At yearend, your bookkeeper or internal accountant will (or should) go through every account on your balance sheet and tie it to a third party source document. You can reduce your yearend preparation costs if you submit a clean set of books.
Getting Ready For Yearend List
Bank accounts AND credit card accounts should be reconciled EVERY month. At year-end, your accountant is going to want, at a minimum, your reconciliation for the last month in your fiscal year AND the first month in your new year. (They use it for accounts receivable and payable cutoffs).
Your accounts payable sub ledger should be reconciled to vendor statements. If you haven’t been doing this during the year or don’t receive vendor statements, call today to request one. Payables that are outstanding for two or more years should be brought into income.
If you have a bank loan, you probably have been receiving loan statements. What have you been doing with them? Hopefully you have been comparing them to your bank loan balance on your balance sheet and making any adjusting entries necessary.
Clean up those miscellaneous over and under balances on your accounts receivable and payable reports. Review accounts outstanding more than 90 days. Your bookkeeper or accountant will to want to know if you think they are collectable. Identify any balances that over two years old so you can bring them to your bookkeeper or accountant’s attention.
If you have inventory, mark your calendar to take a physical count on the last day of the fiscal year.
Reconcile your payroll account(s). Make sure they match what you have reported and remitted to CRA. If there are discrepancies, have an analysis that explains them. Starting this now will make T4 issuance much easier to accomplish on time.
Reconcile your GST/HST (sales tax) account(s) to your CRA reports. If there are discrepancies, have an analysis prepared explaining them.
Take a look at how you handled any reimbursement of expenses. GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) requires they be recorded as income and NOT netted against the expense.
If you need help with any of the above items on the list, want us to prepare a package for your accountant or would like to save even more money and have Thinkbooks complete your yearend including all tax filings call Thinkbooks today.
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