You can take steps now to make New Year's Day less worrisome. Doing some extra work in QuickBooks during December will ensure that you'll start 2016 ready to move ahead, rather than scrambling to see what you missed on January 2.
For example, did you instruct QuickBooks to "close your books" at the end of the year? QuickBooks will automatically make year-end adjustments if you entered December 31 as a closing date in Preferences. However, it's not required, and there are both advantages and disadvantages to doing so. We can help you decide if this is the best decision for your company.
Prior to this, though, there's another important task you should complete before the end of the year. It's common sense, but not everyone thinks of it during the December rush: Make sure you've entered all transactions and payments that should be included in your QuickBooks file for 2015.
You may have already been working with us on tax planning for the 2015 tax year. If you haven't, and you haven't been doing so on your own, you need to look at your incoming and outgoing funds for the year before it's over. Do you need to hold until 2016 some income and/or expenses that haven't been recorded until 2016? This kind of question really needs to be resolved now.
Figure 2: Time is short, but we may be able to help you make some decisions about carrying some 2015 income and/or expenses over to 2016 if it will help reduce your tax obligation.
And when you think you've entered everything but payments or transactions that may come in at the last minute (unless you're going to defer these until 2016), all accounts should be reconciled. QuickBooks makes it easy to do this regularly.
Figure 3: Before the end of December, you should do a final reconciliation of all accounts for 2015.
It will be painful to open QuickBooks on January 2 if you don't feel like you paid extra attention to your finances in December. We can help you ring in the New Year on a more confident note.