Get Organized for Tax Season In 3 Simple Steps
Pre-work planning helps to lessen the burden of the data entry if you're a little behind on your bookkeeping and ready to get caught up. There are two main reasons to gather up all your financial documents – First, having them on hand will make doing your bookkeeping and taxes a lot easier. Second, if the government decides you’re the lucky subject of an audit, you’ll need them ready and organized to back up your numbers.
I highly recommend utilizing accounting/bookkeeping software that will allow you to upload digital copies of your receipts and attach them directly to the transaction. This way, there is never any doubt as to where to find the needed proof of a transaction–it's right there in your records! But if this option is not possible for you right now, I've outlined 3 steps below to get your files in order to help you be tax ready.
Set up a physical file system to organize your financial documents. Our first step is to create a folder system for organizing papers. You probably have physical (printed) paperwork lying around, and a lot on the computer too. The goal is to get all your paperwork sorted in such a way as to make entering all your transactions easier later on.
Set up a virtual folder system to organize your digital documents. For your digital receipts, emails, and all the stuff on your computer, I suggest a similar system but in virtual form. Create monthly folders with expense categories as sub-folders within each month. As you find receipts and important financial files on your computer, you can move them to these folders. You can “print to PDF” any emails that you want to save as well. It’s a good idea to save these folders to your Google Drive, iCloud, or some cloud-based system in case your computer hard drive ever fails.
Print copies of all your bank statements and file them. You might’ve been shoving all your receipts into that hypothetical shoebox over the course of the year, or they might just be all over the place. Worse case scenario – you haven’t been purposely holding onto any receipts. What’s the best way to go back and remember what you spent your biz money on? If you weren’t saving those receipts as you go, I’ve got a suggestion – log into your business bank account, credit card account, and possibly PayPal (if that applies), and go through your transactions. Printing monthly statements from all of these accounts creates easy documentation to enter your transactions later on.
Now that all your papers are organized, it will be that much easier to do the dirty work of actually entering all those transactions! If you need help breaking down the work of entering all these items into your financial books, I am happy to assist you. Schedule a consultation with me today!