(disclaimer: this is not legal advice consult with a licensed professional)
(2022) Bookkeeping Checklist,Task List & Template to Complete for Every Business
Bookkeeping and maintaining your financial accounts are important to run a successful and sustainable small business.
However, bookkeeping is a time-consuming task that can be overwhelming for small business owners. With the volume of tasks and responsibilities involved in keeping on top of your accounts, it can be quite difficult to keep track of what needs to be done every day, month and at the end of the fiscal year.
Where do you start with bookkeeping? How often do accounting tasks need to be completed? What are the tasks you need to complete each month? How do you prepare your small business bookkeeping for the end of the tax year?
That’s where a small business accounting checklist becomes useful. It takes the guesswork out of bookkeeping so you can focus on running your business. Often, small businesses keep a monthly bookkeeping checklist as many bookkeeping tasks need to be completed every month. But it’s also useful to have a daily bookkeeping checklist too along with an annual one.
At SynkBooks, we believe in making bookkeeping and tax preparation as easy as possible for small business owners. Our services can help your business complete its bookkeeping checklist with ease. Read on to find out what we can do for you!
In this article, we’ll present you with the most important bookkeeping tasks to complete and give you a comprehensive accounting checklist and task list for your small business to complete daily, weekly and annually.
Small Business Bookkeeping Checklist Template
Need a template for you to keep track of your bookkeeping tasks and tick them off when you’re done? We’ve made a free bookkeeping task list template for you to use.
Here is our ideal bookkeeping checklist that your small business should follow:
Daily Tasks:
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Monthly Tasks:
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Quarterly Tasks:
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Annual Tasks:
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If you need a downloadable checklist, we’ve made our small business bookkeeping task list available on on Google Sheets: Bookkeeping Checklist Template.xlsx
To save and edit this document, head to File > Make a Copy. From here, you can insert rows and amend the tasks to suit your business!
Let’s now explore what each of these tasks mean and what needs to be done!
Daily or Weekly Bookkeeping Checklist
Many of the essential bookkeeping tasks relate to the day-to-day financial transactions of your business. Therefore, many responsibilities have to be met at the end of every workday – or if you don’t have time, at least complete these by the end of every week.
Here are some tasks that should be on your daily bookkeeping checklist:
Daily bookkeeping checklist
Record all income & expenses
Small businesses often struggle with the workload of logging all transactions. Keeping on top of these by recording your daily income and expenses in your accounts is a great way to handle this.
When customers pay your invoices, recording the payment receipts as soon as possible is a great practice. This helps keep your cash flow calculations accurate and avoids your team chasing payments that have already been paid.
Enter Bills and Checks Immediately
In the same vein, recording expenses and bills right away are also extremely important. Record the date, vendor, and amount of all expenses in your daybook when the bills or check comes through.
Leaving this to the end of the week or the end of the month makes it harder to keep track of what you owe, and risks late payments to your vendors.
Sending Invoices
Prompt payment by customers is vital for maintaining good cash flow, and sending regular invoices is one of the best ways to reduce the number of late payments. Invoice your customers straight away!
Not only does this improve cash flow, but it also makes it more manageable for your team to chase unpaid invoices.
Categorize Transactions
Organizing your transactions helps you understand where your business is spending and receiving funds, and gives you a better overview of your financial health.
Moreover, maintaining distinct transaction categories makes it easier to report expenses to the IRS when needed.
It’s good practice to sort your transactions and documents into the categories the IRS uses. This includes:
- Account statements
- Credit card receipts
- Invoices
- Unpaid & Paid
- Capital contributions
- Non-taxable deposits
Expenses could also be split into distinct categories based on the department that incurred the cost:
- Cost of goods sold
- Payroll
- Advertising/Marketing
- Insurance
- Employee Insurance
- Health Insurance
- Liability Insurance etc.
- Taxes
- Legal
- Rent & Utilities
This list isn’t exhaustive. You may find your business benefits from certain categories depending on your market sector.
However, categorizing your transactions in this way can be incredibly time-consuming and tedious. No worries! Your SynkBooks custom bookkeeping team can sort through your income and expenses and categorize them for you. We automatically logs your transactions in useful, IRS-recognized categories for you.
Make Deposits
An important bookkeeping task to be done daily or weekly is to make bank deposits to reconcile your company’s bank statement. This helps to ensure that all funds are accounted for and that businesses comply with federal banking regulations.
Monthly Bookkeeping Checklist
Run And Update Payroll
Keeping on top of payroll helps ensure all your staff are paid on time. The frequency of this task depends on how often you pay your employees.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 36.5% of employees are paid biweekly – however, monthly payroll is quite common among small businesses as it often reduces the associated payroll costs.
Bookkeepers and accountants will need to make sure all employee details are updated before payday. Accountants need to ensure:
- All pay is recorded: this includes employee salaries and wages.
- Deductions like payroll tax are recorded
- Payslips are produced for each employee
Chase Up On Past-Due Invoices
At the end of each month, it’s useful to review your accounts receivable and track how much your customers owe you.
Here, you can follow up on customers who have outstanding invoices with you. You may choose to do this weekly or bi-weekly if cash flow is a particular concern for your business.
Generate your cash flow budget
Understanding your cash flow helps your business more effectively manage its budget. Monitoring and revising your cash flow budgets ensure your small business can use its retained earnings to grow sustainably.
Quarterly Bookkeeping Checklist:
The end of the financial quarter is always a hectic time for any small business. Following a clear bookkeeping checklist for end-of-quarter is extremely helpful for keeping on top of these tasks.
Generate Profit/Loss Reports:
A Profit & Loss statement measures your small business’s sales, expenses and overall profit during the quarter. This is an important document for tracking the financial health of your organization – and is a key metric for shareholders to review at the end of every quarter.
It tracks your actual revenue/sales, gross profit and expenses. It helps you identify areas of your business that are contributing most to your profit margin, and also helps you rectify areas where costs may need to be trimmed.
As with many financial reports, generating your P&L statement can be tedious. SynkBooks allows you to generate clear Profit/Loss reports that sync to an IRS tax return form within a few clicks!
Profit/Loss statements can be generated either quarterly or annually. How often you’ll need to generate these depends on your company structure and its related financial disclosure requirements.
Make your Quarterly Tax Payments
If your business needs to pay quarterly estimated tax payments, your bookkeeper must keep on top of this. Even if you don’t make quarterly tax payments, you’ll still need to know your estimated tax returns for tax withheld.
To figure out your estimated tax, you should know your expected adjusted gross income, taxable income, taxes, deductions, and credits for the year. This will help you calculate your estimated business income tax for the quarter.
SynkBooks simplifies this process and allows bookkeepers to easily calculate your estimated financials for the year. This can easily be imported into a form 1120-W to estimate your income as accurately as possible to avoid penalties.
Annual Bookkeeping Checklist
Preparing for the end of the fiscal year is one of the most difficult times for a bookkeeper, accountant or small business owner. Here’s what needs to be done annually:
Generate, Review and File Tax Returns
Tax preparation is the fundamental responsibility of a bookkeeper at the end of the fiscal year. The first step to filing your year-end tax returns is to generate your annual profit/loss statement and other financial reports.
From here, you’ll need to translate your taxable income to a tax return form – either Form 1120 or Form 1120, depending on your corporation structure.
Given that tax-time is one of the most stressful and complex periods for small businesses, it’s extremely helpful to consider the services of an outsourced bookkeeping service like SynkBooks.
As we’ve touched on before, your SynkBooks team will generate P&L and income statements, and will even fill out and file your tax return for you.
File Your Other IRS Forms
Aside from Form 1120 (or Form 1065 for partnerships), the other IRS forms that’ll need to be filled out depending on your business and its market sector. It’s useful to consult our expert bookkeeping team to figure out what forms need to be filled out and when.
Complete your bookkeeping task list easily with SynkBooks
At SynkBooks, our simplified and easy-to-use bookkeeping tool suite is perfect for completing your small business accounting checklist.
To simplify your bookkeeping task list, we recommend using our custom bookkeeping services. These plans start at around $200 a month. With this, a team of our bookkeeping and tax professionals will:
- Categorize your income and expenses for you.
- Record your cash transactions
- Produce income statement reports
- And even represent you if you’re audited for no extra costs.
Your dedicated team will know exactly how to help small businesses like yours and will work with you throughout the year – getting you ready for tax time!
To help you with your checklist, we offer two distinct plans:
Don’t need your own outsourced bookkeeping team? Our standalone bookkeeping software starts at $15 per month and is designed for do-it-yourself bookkeeping.
Get started with SynkBooks today!
It’s easy to get started with SynkBooks! Simply head to app.synkbooks.com or get in touch with us today!
We’ll ask you a few short questions about your business and your very own dedicated bookkeeping team will handle all your bookkeeping and tax preparation needs for you! Within a few clicks, you’ll be able to start simplifying your small business bookkeeping task list in no time.