Year-End Checklist for Small Businesses

Whether we like it or not, another year has come and gone. That means it’s time for small businesses to wrap up their 2018 books and accounting to prepare for another year. If you haven’t already, it’s time to wrap up the past year’s books and make sure your finances are all in order. The year-end process can be a bit overwhelming, especially for small business owners. To help you out, Tally Services has created a year-end checklist for small businesses to make sure you’re in great shape for 2019.

Our year-end checklist for small business owners is a simple guide to help you make sure you’ve not only taken care of your books, but have also done a few overall maintenance tasks to keep your business running in top shape. Furthermore, doing these tasks now will help you prepare for tax filings so it’s not a scramble at the last minute.

Year-End Checklist for Small Businesses

1. Get Your Books in Order: We say this all the time, but it’s true. If your books are out of order and incomplete, now is the time to get them straight. You must do this before filing taxes anyways, might as well be now before you’re crunched for time. If you have missing payments, work to collect those. If you have unpaid bills, get them in order and start paying them off. If you haven’t balanced your checkbook or made sure your finances are in order, now is the time. You’ll be so much better prepared for year-end tasks and taxes if your books are clean, organized, and up-to-date. 
2. Pull Your Reports: Now that your books are in order, there are many year-end reports you should run to get a better idea of the financial health of your business. These reports will give you an idea of where you’re at and will help you make decisions for the future. Pull these year-end reports if you haven’t yet:
   - Balance Sheet: This report is a basic summary of the financial health of your business. It shouldshow all of your assets, liabilities, and equity. It will tell you where your business is at financially at the moment and give you a snapshot of how things are going.
   - Income Statement: This report will give you an insight into the profitability of your business by showing you your current profit and loss, listing all of your current revenues and expenses.
   - Cash Flow: To better understand where the cash of the business goes, your cash flow statement will reconcile all of your inflow and outflow of cash from operating expenses, investing, and debts. This will give you a good idea of how much you have coming in versus how much you have going out, and where it goes.
3. Inventory: If you haven’t done this recently, it’s important to check your inventory levels and see what you sell most, what sits around too long, and how much you have invested in inventory assets.
   Once you have these reports, you can do a bit more digging to understand your profit margins, debt ratios, and the overall financial health of your business. You can use these numbers to make decisions about where your business should go in the future. 

4. Set Your Goals: Just like in your personal life, you should set yearly goals for your business. Goals can take a number of forms, and you can certainly have more than one. For some, your goals will be about the number of sales you’ll make or the number of new customers you’ll attract. For others, it might be the number of jobs you land or the number of products you build. Other goals might be more personnel-related – the number of employees you retain or the number of training opportunities your business provides. No matter what they look like, thinking about your 2019 goals is an important part of making 2019 a success.
   

5. Start Working on Your Taxes: Depending on what kind of business you run, your tax filings will be due soon. Once you get your books in order and finish pulling all your year-end reports, you might as well just get a jumpstart on getting your tax documents in order. The last thing you want to do is wait until the last minute. By doing it now, you’ll have plenty of time to get everything in order and avoid the last-minute tax scrambling that is so utterly stressful.
   

6. Back Up Your Files: This task isn’t particularly glamorous, but if you haven’t done it in a while, now is a great time to make sure all your company files – books, customer data, marketing materials, imagery, and more – are backed up in case your system goes down. One of the worst things that can happen to a business is to lose your important documents. Make sure your files are safe and backed up in case the worst-case scenario happens.
   

7. Ask for Help! If this list seems overwhelming and is giving you anxiety just by reading through it, it might be time to ask for help. By adding an accounting professional to your team or maybe even a CFO, you can get these big year-end tasks off your plate to better focus on what you’re good at – running your business!

Ready to rock 2019?! Tally Services is here to help! We’re your partner in making sure your books and accounting are in top shape to help you make the best decisions you can this year and prepare for tax season. Contact us to learn more about how we can help your business grow and adapt this year.