Solo Bentonville bookkeeping — answered personally, never a queue.
Bookkeeper — answered personally.
A printable quarterly and year-end checklist you can hand to your CPA, walk through together, and be done in an hour — because every line on it already came in clean.
Clean monthly close isn't a theoretical preference — it's the difference between an annual filing that takes an afternoon because the documents are already in the right place and one that takes three weeks because receipts, statements, 1099 prep, and last year's return all have to be hunted down at the same time. The checklist below is the same one I run on my own books and walk client books through every quarter. Bank and credit-card statements, categorized receipts, payroll summaries, the 1099 roster, prior-year return, mileage logs, depreciation, owner-question notes — grouped by what lands every quarter, what lands at quarter close, and what lands once a year at year-end handoff. The whole point is: each artifact has a known home, and the CPA walkthrough is mechanical, not archaeological.
Every-quarter cadence, quarter-end wrap-up, year-end pack — each item names what the document is, why it matters, and where it lives. Bring it to your CPA meeting and the questions go from “can you find this?” to “is this right?”.
The checklist
Each item is what the artifact is, why it matters at handoff, and where it lives in the books — the same shape as the page on your desk if you printed this out and handed it to your CPA.
Why this checklist works
Annual filings don’t go sideways because the CPA asks weird questions. They go sideways because the documents they need aren’t in one place, on the same schedule, with the same names the books use. The whole point of a clean monthly close is that by the time the year-end filing is due, everything the CPA is going to ask for is already filed under the name they’ll ask about — not huntable across an inbox, a shoebox, three portals, and the memory of one person who left in October.
The checklist isn’t a thing the CPA hands you the week before the filing. It’s a discipline the books follow every month. Run quarterly, the year-end handoff is an hour. Skip a quarter, it’s the audit you didn’t ask for. That’s the whole pitch.
Want this on your books?
Bring this page to the free consultation and we’ll walk it against your chart of accounts, your last month close, and your upcoming quarter — so by the time you hang up, you’ll know what’s already in the right place and what we’ll need to put there. No proposal, no follow-up pressure, no sales pitch.