QuickBooks 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 18. Performing End-of-Year Tasks

As if your typical workday isn’t hectic enough, the end of the year brings an assortment of additional bookkeeping and accounting tasks. As long as you’ve kept on top of your bookkeeping during the year, you can delegate most of these year-end tasks to QuickBooks with a few mouse clicks. (If you shrugged off your data entry during the year, even the mighty QuickBooks can’t help.) This chapter describes the tasks you have to perform at the end of each fiscal year (or other fiscal period, for that matter) and how to delegate them to QuickBooks. (The box on QuickBooks’ Year-End Guide describes a QuickBooks feature that helps you remember these various tasks.)

Checking for Problems

If you work with an accountant, you may never run a report from the Reports→Accountant & Taxes submenu unless your accountant asks you to. But if you prepare your own tax returns, running the following reports at the end of each year will help sniff out any problems:

• Run the Audit Trail report, especially if several people work on your company file, to watch for suspicious transactions, like deleted invoices or modifications to transactions after they’ve been reconciled. People make mistakes, and this report is also good for spotting inadvertent changes to transactions. QuickBooks initially includes only transactions entered or modified today, but you can choose a different date range to review changes since your last review (in the Audit Trail report’s window, choose ...