As a business owner, you may decide to put off activities you do not deem urgent because you have so many bookkeeping tasks on your plate. However, if certain tasks are left to pile up, a small business can experience cash shortages, inventory interruptions, and late payments.
You must complete specific bookkeeping tasks weekly, and developing a strategy that works for you can assist in making minor changes to strengthen the habits required to stay on top of these weekly tasks.
In this article, you’ll find a list of the most important bookkeeping tasks you need to complete each week.
Weekly Bookkeeping Tasks List
Bookkeeping activities give the necessary records and analysis to understand a company’s finances. While these weekly bookkeeping duties may appear intimidating, you can fulfill each with proper planning and timing.
Furthermore, some bookkeeping tasks must remain a priority whether you employ an in-house bookkeeper, outsource your chores, or manage the bookkeeping yourself. Here is the list of bookkeeping tasks you need to complete each week:
- Send invoices – One of the most important bookkeeping tasks
How often do you send your customers invoices? A business owner’s cash flow depends on getting paid on time. Therefore, you must prepare and deliver weekly invoices, not monthly ones. By doing this, the magnitude and frequency of late payments are decreased. However, your approach will be impacted by the kind of business you run and the volume of your clientele.
One step in arranging your books is to send out invoices and track payments. Include a due date and payment terms in your invoices, so customers know how and when to make payments. You should note the date you receive payments, not the day you record the payment.
- Pay your bills
Utility costs, rent, and invoices from other vendors may add up quickly for small businesses. Mark them in bold in your bookkeeping tasks checklist. Vendors appreciate timely payments, and paying your bills on time is another method to maintain a good reputation and manage your finances.
Although many bills have a monthly due date, some could have a closer due date. As a result, you must check your bills each week for inaccuracies and plan your payments accordingly. Paying your bills on time can benefit from select merchants’ early payment discounts and prevent late payment fines. Weekly bill recording also makes it simpler to determine whether your accounts have enough money. If you manage a large business, you might consider including this task in your regular bookkeeping practice.
- Categorize your transactions
To manage your finances, you must know where your company is spending money. Your needs and type of business will determine how you structure your payments. Tracking your expenditure is made simpler by categorizing every expense.
You might decide to include categories like:
- Utilities
- Travel
- Payroll
- Equipment
- Employee benefits
- Mortgage or rent payments
- Insurance
Categorizing your transactions and expenses will help you keep accurate records and make it easy to identify any mistakes. If you opt to deduct small business expenses when doing your taxes, doing this job once a week will save you time.
- Bank reconciliation
One crucial bookkeeping duty you must complete each week is bank account reconciliation. Nevertheless, it is typical for most business owners to reconcile their bank accounts once their account statements are accessible, typically at the end of the month.
To do so, however, is a common mistake. Consider this: If your account closes on the 25th of every month and your paper statement isn’t mailed until the following week, 45 days will have gone from your earliest transaction when it gets to your office.
In 45 days, a lot can happen in your business, and if something is wrong, you don’t want to wait a month to fix it. Balancing your bank accounts weekly ensures that no errors or inaccuracies go unreported for more than seven days.
- Make deposits
Businesses should make at least weekly deposits. However, you must make daily deposits if you run a cash-based firm and get cash payments regularly. Making regular deposits allows you to keep available funds and records up to date. On the other hand, mobile deposits may be sufficient to handle your cash inflow and save you a trip to the bank if you receive predominantly electronic payments.
- Review your employee’s timesheets
Employee timesheets should be examined weekly, even if some organizations run payroll bi-weekly or bi-monthly. Additionally, by doing this weekly, you gain a better understanding of your future payroll obligations. It also assists you in identifying any unlawful hours on your employees’ timecards.
For example, if you have staff working overtime during a specific week, you must pay for those extra salaries whether you authorize it or not. However, by analyzing your employees’ weekly timesheets, you may stop those excess hours the next week and properly schedule everyone.
However, if you don’t review the time sheets every two weeks, you’ll have to pay for those unauthorized hours.
- Create journal entries
A general journal entry should include all financial transactions conducted by your company. Maintaining this journal will give a continuous record of your company’s transactions. Business journal entries typically adhere to the double-entry accounting technique, in which every transaction necessitates balancing debits and credits across accounts.
There are five kinds of accounts in this system:
- Shareholders’ equity
- Revenue
- Assets
- Liabilities
- Expenses
For example, if your company acquires a point-of-sale (POS) system, you must debit your cash accounts (assets) and credit your equipment account (assets) for the transaction.
- Scan documents and receipts
Make sure to save all of your bookkeeping records and receipts. The simplest method is to scan each document and submit it to a cloud-based storage solution. While doing this task daily may be unnecessary, doing it monthly may also be ineffective as it leaves too much time for items to be misplaced. The simplest method is to scan each document and submit it to a cloud-based storage solution.
Paying an invoice at the beginning of the month but scanning and uploading the receipt at the end of the month can lead to disorganization. As a result, you should consider doing this work once a week, which is a more effective pattern.
If you upload your papers to a computer rather than a cloud-based solution, make sure to back up your hard drive at least weekly, if not daily. You must devise and stick to a plan that works for you.
- Review your inventory
If you own a small business that sells commodities, you must maintain track of your inventory flow. Weekly inventory evaluations assist you in determining what products you need to order, preventing theft, and informing employees when an item is back in stock to prevent losing out on a possible purchase.
Some components of inventory evaluation are more advantageous to your organization when performed more frequently than once a week. For example, recording receipts and inventory sales should be daily duties for businesses with a high sales volume or perishable products.
When you use inventory management software that is integrated with your bookkeeping software, it can save you a lot of time and confusion. In addition, some POS systems include inventory management software. However, you can execute this task manually. Even if you employ technology to manage your inventory, you’ll almost certainly need to order new goods manually.
- Run reports – One of the most important bookkeepers daily tasks
Financial reports must be created as part of your company’s bookkeeping tasks. While some of these reports can be completed monthly, others must be completed weekly.
You can run the following reports weekly:
- Accounts receivable show how much money you owe to small firms. Keeping track of receivable accounts weekly will assist your company in quickly following up on late payments.
- A sales report is helpful in making short-term decisions since it analyses how much of each product your company sells each week.
On the other hand, there are specific financial reports you should run monthly:
- A balance sheet is a statement that reports your company’s resources, liabilities, and property value at a certain point in time to provide a picture of its finances. A balance sheet can indicate a company’s net worth and debt-to-asset ratio at a glance.
- The profit and loss statement reveals how much your company generated after deducting all of its expenses. Regularly running a profit and loss statement provides an accurate view of your company’s bottom line because most of its expenses, such as rent or utilities, are paid monthly.
- A cash flow statement shows how well your business manages its cash flow, which can be considered its ability to generate cash to cover its expenses and pay its debt.
Why Do You Need a Bookkeeping Checklist?
There are various reasons why your company requires a bookkeeping checklist. Among them are the following:
- It aids in the organization of your business finances because you know what you’re required to accomplish and when you need to do it.
- A booking checklist can help guarantee that nothing falls through the cracks and that you complete all of your business’s bookkeeping tasks.
- If you intend to delegate bookkeeping duties to someone else, a bookkeeping checklist may be essential. It makes it simple to coach and onboard someone else to take over your company’s bookkeeping and provides them with a detailed list of tasks.
Monthly Bookkeeping Tasks for Your Business.
In addition to the weekly bookkeeping duties you must complete, below are a few examples of monthly tasks you must perform:
- Send invoice reminders
Knowing when and if you need to issue a reminder for past due payments will depend on how well you manage your accounts receivable. It is reasonable to get in touch with your clients and consumers monthly to provide them with an initial reminder about payments. However, you might need to follow up more regularly if the payment is severely overdue and you’ve already issued them a reminder.
- Ensure payroll taxes are filed
Depending on your payroll schedule, running payroll may be a weekly, biweekly, or monthly bookkeeping process. However, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employment tax payment is a monthly obligation for most small firms. Additionally, small businesses that reported less than $50,000 in taxes during the previous lookback period are required to make monthly payments, according to IRS publication 15. And companies that report more than $50,000 must pay the IRS semi-monthly deposits.
- Review your balance sheets
Reviewing your balance sheets at the end of the month can help you understand how well your company performed for the month and identify any areas that need improvement by comparing them to previous months’ or years’ performance.
- Track your budgets
Even though creating budgets for your expenses, projects, and tasks may not be difficult, following through with them may be challenging. The best way to reduce variances in your budget is to check for them each month and make corrections where needed.
- Backup your data
You may need to manually back up your financial data if you don’t use cloud-based accounting software that regularly backs up your data. This manual backup will give you confidence that your data won’t be lost in the event of hardware failure or file corruption. Accessing a previous version of your data if you accidentally delete something is another advantage of manually backing up your data. Additionally, it enables you to spot problems that may be corrected more quickly by going back a few days and entering the data again rather than making big changes.
- Review your bank and credit card statement
Reviewing your bank and credit card statements monthly is important because it allows you to determine whether or not you have been victimized by fraud. And you also want to ensure that your reconciliations are done promptly and correctly.
How To Manage Your Bookkeeping Tasks
Even though running your company in every aspect is challenging, automating and streamlining your bookkeeping activities with accounting software can help you save time and stress. Even though accounting software typically has a high price tag, it can help your firm succeed in the long run by assuring tax compliance and giving you real-time financial intelligence.
You have a huge selection of accounting software to pick from. However, your budget, demands, desired features, and capacity to interact with other business software like payroll or HR applications will determine which option is ideal for you.
Consider the following examples of accounting software for your company:
- FreshBooks is great for small businesses that need to save time on invoices, expense management, and proposal creation.
- QuickBooks Online is ideal for small businesses seeking a comprehensive accounting solution.
- Zoho Books is accounting software for organizations that require robust online accounting, outstanding mobile apps, and exceptional invoicing.
- ZipBooks is ideal for small businesses looking for cost-effective accounting software. It is also perfect for small business owners with less accounting knowledge.
- Wave accounting software is suitable for organizations with a limited budget requiring strong accounting skills.
- Sage Business Cloud accounting software is ideal for small enterprises with many employees.
- Xero is ideal for companies that require complex accounting functionality.
If you run a small business and you’re on a tight budget, you can use an Excel spreadsheet to manage your expenses, but it is not advisable in the long run. Nowadays, accounting software is advanced, but you can handle your books independently even if you don’t have any experience.
Does Bookkeeping Take a Long Time?
The time it takes to accomplish your bookkeeping tasks is determined by the nature of your firm and its activities. For example, if you run a retail business or one with multiple daily transactions, you may have more bookkeeping than a consulting firm with fewer clients. Also, if you’re manually managing your books, it may take you longer compared to using accounting software.
Should You Hire a Bookkeeper? – Bookkeeper daily tasks
The size and complexity of your firm will influence whether you should hire a bookkeeper or do your bookkeeping. On the other hand, a developing business may find it more beneficial to engage a bookkeeper so that you may focus on other elements of the business.
Outsourced bookkeepers can help you save time and money while collecting critical financial data for your organization. Access to a service accounting staff dedicated to your company’s safety and success will aid in integrating the essential infrastructure, offering scalability and automation.
Conclusion
The duties of a small business bookkeeper are varied, and depending on your business type and activities, some of these tasks can be completed monthly, quarterly, or annually. For your business to succeed, however, certain tasks must be completed weekly. It may be difficult for a business owner to manage these obligations independently. Nonetheless, you can utilize some of the suggestions in this article to help speed up your approach. You could also use accounting software or employ a bookkeeper. Keeping track of your bookkeeping activities allows you to perform other tasks on time, such as paying bills and sending out invoices. It will also save time looking up particular transactions and help you avoid tax fines.
