End of Financial Year Checklist

You’ve entered everything in your accounting system and are ready to send it to the accountant for end of year. What checks should you make first? Follow our step-by-step guide and you won’t miss a beat.

Accounting software lets you record transactions in the 2017 year without having to finish recording transactions in the old year. Don’t stop entering sales, purchases, doing bank feeds and other everyday stuff in the new year, and take a few weeks to make sure that all transactions are spot on in the old year. We suggest you get on with the jobs below early – the longer you leave it the more you forget what happened.

1. Enter every transaction up to the last day of the financial year (31/03/16)
2. Reconcile all your bank, credit card HP & loan accounts – deal to any ‘stale’ entries (reverse them, don’t delete them). Nothing should be left unreconciled except cheques (if you still use them).
3. Reconcile your PAYE account to match your payroll software. The balance at year end is what you paid in April.
4. Run the General Ledger detail report with a view to finding coding errors. Check all coding for consistency and correctness.
5. Run the GST reports again for the previous 12 months and check they still agree to that filed. You can still amend a future GST return.
6. Run the Receivables Reconciliation report at 31/3/16 and check the debtors. Bad debts need to be written off at 31/3/16. The out-of-balance should be $0
7. Run the Payables Receivables Reconciliation report and check you have statements/invoices for each balance. The out-of-balance should be $0
8. If you have stock run the Inventory Reconciliation report. Make inventory adjustments to correct the list (code to a cost of sale account)
9. Run your Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet report for the last 12 months – does it make sense?
10. Supply the accountant with all the information they need (best to invite them to use your accounting program so they can enter the year-end entries such as depreciation and tax directly)

Once the alignment journal is entered:

1. Do a final backup and label it “Company_name-2016.myox”
2. Open your file and choose [File] Close a Year. Read each screen carefully before clicking Continue. All entries in your file should be retained forever so you can look back anytime! Some programs allow you to roll back if necessary.
3. Yeah!… you’re done.

Final note: If some of these points fall into the too-hard-basket, then call us. We can sort your out-of-balances and do the checking for you plus enter the alignment journal if your accountant hasn’t provided one.