Cleanup

Tax-Ready Bookkeeping Checklist for Year-End

Tax-ready books are organized enough that your CPA can prepare the return without a pile of questions or a rushed cleanup in March. Perfect isn’t the goal.

The year-end checklist

1. Bring reconciliations current. Bank and credit card accounts, every month of the year. Unreconciled balances make everything else hard to trust, and they’re the first thing a preparer asks about. My bank reconciliation guide covers the routine.
2. Review owner and loan activity. Owner draws, contributions, transfers between accounts, and loan payments are the most common confusion spots in small business files. Sort them now so they don’t turn into a longer conversation with your CPA in March.
3. Resolve uncategorized items. Big transactions sitting in vague buckets cause the most trouble at tax time. Handle those first. A few small stragglers won’t hurt you.
4. Collect W-9s and prepare 1099s. If you paid subcontractors or other vendors who need a 1099, gather the W-9s before the January rush. I prepare and e-file 1099s for clients as an added service, billed per form, and that job goes a lot smoother when the W-9s came in early. My 1099 guide for 2026 covers the new $2,000 threshold and the February 1 deadline.
5. Check that every payroll run is in the books. Your payroll provider runs payroll. Each run still needs to be recorded in QuickBooks and reconciled against the bank, and the year-end payroll summaries should agree with what the books show.
6. Organize the supporting documents. Statements, records for major purchases, loan documents, payroll summaries if you have employees, and last year’s return.
7. Run and review the key reports. Read the Profit and Loss and the Balance Sheet and ask whether they match the year you actually had. Ask now, not in April.
8. Write down what to fix for next year. Every tax season shows you a weak spot: receipts were hard to find, the monthly close never happened, the cleanup took too long. Change the routine while it’s fresh.

If the books are too far behind for this list

Then it’s a rebuild, not a year-end tidy, and that is a specialty of mine. My cleanup service for books that are behind rebuilds them period by period until you’re current and tax-ready, with a fixed price in writing after a free review. If you’re more than a year behind, please don’t be embarrassed to call, because that’s the work I enjoy most. The catch-up guide shows how I break the work into stages.

I’m a bookkeeper, not a tax preparer or attorney. For tax and legal questions, confirm the details with your CPA. I keep the books that make their job easier.