What a bookkeeper usually hopes to receive, and how to package the month so they have fewer questions for you.
Plenty of small business owners know the Sunday night feeling. The month has ended, the bookkeeper is waiting, and somewhere there is a carrier bag of crumpled receipts, half of them faded beyond reading. You sit at the kitchen table trying to remember what a payment to a car park in Harrogate was for. Was it the trade fair? Or the other trip?
Handing over the month should feel like passing a tidy folder across a desk. With a bit of routine during the month, that is what it can become.
A calmer month-end handover
The work happens long before the last day. Every time a card is used, a notification arrives, and that is the moment to add the receipt and a short note while the memory is fresh. Ask your team to do the same. By the time the month closes, most of the gaps have filled themselves.
- Attach receipts to transactions as they happen, straight from the alert.
- Add a category and a few words of context to anything unusual.
- Give your bookkeeper their own login through the Login Portal with view-only access.
- Send a short handover message listing anything still outstanding.
Giving your bookkeeper their own access is the step people skip most often, and it causes the most back and forth. When they can open the statements and the attached receipts themselves, they stop emailing you questions at odd hours, and you stop forwarding screenshots from your phone in a queue at the post office. Their access can be limited so they see what they need and cannot move money.
Leave a little room for what does not fit neatly. A refund that crossed months, or a supplier who billed twice and then corrected it. A line or two in your handover note saves a phone call. Your bookkeeper will still have questions, of course, and that is their job. The aim is simply that the questions are about the work, not about a missing piece of paper you swore you put somewhere safe.
Desk notes
All desk notes