Audit and Accounting

There are a number of benefits to streamlining the internal accounting processes for your business. The most obvious benefit is the reduction in time required to prepare the necessary information for your corporate year end, thereby making the process much more efficient and cost-effective. Streamlining your accounting processes can also mitigate redundancies and needless complications in your business, which can drastically reduce the potential for errors or fraudulent activity.

To help you simplify your year-end process, we have provided a convenient checklist:

The Accounting Checklist – What to Do Before Your Year End

Organize your financial statements, source documents, and reconciliations:

• Contact sales and customer-facing personnel to ensure all customer sales invoices have been processed.
• Speak to suppliers to ensure that all payable invoices have been received. For those that have not, make a list of accrued liabilities.
• Collect all payroll records, including time sheets, time cards, and vacation allowances.
• Prepare initial reconciliations for the bank by comparing your balance to the general ledger trial balance, identifying any differences. Print out accounts receivable and accounts payable sub-ledgers to compare to the general ledger.
• Draft financial statements should be printed from the accounting system for review. These can identify any errors and items that require further investigation.

Make appropriate tax considerations:

• Connect with your professional accountant to identify any new legislative updates, tax deductions, tax exemptions, or tax credits that may help your business.
• Review expense transactions to ensure all expenses paid personally by you (as a shareholder) have been captured, and that these expenses have been fully reimbursed.
• Organize Notice of Assessments and tax remittance payments made during the year for reference.
• Keep in mind that, although source documents don’t need to be submitted to CRA unless there is an audit, your business must keep relevant documents for a minimum of 7 years.

Business Planning

• Year-end is an excellent opportunity to review the business goals that were set over the past year, and compare these goals with actual results.
• Taking the current budget and performance into consideration, prepare a new budget for the upcoming year.
• Plan non-budgetary elements of your annual business strategy. This could include customer acquisition, the cultivation of strategic relationships, shifts in corporate focus and philosophy, etc.

Let Fuller Landau Help With Your Year-End Business Accounting Solutions

At Fuller Landau, we provide business accounting solutions to help entrepreneurial companies run more efficiently and profitably. We work in partnership with our clients to support their plans for growth, and to keep their corporate finances on track.

Call us today to book an appointment with one of our knowledgeable experts.