Datasheet

Book VII
Chapter 1
Administering
QuickBooks
473
Maintaining Good Accounting Controls
required for the annual tax return. Unfortunately, that distant relationship
with the accounting system means that business owners often don’t feel
much need to actively manage what happens with the accounting system.
In my opinion — er, an opinion based on more than 25 years of experi-
ence working as a CPA — this attitude is wrong. An accounting system
should be a tool that you use to better manage your business. And it can
be that. But if it’s going to be a tool for better managing your business,
you need to manage the system. In other words, I respectfully suggest
that you take responsibility for ensuring that employees are trained to do
the things that protect your accounting system (such as backing up the
data file) and that you ensure that they complete appropriate account-
ing procedures on a monthly and annual basis (such as sending out all
invoices, reconciling bank accounts, cleaning up messy transactions,
and so forth). I don’t think this management responsibility needs to be
a heavy one. You can rather easily make sure that people are doing the
sorts of things they are supposed to be doing by creating some simple
checklists. Table 1-1 shows a sample monthly accounting to-do list. Table
1-2 shows a sample annual accounting to-do list. You can use these as
starting points for constructing your own list of things that the accounting
clerk or office manager must do every month or at the end of every year.
Table 1-1 A Sample Monthly Accounting To-Do List
Data backed up and moved offsite
Bank accounts reconciled
All invoices, credit memos, statements out
Any suspense accounts cleaned up
Financial statements delivered
Exceptions reported (for example, overdue invoices, bills, purchase orders, under-
stocked inventory items)
Table 1-2 A Sample Annual Accounting To-Do List
Adjust trial balance
Burn CD with year-end numbers for permanent record
Consider cleaning up data files if they’re huge
Close year when really done