Bookkeeping Service Dallas The monthly close

What a finished month looks like

A finished month is a bank statement whose every deposit and every check has a name in the books, and whose totals match. Software that looks neat can still be an open month if a deposit is sitting there unnamed.

Catching up an old year means putting those unnamed months onto the statement before anyone builds a return. Keeping the current month means naming each deposit on the day it lands. The return gets shorter only when both of those are already true.

Steven Palmieri does the naming from the statement you bring. You still know the business. If a deposit has no story we can see, we ask you before that line gets a name. A vendor is never invented here just to make a column balance.

Payroll setup on the company that pays

Payroll setup means we put the paying company onto the payroll login you already operate. This practice does not run the pay runs and does not hold the payroll account.

When the name on the window and the name on the payroll account differ, setup follows the account that pays. Moving it later means reclassifying pay that already went out the door.

Bring the legal name on that account, the provider you want to keep using, and a plain note about how current the pay records are. A messy pay file is enough to start. A guess about who got paid is not.

Oak Cliff uses the same close

Oak Cliff was its own town from 1887 until it was annexed in 1903, which is why people there still talk about it as its own place. We close a shop south of the river on the same date as a shop north of it, because the bank does not care which side the window faces.

The friendly name on the window can stay the name customers use. The books follow the name on the bank. Shoppers can keep using the painted window name. Only the return has to follow the name printed on the account.

What to put on the table

Bring one recent bank statement, the legal name printed on that account, and the name customers see. When paychecks are already going out, the useful name is the one printed on those checks.

A spotless year is not required to start. Bring the open months and a plain note about how far behind they are. We name the oldest open month before any later one.

How a deposit gets its name

A deposit gets a name the day it hits the bank. Sales, the tax collected with those sales, and a transfer from the owner are three different names. Leaving all three inside one line is how the filing on the 20th turns into a guess.

The oldest open month gets that naming before any later month is touched. The month you are in gets named as the deposits land. Later months stay readable only when those two jobs are already done.

The statements you receive are the closed months in a form a bank or a buyer can read. A month that is still open stays off those statements until it ties. That rule is the whole close.

Reconciliations and the reports that follow

A reconciliation is the check that the books and the statement agree, line by line, for that month. It is not a second set of numbers. It is the same set, proved.

Once the month is reconciled, the sales tax report and the return can both use it. Before that proof, both of them wait. You get the statements after the proof, not before it.

If two accounts feed one company, each account is reconciled on its own. A transfer between them gets its own name so it is not counted as sales. A named transfer stays out of the sales tax report, and a named deposit is the one that can go on it.

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