Year-end close and CPA handoff pack

Every balance sheet account, not only the bank accounts that get attention all year, is reconciled through fiscal year end: loans against the lender's year-end statement, prepaid expenses against an amortization schedule, accrued liabilities against what was actually owed at year end. A fixed asset and depreciation schedule is reconciled to the capitalization policy already on file, so book depreciation is accurate before your preparer applies whatever tax depreciation method or election they choose. A trial balance is produced in the format your preparer's software typically expects, and a written memo accompanies it, flagging anything material or unusual in the year rather than leaving your preparer to find it independently.

Close starts as soon as the fiscal year ends, working through the same checklist used every month but with a full-year lens: every account reconciled, not a sample, and every prior-year comparison checked for a swing that needs explaining. Once the internal close is confirmed, we assemble the handoff pack itself, trial balance, fixed asset schedule, reconciliations, and memo, and deliver it directly to your CPA or tax preparer if you want us coordinating with them, or to you to forward if you would rather stay in the loop yourself. We stay available to answer any question the preparer raises while working from the pack, since we built the numbers they are now relying on.

Any US business whose outside CPA or tax preparer currently starts each return from a file that needs cleanup first, or whose books are maintained internally but nobody formally closes the year before handing it off. It fits especially well for a business using an outside tax preparer who is not the same firm doing the bookkeeping, since that preparer has no visibility into how the numbers were built and needs a reviewed file, not raw transaction data, to work efficiently.

The most frequent issue is a loan balance on the books that no longer matches the lender's actual year-end statement, often because a payment was misapplied to principal versus interest sometime during the year and never caught. The second is a prepaid expense, insurance or a annual software contract, expensed in full at payment instead of spread across the months it actually covers, which distorts which period the expense belongs to. The third is a large one-time transaction, an asset sale, a settlement, a PPP-era loan forgiveness still sitting on the books years later, booked to the wrong account or never cleared at all.

We run every account against the prior year as a standard part of close, not as an extra step someone requests. A swing worth flagging is not always obvious from the balance alone; a 15 percent revenue increase might be entirely normal for a growing business, but the same swing in a specific expense account with no clear driver is worth a sentence of explanation before the preparer or a lender's underwriter has to ask about it. This is one of the more valuable parts of the pack precisely because it is easy to skip and expensive to skip badly.

We work inside whatever platform already holds your books, QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite, or Sage Intacct, and export the trial balance and supporting schedules in the format your preparer's tax software typically ingests. Where your preparer uses a specific practice management or workpaper tool, we will match delivery to whatever integrates cleanly on their end rather than asking them to reformat what we send.

Year-end close and handoff pack pricing depends on entity count, transaction volume, and how clean the books already are heading into year end, since a file that has been reconciled monthly all year closes faster than one that has been left until December. Current pricing structure and where this sits relative to ongoing monthly plans is published on the pricing page, and your exact scope and fee are confirmed in writing before work starts.