For the growth and well-being of your business, healthy finances are necessary for you to make the best business decisions. To keep things going, a regular clean-up of your books is required.
Keeping on top of your financials will ensure that you can take risks, explore new opportunities and make decisions to take your business to the next level of growth. To do this, it is important to keep your accounting up to date and know the benefits of consistently cleaning up your books.
Most companies don’t realize that regular bookkeeping checkups and reconciliations are important. Most companies tend to wait until the end of the year to perform these tasks. This would not only complicate the job later on but it also prevents you from properly planning your taxes or looking at your financial statements and knowing the financial health of your business.
For an effective cleaning of your books we recommend that you perform the following tasks on a quarterly basis:
- Reconcile all bank and credit card accounts
- Reconcile loan balances to match your bank balance
- Review accounts receivable
- Review sales tax records
- Conduct a physical inventory
- Do a general review of suppliers
Here are some extra tips you can follow to keep your books clean on a quarterly basis to keep your accounting fresh and up to date.
Why is it Important to Keep Clean Books?
To maintain good financial health and ensure the growth and progress of your business, it is important that your bookkeeping is clear and that you have access to information at all times. Many businesses today are struggling with the financial consequences that the pandemic has created.
Today more than ever, companies have realized the importance of having a clear and defined process for keeping their books clean at least every third month, as they have found it beneficial to periodically review the health of their business.
Outsourced Bookkeeping
A good idea is to hire an accounting team to do the hard work for you. The benefit of this is that the team you hire will take care of and ensure that your business income and expenses are used properly to benefit you and your business. By having a staff that is directly in charge of the accounting, you will create a real-time financial statement on a month-to-month basis.
By relying on the services of professional accountants, processes will be much more efficient and automatic, including the cleaning of the books. Usually, outsourced accounting is aided by technology to make the most tedious tasks, an efficient and fast process.
Quarterly Cleanup
As a business owner, it is your responsibility to review financial reports to know the overall health of the business. By having this information clear and accurate, you can share it with your tax preparer and make decisions such as creating a budget.
An excellent strategy to keep your finances up to date is to change the annual book cleaning process to a quarterly one. This timeframe is perfect to not feel overwhelmed and start planning your budget for the next year at the time you need it.
Knowing exactly where your business stands will make it easier and more efficient to plan for the future of your business.
Using Automated Solutions
There are automation tools that allow you to save time and avoid anomalies and errors that normally occur during manual accounting.
Cleaning tools help to detect these anomalies with greater efficiency. The advantage of these types of tools is that they can be used on a daily basis to have your books cleaned and up to date.
Some of the areas of cleanup you can perform on a daily basis are:
- Unreconciled transactions
- Duplicate contacts
- Multiple coded contacts
- Suggested defaults
- Inactive accounts
- Duplicate transactions
Correcting and cleaning up these anomalies will save you time and money. They may seem like small errors but if they skew your data, it can be very costly to correct them. Even more so if they are not detected in time.