Four Tips for Spring Cleaning Your Bookkeeping.

De-clutter and go paperless. Scan and make digital copies of important documents, then securely shred the physical copies along with any old and/or expired documentation to get it out of the office. You can streamline invoicing, payroll, and bookkeeping by going digital.

Review all outstanding invoices. While reviewing invoices should be a regular occurring task in your business, take the time now to do a “deep clean” of your accounts receivable. Using your bookkeeping system, run a report to pull every single unpaid invoice for the year to date. Then use every tactic available to connect with your clients/customers to make sure you get that payment.

Check all service agreements. It can be easy enough, especially with credit card payments and automated bill pay, to neglect to review your service agreements with your vendors and suppliers. It’s important to keep up to speed on all of the fine print to avoid surprises down the road. A vendor may have taken away from his or her services while charging you the same amount, or you might only be paying the promotional period rate for a specific service without realizing the cost will increase significantly in a few months. Research every service agreement and if things are changing, contact the provider to see if you can negotiate a better deal.

Ensure data integrity. A lot of small and medium-sized businesses use a digital bookkeeping solution, such as QuickBooks. While QuickBooks inherently does a good job at keeping all of your financial data backed-up, occasionally something can happen (i.e. human error, a system bug, a power surge) that can corrupt your QuickBooks data file. While you are going through your office and organizing items, take a few moments to check your QuickBooks file to make sure it is backed up completely and regularly. Make sure you keep up to date so you’re not left in the dark if a problem does occur with your file.