Guides

Handing your books to an accountant

If an accountant does your books and you still do the gathering, nobody ever gave you a list of what the gathering consists of. You work it out from the questions that come back.

These are written out properly, and they hold whether or not you ever use any software to do them.

→ What your accountant needs from you each month The six kinds of material, the rule that the bank statement is the spine and every document attaches to it, what to do about a line with no receipt, and the items that need a decision rather than a paper.
→ How to get your receipts together for bookkeeping The part that takes the evening. Receipts live in three places, only one of them is your inbox, and the billing portals are the expensive ones.
→ Is it safe to give a bookkeeping app your bank login? Anything that collects your documents has to reach your bank, your suppliers' portals and your mail. Where those credentials end up differs between a cloud service and something running on your own machine.
→ Do I need bookkeeping software if I have an accountant? Usually not — but which of three situations you are in decides it, and two of them want something other than us.
→ Is Booksmate the right tool for you? Sometimes yes. They fetch invoices from a list of suppliers you name, and do it well — so the question is whether naming them is the part you struggle with.

More coming

The next ones are per-supplier: where a particular company actually keeps its invoices, and how to get a year of them out without clicking through twelve months by hand. We write one only for a supplier we have really collected from, so they arrive at the speed of real months rather than all at once.

Or stop doing it by hand

It gathers the month for you.

Runs on your Mac. Pay what you decide, including nothing.

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