broken down into smaller periods such as monthly or quarterly.

Take Inventory

This is simple if you sell products then go count how much product you still have on the shelf. This will help you double check your inventory value on your balance sheet and if there are discrepancies then you can fix them.

Also take this time to count your workplace stock and keep track of your computers, printers, scanners, etc. This will help you know what you need in the new year.

Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable Reviews

Throughout the year, you may not always keep up with who owes you what or who you owe. But the year-end is the time to clear up any confusion.

You can start by reviewing your aging reports of both accounts receivable and accounts payable.

You might find invoices in accounts payable that you’ve paid or amounts in accounts receivable that haven’t been billed for. If either of these are the case, then this is the time to fix these mistakes.

Plan for Taxes

Last but definitely not least is your preparation for tax season. Doing this as a year-end task item gives you the opportunity to position certain transactions to save you in taxes.

If this is something that you are needing help with then give me a call and let's discuss where your business stands at the year-end.