Review the payroll summary before payments are disbursed to avoid making corrections during the next payroll period. A payroll service provider can do all this to save you time and ensure accuracy at a reasonable cost. If you’re managing inventory, set aside time to reorder products that sell quickly and identify others that are moving slowly and may have to be marked down or written off. If you check regularly (and compare to prior months’ numbers), it’s easier to make adjustments so you are neither short nor overloaded.

Or it’s not certain who is meant to approve the claim or whether that approval has been given or not. Then, there are the occasions where an approved and processed expense doesn’t end up being paid to the employee when its meant to be paid. Connect the Process Street checklist to Zapier to automatically fire your data into the generator with our Zap. Accounting is vital to the health of a business and too many companies overlook it. In the UK, the Association of Accounting Technicians revealed that SMEs were “leaking” £2.9bn every year through poor accounting practices.

1. Most invoices are due within 30 days, noted as “Net 30” at the bottom of your invoice.
2. The end of the month is the perfect time to review all invoices and understand the balance of aged receivables.
3. Assign responsibilities to team members and leverage accounting technology to automate repetitive tasks like collecting documents or sending follow-up reminders.
4. Closing the books doesn’t have to be a tedious and time-consuming process.

Refresh Accounting Software

In which case, check out these other template packs to help your other departments and business processes. The annual financial report is the culmination of all the hard work put in over the course of the year. This helps you work out your gross profit, your profit before taxes, your retained earnings, and other important terms any good accounting overview of your business will need to represent. There are many purposes inbuilt within an effective accounts payable process.

Why do you need a bookkeeping checklist?

Forecasting how much cash you will need in the coming weeks and months will help you reserve enough money to pay bills, including your employees and suppliers. Plus, you can make more informed business decisions about how to spend it. Software tools can simplify this process by providing real-time insights into your cash flow trends, helping you make informed decisions about spending, saving, and investing.

Generate End-Of-Month Reports

They do this to ensure financial accuracy and compliance and prepare for the tax season. You’ll want to do invoicing weekly in most cases, although some businesses may invoice monthly or as they make credit sales. Business accounting is the process of gathering and analyzing financial information on business activity, recording transactions, and producing financial statements. There are three main pillars of business accounting reports and one of them is your income statement, otherwise known as a profit and loss statement. A further function of a well-constructed accounts payable process is to minimize the risk of fraud.

As companies grow larger and the outgoing payments they make begin to spiral upward in value, the risk/reward of fraud charges. Every company should have oversight procedures in place to protect company assets. With these Process Street checklists, you’ll see how you can integrate Process Street with Zapier and Quickbooks to automate accounting processes, saving you time and money. Our checklists enable anyone to perform accounting activities, and as you go through you’ll see the different steps explained where necessary. The CRA requires that all small businesses that earn state tax and expenditure limits more than $30,000 make HST/GST payments. But CRA rules state that you must change your HST/GST reporting period if you experience an increase in sales and taxable supplies.

Review and pay quarterly payroll taxes

Daily cash reconciliations create a paper trail and work as a control for the business. You can immediately tell if cash is missing and only need to investigate the past 24 hours if anything is off. Rather than disappointing your clients, keep your team organized by creating detailed checklists to stay on track. A simple way to do that is with spreadsheets, using Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Are the tasks in the Monthly General Accounting Checklist Template accurate?

Marshall is a former Securities & Exchange Commission-registered investment adviser with a bachelor’s degree in finance from Appalachian State University. After recording transactions, you’ll want to keep copies of your invoices and all receipts. While tossing receipts in a box might seem tempting, it leads to chaos at tax time. The annual financial report is your detailed proof that you and your team did a great job and a way of communicating the company’s strategy for the year ahead. The cash flow report, or cash flow statement, is focused on looking less at broad overviews of the business and trends, and more on activity within business operations. Working out your cash flow is another staple aspect of business accounting.

Businesses can also manage their travel and entertainment expenses without the constant headache of submitting manual expense reports. However, for any cash or check payments not received online, make depositing these funds a weekly habit. At the end of each day, reconcile all cash payments and payment receipts received in the general ledger to get a good idea of each client’s cash balance.