It may be tempting to postpone accounting procedures so you can concentrate on the cool parts of entrepreneurship, but you’ll quickly realize that’s a mistake. Keeping your ledgers up to date lets you see when you’re running short of cash, and whether your new project’s expenses are ballooning. If you’re not on top of your financials, money problems can blindside you.
With this accounting checklist, you can master bookkeeping even if you hate it. We’ll show you how to set up a checklist for accounting that will make bookkeeping workflows as routine as checking your email. And when you’re out of pocket, your staff can fill in by following the checklist. That’s the beauty of well-defined workflows.
Accounting Daily Task Checklist
Taking time out every day to keep up with the daily tasks of an accountant may sound like a distraction from the important work of growing your company. In reality, keeping track of your income, expenses, and tax bills is essential to keeping your business in the black.
Drawing up an accounting daily task checklist—and lists for weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks—requires some up-front work, but it pays off in the long run. Once you have an accounting checklist in place, you don’t have to think about what you need to do. Sit down, attack the different items on the list, and don’t stop until they’re done. Then you can put accounting out of your mind.
Develop accounting processes that work with your schedule. If you can enter transactions as soon as they happen, great. But if setting aside dedicated accounting time at the end of the day works better, go that route.Once you have a time frame, commit to it. Let your team know you’re focusing on accounting tasks at the appointed hour, and on nothing else.
Here are the essential daily accounting tasks:
1. Record transactions
On a given day, your business may need to account for cash sales, sales on credit, inventory purchases, and office expenses. One item on your accounting checklist should be to record transactions daily, including revenue, expenses, accounts receivable, and accounts payable.
It’s particularly important to record cash transactions in your daily accounting procedures because it’s easy to lose track of them. If, say, someone takes $20 from petty cash to buy office supplies, you need to maintain a paper trail, even if you’re swamped by other priorities.
Don’t assume you’ll remember if you don’t keep records. Even if an unexplained $20 shortfall is a trivial fraction of your day’s cash flow, it can add up over time. And without records there’s no way to distinguish legit expenses from an employee helping themselves to some extra cash.
Look at your current workflows and see how they can improve. For example, if you and your team have trouble keeping track of receipts or invoices, assign some designated folders. Direct everyone to file the paperwork on those items as soon as it’s created. When the time comes to work on your accounting checklist, you’ll have the documentation at hand.
2. Deposit cash and checks.
If your company does a lot of business in cash or checks, don’t leave it sitting around too long. The best practice here is to make a daily trip to the bank to deposit that revenue. This also builds up the cash cushion in your account in case of an unexpected expense in your future.
3. Track your cash flow
At the end of the day, add up the cash you have on hand. Compare it with the amount your sales report says you should have. For example, if you run a restaurant and it started the day with $1,500 in the safe, then took in $850, you should have $2,350 when you close. If not, what happened?
The problem could come from a cashier error, a purchase nobody reported making, or a “dine-and-dash” case. It’s important to figure it out so you can avoid similar problems in the future, and so you can gain a clearer picture of your business finances and health.
4. Update your inventory
Whether your inventory is diamonds or paper plates, update your stock in your inventory management platform the day you get shipments in. That way your team knows whether they have the items a customer asks for.
5. Back up data
Cloud-based accounting software can back up your data automatically and instantly. Otherwise, backing up everyday is the ideal. The odds are that if you skip a day, your computer won’t crash or be hacked the very next night. Over time, though, the odds of something happening to your customer data, invoices, and digital ledgers are good. Without backups, it’s all lost.
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