Bookkeeping is so much more than just recording the internal and external cash flow. It helps companies to excel in their past performance, evaluate their current operations, and make wise decisions for the future. Every entrepreneur must follow a bookkeeping cleanup checklist. Bookkeeping is an essential aspect for every business owner out there, and it helps them reserve their strength for rainy days.
When a business’s bookkeeping records fall out of order, financial reports no longer provide the proper guidance, nor do they assist with the company’s tax return filings in case of an audit. Unfortunately, incomplete books might prevent a business from qualifying for loans and credit. Inaccurate bookkeeping can be a destructive part of a small business owner’s life, but it’ll be equally frustrating for larger enterprises.
In the following guide, we’ll walk you through the stages of precise bookkeeping cleanup projects to ensure that your accounts remain stable and healthy. Regardless of the reasons you want to earn from your bookkeeping cleanup projects, the below strategies will help you map out a successful plan.
Identify the Problems:
If you’re serious about the confidentiality of the financial books, you must be aware that there’s always room for improvement. Among other chores, it’s straightforward for minor issues to go unnoticed for years. However, if you’re content with your bookkeeping tactics, you might be drowning secretly inside the accounting graveyard. Still, they can be an excellent reason for your business’s destruction, so it’s feasible to take precautions beforehand.
Prevent Further Damage:
After recognizing the source of your problems, you’ll probably find remedies to fix them. However, it would be wise to consider the outcomes and ensure your books suffer no further damage. At this point, you’ve to make sure that a reliable accounting system manages all the internal cash flows under the eye of an experienced bookkeeper.
Select a Professional Bookkeeper or Software:
If you’ve been outsourcing the bookkeeping responsibilities and getting consistent negative results, then it might be the right time to find a professional one and hand him over the operations. For small businesses, bookkeeping software might come in handy as it would be less expensive and penetrable.
Diversify Management:
It might have appeared a smart move to have invoices directly sent to one department, the billing reports to another, and so on. However, internal smartness isn’t your most significant trouble at this time. It is far more essential that one employee at the company be responsible for receiving and sending all the incoming source documents related to your finances. After every document gets accounted for, you can precede it to the final destination.
Analyze the problematic areas:
After reviewing and recording the financial documents, you can now begin addressing the problems you found earlier. This guide can’t determine every mishap you might have discovered, but you’ll indeed find a few helpful remedies to implement in your situation.
Establish a clean system for bookkeeping:
Following selecting a new bookkeeping system, recognize the problems that influenced the previous ones and analyze your accounts for what exactly was wrong. Now it’s time to develop an accurate and complete set of bookkeeping of the period. Start by setting up a list of accounts in your chosen bookkeeping software and enter each cash transaction attentively. Preferring this bookkeeping cleanup checklist for your official requirements, and following it regularly, will result in accuracy of the accounts.
Reconcile the credit and cash accounts:
A proper bookkeeping cleanup checklist would be imperfect without coordinating the cash and credit accounts. You’ll start by associating your cash accounts and repeating the same procedure for the credit accounts. The accuracy of these cash and credit accounts is a pivotal cleanup activity that you must consider implementing to avoid any red flags.
After cleaning these accounts up, it would be wise to make a strategy to reconcile your cash accounts regularly. Some accounts might require a monthly reconciliation, but cash accounts that receive frequent use might require a weekly reconciliation. However, there is still room for the interpretation of valuable financial information of the company.
About Complete Controller® – America’s Bookkeeping Experts Complete Controller is the Nation’s Leader in virtual bookkeeping, providing service to businesses and households alike. Utilizing Complete Controller’s technology, clients gain access to a cloud platform where their QuickBooks™️ file, critical financial documents, and back-office tools are hosted in an efficient SSO environment. Complete Controller’s team of certified US-based accounting professionals provide bookkeeping, record storage, performance reporting, and controller services including training, cash-flow management, budgeting and forecasting, process and controls advisement, and bill-pay. With flat-rate service plans, Complete Controller is the most cost-effective expert accounting solution for business, family-office, trusts, and households of any size or complexity.
