Bookkeeping Services for Small and Growing Businesses

OOPS! 2024 is coming to a close and you forgot to do your bookkeeping. You are not returning your accountant’s phone calls because you don’t have the information that he needs to your your tax return for 2024. What should you do? You are not the only one. Often we get a call from an optometrist or property manager who never kept any records last year. Here is what we do when faced with this dilemma. 

Determine the most efficient process to collect your corporate information for your accountant. Every company is different. Here are two different situations we encountered and what we did: 

Catch-up an Existing QuickBooks File: ONE MONTH AT A TIME 

1. Enter Deposits and Checks (or ideally download all bank transactions) and batch/post transactions.  Do one month of transactions on all accounts before you go on to the next month. 

1. Pull all your bank and credit card statements and place them in order by date 

1. Perform monthly Bank Reconciliations and print out Summary Reconciliation Reports again, only for the month that you are working on.  

1. Record Journal Entries for Payroll by pay period or one entry for the year for that month.  

1. Review A/R and A/P at the end of the month to make sure that all deposits and payments were recorded correctly. Make adjustments if necessary 

1. Review Undeposited Funds (Make Deposit – should be empty for that month).   

1. Print out Monthly Reports: Comparative Profit and Loss, Comparative Balance Sheet. Are all accounts in order, for example no negative balances on the Balance Sheet? If not, do some research and make adjustments. 

1. Once satisfied that January or the 1st month that you needed to catch-up is 100% correct, go back to step on and complete the next month.  One month at a time in crucial but takes some self control.  The desire to look at one account for the entire year is compelling but we have found it could cause the project to take much longer.  Why you may ask, because you will miss critical information that if you don’t catch early on will result in the same mistake happening over and over.  That is why we catch-up one month at a time prior to moving on to the next month.   

1. When done with the catch-up, to see how the year went review the following reports: Sales by Customer Summary, Sales by Product/Item, Vendor Summary, A/R aging, A/P aging 

Catch-up Using Excel: 

• Pull electronic information for the bank and credit cards 

• Organize all the transactions in an excel spreadsheet 

• Add a column for categories (Rent, Meals and Entertainment, Filing Fees, Travel Expenses, Advertising & Marketing, etc.) 

• Sort by Payee so that when you categorize one transaction you can pull down and categorize all transactions for that payee 

• Continue until all transactions are categorized 

• Use a Pivot Table to group the transactions into a summary of all your transactions for the year 

Extra Tip for Either Catch-up: 

Does your credit card provider offer an Annual Summary Statement? If it does, enter the summary amounts, not the detail. This alone will save you an hour or two of your time. 

Make sure you add all the expenses you paid for with a personal checking or credit card account. The offset would be your Owner’s Draw or Contribution Account.  

To make sure you are never faced with a big catch-up project again, set aside a time every week to update your QuickBooks.  You will thank yourself because the information in QuickBooks when reviewed regularly is a treasure chest of data that will help you propel your business.   

 OR call BudgetEase. We would be happy to catch your bookkeeping up so you don’t have to worry about it anymore! Contact us!