Returning Value Blog

Performing a mid-year QuickBooks® cleanup is a smart habit that small business owners and bookkeepers can adopt to stay ahead of their financial responsibilities. Waiting until year end to review your accounting records can lead to unnecessary stress, missed deductions and preventable errors.

The month-end close is a pain point for many small to midsize businesses. While internal accounting teams often aim to wrap up the close within three days, a recent survey found that half the respondents actually take six days or longer to close the books. What can your organization do to help streamline this process? Leveraging cloud-based technology tools like QuickBooks® can be a game changer.

Understanding your business’s financial health is essential for long-term success. QuickBooks® offers a powerful reporting tool suite that can provide critical insights to support decision-making and help you comply with accounting and tax rules.

Accurate financial records help business owners manage cash flow, tax obligations, and strategic planning. QuickBooks® is one of the most widely used bookkeeping software solutions for small and midsize businesses, offering a comprehensive suite of tools designed to simplify financial management and support business growth.

In a business world marked by uncertainty, month-end and year-end accounting challenges have remained a constant. The resolution of the recent political season and the Federal Reserve’s lowering of interest rates may have given organizations an overall renewed sense of optimism and the momentum to tackle those challenges. However, the complexity and volume of financial tasks during these periods can overwhelm even the most seasoned accounting teams, placing intense pressure on those that may lack the necessary resources. In this article, we explore how outsourcing accounting functions may provide a viable way to alleviate that pressure. 

How often do you reconcile your company’s internal financial records against your bank statements? Bank reconciliations are an essential internal control procedure that busy owners and managers sometimes overlook or neglect. Here’s why it pays to perform them regularly.

A chart of accounts is the foundation of accurate financial reporting, so it needs to be set up correctly. A disorganized chart or one that lumps transactions into broad, undefined “buckets” of data can make it difficult for management to evaluate financial performance and identify unmet customer needs — or open the door to accounting errors and fraud. Here’s some guidance on how to create a robust chart that’s right for your situation.

Running a closely held business is challenging. Owners usually prioritize core business operations — such as managing employees, serving customers, and bringing in new sales — over tedious bookkeeping tasks. Plus, the accounting rules can be overwhelming.

There are currently more than 33 million small businesses in the United States, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.To succeed in today’s competitive markets, it’s essential for your business organization to have accurate books and records. 

Any recordkeeping system that suits you and your company and clearly shows your income and expenses is OK with the IRS. It's the business you're in that affects the type of records you need to keep for federal tax purposes.