What your bookkeeper needs from you each month

Good bookkeeping is mostly automatic these days. Bank feeds bring transactions in on their own, software categorizes the common ones, and a bookkeeper closes the month. But there is a small amount of input only you can give, and the smoother that input is, the cleaner your books end up. Here is what we actually need from you each month.

A place to ask questions.

Most months, there are a few transactions we cannot identify with certainty. A deposit with no memo, a charge to a vendor you do not recognize, a transfer between accounts that could go two ways. Instead of emailing you about each one, we collect them into one list and send it once a month. A quick reply, usually a few minutes, sorts them out.

Access that stays connected.

Bank feeds work only when they stay connected. If a feed drops, or a bank asks you to reauthorize, the transactions stop flowing. We will tell you when something disconnects, but reauthorizing it is something only the account owner can do. Keeping the feeds live is the one thing that keeps the monthly routine on schedule.

Receipts or memos for cash heavy spending.

For most transactions the bank description is enough. For a few, it is not. If you pay a vendor in cash, or buy something where the bank line says only "debit card purchase," a quick note or a saved receipt tells us what it was. You do not need to keep every receipt, just the ones the bank description does not explain.

A heads up on anything unusual.

If you took out a loan, bought equipment, started a new product line, or moved money for a reason, a one line note helps us categorize it correctly the first time. We do not need the full story, just enough to know which account it belongs in. The earlier you mention it, the less likely it becomes a "what was this?" question later.

That is, honestly, most of it. We do not need you to categorize transactions, reconcile the bank, or run the reports. The routine is designed so that the bookkeeper does the bookkeeping and you answer the occasional question. The months where the input is light are the months where the books close on time and the reports are clean.

If you are the kind of owner who would rather hand over the whole file and not think about it, that works too. We can work from the bank feeds and send the question list when we hit something we cannot place. The only thing we cannot do is guess on the ones that matter. A wrong category for a big purchase is worse than a short email asking which account it belongs in.

Most clients settle into a rhythm within a month or two. The first month has more questions while we learn the business. After that, the monthly list gets short, and "close the books" becomes something that happens in the background while you run the business.