The five reports to send your accountant at year end

Year-end with an accountant is usually a slow exchange of emails. They ask for something, you find it a few days later, they look at it, a question arises, and three weeks pass on work that involved perhaps four hours of anyone's attention.

Almost all of that is avoidable by sending a complete pack up front. Five documents and a list of questions covers what nearly every small business engagement needs.

One: the trial balance

Every account with its closing balance. This is the document your accountant actually works from — the P&L and balance sheet are views of it — and sending it first saves the opening exchange entirely.

Export it after you have finished your own review, not before. A trial balance with an unreconciled bank account or a populated suspense account just generates the questions you were trying to avoid.

Two: P&L and balance sheet, monthly

Not the annual single-column version — the twelve-column monthly one. It lets them spot a cost that appears eleven times and vanishes once, or revenue in a month with no matching activity, in about ninety seconds.

That pattern-spotting is most of what they are looking for, and giving them the shape that makes it easy is worth more than any amount of tidying.

Three: the reconciliations

Year-end statements for every bank account, credit card and loan, plus your reconciliation reports. Loan statements matter more than people expect: the split between principal and interest is one of the most commonly mis-posted items in small business books, and only the lender statement settles it.

Four: the supporting schedules

• A/R and A/P aging at year end, with anything you consider uncollectible flagged.
• Inventory count with the valuation basis, and any write-downs noted.
• Fixed asset additions and disposals — what you bought, when it was placed in service, what it cost, and what left.
• Payroll year-end summary from your provider, plus any contractor payments that need reporting.

Five: the list of things you are unsure about

This is the one nobody sends and the one that saves the most time. Every set of books has a handful of judgment calls the owner made and is not confident about: an equipment purchase that might be capital, an owner transfer that might be a distribution, a customer deposit sitting in revenue.

Flag them yourself, in a short list, with what you did and why. Your accountant would have found most of them anyway — but they would have found them one at a time, each generating an email, each waiting on your reply.

Send it as one package

The compounding cost of year-end is context switching. Every partial submission means someone re-opening a file, re-reading where they got to, and re-asking a question they had already parked.

One complete package with the questions attached lets the work be done in a single sitting. It routinely turns three weeks into a few days, and because most firms bill by time, it usually costs less as well.