Playbooks · Year-end
What decides the pace of a year-end is what you have before it starts.
The complexity of the business rarely explains why one year-end takes an afternoon and another takes a week. Five inputs usually do. Check them before anything gets coded.
Five inputs
Get these first, code second.
1. The whole period, in one file
A single export covering the full accounting period is one thing to check for gaps. Twelve monthly exports are twelve, and the gap between two of them is the classic place a fortnight of transactions goes missing without anyone noticing until the bank won’t reconcile.
2. Opening balances, sourced
Last year’s closing figures, a rolled-forward locked period, or a written confirmation from wherever they’re coming from. An opening balance nobody can point to a source for is the single most common reason a trial balance disagrees with itself three weeks in.
3. A list of the client’s own accounts
Money moving between a current account and a savings account, or between a personal and business account the client actually uses for the business, isn’t income or expenditure. Knowing which accounts belong to the same client before coding starts stops transfers inflating turnover.
4. VAT registration and scheme, confirmed
Whether the client is VAT-registered, and on what scheme, decides how every coded line is treated for VAT. Confirming it once at the start is cheaper than re-treating a year of transactions after finding out partway through.
5. What the bank can’t tell you
Cash takings that never touched the account, and anything that needs a judgement call about intent rather than a rule: drawings versus a genuine cost, a loan versus a sale. Flag these as questions for the client early; they’re the one part of a year-end a statement alone can’t answer.
Before you code a single line
Three checks, a couple of minutes each.
Confirm the date range
Check the first and last transaction dates match the accounting period, and that day and month are the way round you expect. A UK export read as US-formatted moves transactions across a year end without a single number looking wrong.
Check a payment you recognise
Find a payment you know went out, such as rent or a regular supplier, and confirm its sign matches your reading of the file. That single check catches books that balance perfectly while describing the opposite of what happened.
Tie the opening balance to its source
Before coding a single transaction, confirm the opening balance you’re starting from matches whatever document it came from. It’s a two-minute check now, or a multi-day reconciliation hunt in three weeks.
If the checks above are the part that’s actually slow, the year-end bookkeeping page covers how Entrio handles the import, the opening balances and the reconciliation together.
FAQ
Before this year-end starts.
What if there’s no prior year to roll forward from?
Then opening balances have to come from somewhere else: the client’s previous accountant, their last set of filed accounts, or in the worst case a reconstruction from the earliest bank statement you can get. Whichever it is, get it in writing before you start coding the year, not after the trial balance already disagrees with it.
How far back should the bank export go?
The whole accounting period in one file if the bank’s online banking allows a custom date range (most do). A handful of separate monthly exports work, but each boundary between files is a place a day or a transaction can silently go missing.
What counts as "the bank alone can’t tell you this"?
Intent. A bank statement shows that money moved, not why. Whether a payment was a business cost or a drawing, whether a receipt was a sale or a director’s loan, whether cash taken out was for the business or personal, none of that is on the statement. Flag those as questions for the client rather than guessing from the payee name.
Does a messy prior year block this year’s work?
Not necessarily. A messy prior year usually means the opening balance needs rebuilding once, carefully, rather than that this year’s bookkeeping has to wait. Treat the opening position as its own small job and the current year can often proceed in parallel.
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