How to Process for Closing Out Books Each Month

have you been wondering what is the proper process for month end is there something i should be checking or am i good to go well you are in the right place if we've never met before hi i'm candice camper and i love to help both business owners and bookkeepers create confidence and simplicity within quickbooks so today's video is all about what is the month in process i do have a pdf that you can always get access to at canvascamper.com forward slash month end but we're going to be jumping in and looking at them step by step um the most important areas to be checking at the end of your month so come look over my shoulder let's jump into quickbooks so when you're in here a couple things the first thing that you want to be looking at is what's going on with your accounts receivable what is going on with your accounts payable so let's look for first at accounts receivable so why do we check accounts people what is the purpose of it remember that there are three ways to track your income quickbooks and if you are using create invoices then you have what's called accounts receivable it's a way for you to track who is going to pay you later the reason this is so important is it's cash flow right like who owes you when is it going to come in and then in a minute we'll be talking about accounts payable which is who do you owe and when do you owe it by so when you go in you can look at customers receivables under reports i will be showing the online in a moment and you can do either aging summary or detail summary is going to be exactly that it's more summarized it's going to be your customers names are they current how many days out this is a sample file so it's further out then most likely yours is hopefully you can also look at the details or there's one extra little bonus uh report that i'll teach you which is the open invoices what i love about this one is it's by customers and then what invoices are open now can you go in and look at their exact inside of the customer center yes you can look at them there as well let's go look at the online version and let's go under reports you can type it in if you want or you can scroll down and you'll see these are different sections who owes you is going to be your accounts receivable if you star it it will then populate up here under your favorites you've probably heard me talk about that in a prior video so you can go under accounts receivable aging summary or detail whichever one you want you also have open invoices here as well there you go so if you're not already and you use invoices which for online users is going to be right here you definitely want to be checking this to make sure everything is accurate so that's the first thing that we uncheck number two we want to go in and we want to check our vendors accounts payable so just as customers is cash flow of who as i said owes you and vendors is going to be who do you owe now this is a two-step process i don't recommend it for every business it depends what you have going on but if you are using interbills then you can come in here and use under vendors accounts payable summary to see who you owe and how far out it is to help you manage your what cash flow exactly if you're an online user you can go under reports you can type it in up here under the search or you can scroll down to what you owe and you can look at your accounts payable aging detail or summary whichever one so you can see who do you owe and how far out before you have to pay them as i said this is to manage your cash flow i also really like the unpaid bills report as well because it's going to show you just like the open invoices unpaid bills so go ahead and check those reports out let me know know down below in the comments which of these reports do you love the most i love teaching reports it's one things i teach inside comments quickbooks um just because you really want to be able to manage your business right that's the whole point of all these reports why use quickbooks if you're not using it as a tool for your business wouldn't you agree all right so we checked customers and payables so receivables and payables the next thing that i like for you to check is i want you to go in and if you have petty cash so this is where you have a cash till or you have some cash on hand you want to go in and make sure that whatever the balance is if it's supposed to be five hundred dollars a thousand like whatever it is for your business but that is staying up to date that all the receipts have been entered that everything is accurate and then verified if you use online yours is going to be if you want to look for your chart of accounts it's here under accounting chart accounts you want to set this up as a bank account and you would have it here and you'd go in and you'd verify that everything's been entered properly this is actually one of the better ways to enter in like cash receipts to make sure you have where you spent it and where it went for tracking purposes next you want to be checking and reconciling your bank accounts whether that's checking savings whatever you have every single month you want to match it the statement to your quickbooks okay let me know below if you are reconciling both on desktop and online and don't forget i have this entire checklist that if you're like oh i heard her what she said but i like this in checklist you can get the pdf version of it kidscamper.com forward slash month end you can come in here and you want to just be verified and you can find on your online your reconciliation there's a few different ways but you can click here and go in and look at it now remember reconciliation is comparing what happened at the bank to what happened in quickbooks so you're going to go ahead and click on right installation and you just verify what happened make sure you're doing that every single month also on your credit card so bank accounts credit cards any type of account that you have to make sure that it matches i also recommend actually setting up paypal as its own bank account and reconciling it so that you know exactly where that money went because paypal is typically used like an actual bank account so whether you're desktop or online you want to be doing that okay so make sure you're setting up paypal has a bank account you also want to be verified and reconciling your loans either quarterly or yearly to make sure why why does that matter because you want to break down your principal and interest so that when you go to file your taxes you're writing off if the interest is a business expense and off on your taxes right okay next we have on our list it's also on your pdf taxes accrued taxes so there are different kinds of taxes that you can get with quickbooks you can have payroll taxes meaning you process your payroll inside quickbooks and you come in here and you pay it or you might have sales tax right so that says don't forget to pay your sales tax now i will give you a couple tips one for payroll if you pay at the end of the month make sure you've processed your payroll and then pay your taxes and then if it's a quarterly month you want to make sure that you've paid your taxes before you file your quarter lease why is that so that it shows all of your payments when you go to follow your quarterly so process your payroll pay your payroll taxes on a quarterly make sure that's all happened before you file your court lease why do i say that because i haven't always done that and i found it so much easier so make sure you're doing that and if you are an online user your payroll is going to be here for processing payroll your taxes are going to be here under taxes if you are processing payroll this is a sample file that can happen in here but your payroll taxes will be here as well as your sales tax you need to process these properly because if you try to process them as a normal payment in quickbooks not these types of payments it won't actually work properly or report properly as well so make sure you are doing that next you want to check in with your clients and make sure there's nothing that they have on hand that they haven't told you about if you're tracking inventory that you've gone in and done your inventory tracking for the month for the quarter of the year depending on when you do it um as well as do they have any cash receipts did they make any purchases that you need to get the paperwork whether it's real estate there's a hud one whether they bought a piece of like um equipment all those things you want to be keeping for two reasons one you may owe sales tax if you didn't pay it depending on what state you're in and two you're going to want to have that to enter into your quickbooks because in a minute we're going to talk about reports and you want to make sure you have it so that when you go see your tax threshold and they want to know what was the date of service that you put that equipment in when did that happen so if you have this little checklist and you do it monthly it's going to make it so much easier than if you wait till the end of the year right because we forget what we did sometimes two months ago so you want to make sure that you're doing this all right then you're going to want to go in and two more things that we're going to talk about you want to look at your profit and loss if you're not familiar with your problem laws i'd highly recommend coming to my customizing quickbooks workshop you can go to canscanford.com to look at that but you're going to want to look at last month in the sample file i don't have it but you can also look at this year last year all that stuff year to date i talk about those types of things in my free training so i highly recommend checking it out if you're not comfortable or if when you do pull your report you don't feel like it was designed for you you don't feel like you really understand it this is the workshop i recommend that you take and if you are an online user you're going to want to make sure that when you come in here to your reports you can always favor them don't forget so these are at the top you can always scroll down to look at the business overview and you'll see the profit and loss is right there so what is a profit loss it has your income minus your expenses tells you did you have a profit for whatever period of time you selected or a loss okay if it's a negative number it's a loss so that's one report and then the other report we'll pull it here first while we're in here is the balance sheet the balance sheet fills in the gaps so income expense is only a portion of the equation in accounting the rest of it is also going to be your assets liability owner's equity so you go in here we talked about like where do your bank accounts sit right we verified that do we have our fixed assets did we add in what we purchased we talked about that as well do we owe accounts payable member we checked our bills or see if you owed and if they're accurate you're verifying your credit card you're verifying your payroll liabilities your sales tax and all your loans that's everything here and then the last piece of your balance sheet is going to be your equity your retained earnings i actually have a video on that as well i also linked in the pdf some of the other videos that i have like on e-pay and things like that if you need them so don't forget to grab the pdf the other thing that i would say is closing date so this is actually something i get asked often let me show you before i do how to pull the balance sheet for desktop users it's going to be right here and see same thing same information on this one now closing date this is actually something i get asked often do i have to close it or not quickbooks will do your closing entry at the end of your accounting period meaning if your calendar year it's going to be december if you're a fiscal year and you end mid year it'll do a closing entry for you but there is one thing you can do in quickbooks i have a tutorial video that will give you step by step and i'll show you a little quick sneak peek it's called the closed set closing date which is just where you set a period of time where you can't go back and enter transactions before this is great to do at the end of the year after you've filed your taxes all transactions have been entered so that way nobody can go back and change anything because you want your profit loss to match what you filed in the previous years so that everybody get audited and it just makes life easier you can also choose to do this throughout the months as you close them as well so if you're looking for the video for both desktop or online i'll link it here also put the link inside of the pdf let me know did this video help you do you feel like you have all the pieces you need um to close your books now you know what you could be looking at depending on what features and functions you are using quickbooks if i miss anything that you're doing will you let me know below i would love to see it share with us any of your brilliant things that you do on a regular basis if you're new here don't forget to subscribe feel free to like this video if it has helped you share it with anybody that you know that is a quickbooks user who could use this video and if you want to join me on my workshop we'll help you customize your quickbooks don't forget to save your seat because we have some live classes coming up canvascamper.comforwardslash workshop thank you so much for being part of my community um you can always watch this video again if you want to see these tips have a great day talk to you soon bye

Channel: Candus Kampfer

Views: 23,704

Keywords: candus kampfer quickbooks, candus kampfer, The process to closing out books each month, the step by step process to closing out books each month, how to close books in quickbooks, how to close books in quickbooks online, how to close books in qbo, how to close books monthly, how to close books in quickbooks desktop, quickbooks online 2022, quickbooks online for dummies, candus kampfer quickbooks online

Id: uaHUjCWILTM

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022