Bookkeeping Catch-Up Overview

When you find yourself seriously behind in your bookkeeping to the point of considering hiring someone to catch up your books for you, here are some tips to help you, as the business owner, consider and review first:

• Review the status of all of your bank and credit card reconciliations.
  • Cash and credit reconciliations are the first step to catching up your bookkeeping.
  • Make note of this and perhaps you can just undertake this task on your own as it may not be as bad as you think.
• Review your Accounts Payables and Accounts Receivables.
  • Perhaps you have a bunch of old open vendor bills and customer invoices and credits that should just be written off. If done properly, this can be done rather quickly.
• Review your Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet reports.
  • Are there any negative balances to investigate?
  • Are they any old open accounts still showing on these reports?
  • Can you possibly merge some of these accounts?
• If you engage in Job Costing:
  • Are all expenses and income transactions applied to jobs or overhead?
  • Can you process a simple job costing report and ascertain the profitability?
  • Can you process a balance sheet by job report and ascertain works in progress?
• If you engage in selling inventory:
  • Compare your stock status report to the balance sheet; does these numbers match?
  • Were all inventory items sales and purchases booked to the correct income statement and balance sheet accounts?
  • Review your inventory items; are there any that can be deactivated?

Overall, it is always wise to engage in a little sleuthing on your own so you have a much better idea of what is really going on in your books and what it may take to catch up things.

Note: AccuraBooks is a bookkeeping firm only, so please consult with your C.P.A. for verification and clarification about the contents of this article.