For owners and office managers
Keep the books tidy between visits from your accountant
Close the Books walks small-business owners and office managers through the bookkeeping tasks that come around every month, and says plainly where a CPA should take over.
Close kit
A working set of checklists, definitions and comparisons for the person keeping the books. Each page is general information, and each says where your CPA should decide.
- Run sheet
Month-End Close Checklist for Small Businesses
The tasks that turn a month of transactions into statements you can trust, in a working order.
- Feature
How to Set Up a Chart of Accounts for a Small Business
Structure, numbering and level of detail for the list of accounts every report is built from.
- Table
Bookkeeper or Accountant: Who Does What
Which tasks usually sit with a bookkeeper, which with an accountant, and how to choose between them.
- Lexicon
Accounting Terms for Small-Business Owners
Thirty-odd bookkeeping and accounting terms defined in plain language for owners and office managers.
- Charter
How Close the Books Works
What the guides are, what they are not, and how figures, dates and corrections are handled.
Cash Runway Calculator: Months of Cash Left
Work out how many months your cash would last at the current rate of inflow and outflow.
Enter cash on hand, monthly money in and monthly money out to see your net cash change and how many months of runway the balance would cover.
Index of subjects
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Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping is the steady work underneath everything else: recording what came in and went out, putting it in the right account and checking it against the bank. When it slips for a month, the cleanup takes far longer than the upkeep would have.
Categorizing transactions and reconciling accounts through the month.
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Month-end close
The close is the short list of tasks that turns a month of transactions into numbers you can trust: reconciliations, accruals, adjustments and a review of the statements. Working through them in a fixed order keeps the figures tying out.
A close checklist and the accruals that trip people up.
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Cash flow
Profit and cash are different numbers. A business can show a profit and still run short because invoices are unpaid, stock is sitting on shelves or a tax payment is coming due.
Forecasting cash and spotting a crunch before it lands.
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Tax prep
Most of tax preparation is record keeping done early: the right documents in the right folder, with the books closed for the period. A tidy set of records usually saves a round of follow-up questions from your accountant.
Getting records ready for your accountant, and the deadlines that matter.
What you can count on
Accounting rules differ by place, by business structure and by year. The guides are written with that in plain view.
- One job per page
- Each guide covers a single task in the order you would do it, with the point where you should stop and ask your accountant marked.
- Your CPA decides
- Guides explain how bookkeeping is normally done. How your business treats an item, and what you file, is for your CPA.
- Stale figures stay out
- Tax rates, thresholds and limits change every year and differ by place, so we do not print them as current fact. Where a number matters, the page says who publishes it.
- A fixed page changes its date
- When a mistake is corrected, the date moves with it, so you can tell the page was touched.