If you're a small business owner, there's a two-month window right now that decides how your January goes: the stretch between today and December 31st. Spend it cleaning up your books, and tax season is just paperwork. Ignore it, and you'll spend January and February scrambling to reconstruct a year's worth of transactions while your accountant waits.
Here are five things worth doing right now — before the holidays eat your calendar.
1. Reconcile everything, not just your main account. It's easy to keep your primary checking account current and let a credit card or a second account slide. Pull up every account tied to the business and make sure it's reconciled through the latest statement. Gaps here are the single biggest reason year-end close takes longer than it should.
2. Clear out "uncategorized." If you've been tossing transactions into an uncategorized bucket "to deal with later," later is now. Every transaction should land in a real category — it's the difference between a profit & loss statement that tells you something useful and one that's just a guess.
3. Get your contractor paperwork in order. If you paid any contractor $600 or more this year, you need a W-9 on file and you'll owe them a 1099-NEC by January 31st. Chasing down a contractor's tax ID in late January is a lot harder than asking for it in November.
4. Pull together your deduction documentation. Equipment purchases, mileage logs, home office expenses, retirement contributions — these only help you if you can actually substantiate them. Round up the paperwork now, while you still remember what it was for.
5. Know your number before you're asked for it. Run a year-end P&L and estimate your tax liability before your accountant does. It gives you time to make a smart Q4 move — an equipment purchase, a retirement contribution — instead of finding out what you owe after it's too late to do anything about it.
Don't want to do this alone?
I put all of this — plus a few things that don't make a good blog list — into a free, printable Year-End Tax Prep Checklist. It's the same list I run through with my own bookkeeping clients every November.
[Download the free Year-End Tax Prep Checklist ]
Or, if you'd rather hand the whole thing off, Moikeish Business Solutions handles bookkeeping and admin for small businesses across Palm Beach County and virtually. [Book a free consult]
