FREE Accounting Checklist Template Download in Word, Google Docs, Excel, PDF, Google Sheets, Apple Pages

Otherwise, set payment reminders so you can pay your bills on time and avoid late fees. If you receive paper checks and cash payments, deposit them weekly to keep your cash flow healthy and your records up to date. Many accounting software programs have apps that you can use to report expenses and upload receipts, so it’s easy to take care of them immediately. Rather than sort https://adprun.net/new-business-accounting-checklist-for-startups/ through a stack of receipts at the end of the month, just snap a picture of the receipt and jot a note about the details. 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. Most accounting software automates entering information from the documents above.

• At the end of your financial year, you will be looking at this account again to determine what receivables you will need to send to collections or write off for a deduction.
• To ensure you are keeping best practices, view our What Is Payroll guide, created by accounting experts.
• If you have not prepared a budget, compare your current year-to-date P&L with the same prior-period, year-to-date income statement to identify variances and make adjustments.
• That’s why we offer our checklist as they help you to inspect the company budget, transaction records, document client invoices, and review unpaid bills.

Create a payroll file sorted by payroll date and a bank statement file sorted by month. With our accounting checklist, we ensure you have a smooth process in performing an internal audit. An internal audit is a critical activity a company should do to check components that allows your business to be functional, including the cash flow.

Review Sales Tax and Make Quarterly Payments

This deadline includes mailing copies of the tax forms to the people who worked for you. To determine what you owe for taxes, you’ll submit a Self Assessment tax return. It’s important to have a system for creating and sending invoices to your clients. Plus, you must keep these invoices in your records using an invoice numbering system.

It’s also important to become intimately familiar with the three basic financial statements. Every business decision you make will require understanding and using these statements. You’ll use them to create budgets, forecast financial performance, and model different scenarios. Financial ratios such as operating margin, debt-to-equity ratio, and return on assets help you further understand the health of your business.

Creating a starting budget

Small-business taxes vary between industries, states, and business types, so to get the best advice on what taxes your business needs to pay, consult with your accountant. For the most part, though, you’ll probably end up paying income taxes, sales taxes, and payroll taxes. At Addition Financial, we pride ourselves on helping our valued business members deal with their finances. We answer small business accounting questions every day, and we provide services that help our clients deal with payroll deductions and other accounting challenges. Small business accounting is something every business owner must handle, and yet it’s also the area where inexperienced entrepreneurs can make costly mistakes and miscalculations. If your heart’s not in it, you’d be better off leaving it to a licensed Certified Public Accountant (CPA) or a professional virtual accounting team like Xendoo.

A new business checklist requires keeping track of many moving pieces. You need to understand how your business performance is represented in multiple financial statements. You need to establish a legal identity and the bookkeeping processes to track how you deploy capital.

Daily Checklist

Most business owners want to spend their time focused on product development, marketing, customer outreach, and other tasks that have a direct impact on cash received. While these tasks are important, you need to be sure that you have a solid financial plan in place to set your company up for success in the future. Failing to take care of these essential tasks on your accounting checklist could cause your business to fail due to poor practices and a lack of cash flow. Create a payroll file sorted by payroll date and a bank statement file sorted by month. Many accounting software systems let you scan paper receipts and avoid physical files altogether. Start a suppliers file, sorted alphabetically, (Staples under “S”, Costco under “C,”etc.) for easy access.

Step #2: Setting Up an Entity

You may also keep receipts for fuel expenses you rack up while travelling for your business. Make sure you have a signed contract before beginning any work on the client. You will want to follow up with the client to collect any signed documents and payments if necessary.

Keep in mind that bookkeeping responsibilities are a bit different from those of a certified public accountant (CPA). Certified public accountants can file taxes, perform audits, and even provide professional guidance on the best way to manage company finances. It also contains 31 other free accounting workflow templates to help you run your business more efficiently. You never know when you might be facing an audit, so it is important that you are proactive right now so that you are prepared for anything that might happen in the future. Good accounting practices make it easy to navigate a potential audit because all of the information is organized and clear. You need to have documentation to back up the write-offs and deductions used for your tax strategy.

For instance, receipt scanners let you take photos of receipts that you upload to your software for easy journal-entry generation. And if you send invoices or pay bills with your software, the numbers should sync automatically with your ledger. Small business accounting is an ongoing commitment throughout the year.