What to give your accountant for taxes, and the things they should never have to ask for
Nine items, where each one comes from, what your preparer actually does with it, and what a missing one costs you in their hours. Plus the four things they should never have to ask for.
For payments made in 2026, the reporting threshold for Forms 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC is $2,000 rather than the $600 that applied to payments made before 2026.
A tax preparer starts from a trial balance for the full 12 months, so a package that arrives without one is a package they have to build before they can begin.
Owner draws left in the expense columns understate your profit and leave the equity section disagreeing with the return, which is a correction somebody has to make before anything else can be finished.
Nine items, and the useful question about each one is not whether you have it. It is what your preparer does with it. What to give your accountant for taxes is answered in the table below, which carries four columns: the item, where it comes from, what the preparer does with it, and what its absence costs you.
Nothing below asks you to read a balance sheet. Most of it is a matter of locating a document rather than understanding one, and the two or three places where a judgment is needed are named as such so you know to ask rather than guess.
Your preparer files the return. What they need out of your books is 12 months that reconcile, with the accounts mapped onto the lines of the form. Everything else on this page is either an input to that or a document that proves one of the numbers.
What do I give my accountant for taxes, and where does each item come from?
The second column is the one that decides your January. It sorts every item into an export, a request, or an errand, and only the third kind has a waiting time attached to it.
The item | Where it comes from | What your preparer does with it | What it costs when it is not there |
|---|---|---|---|
Last year's filed business return, and your personal return if the business flows onto it | Only you, or whoever filed it | Reads the closing figures that have to carry forward: accumulated depreciation, basis, any amount carried into this year | They rebuild the opening position from scratch, or they file without the carryforwards and the two returns do not join up |
A trial balance for the full 12 months, with a profit and loss and a balance sheet for the same 12 months | Your bookkeeper, or your accounting file | Maps each account to a line on the form. The trial balance is the working document; the other two are how they sanity-check it | If the three do not agree with each other, the first thing they do is reconcile your own reports to each other, in their hours rather than yours |
Reconciliation reports for every bank and credit card account, all 12 months | Your bookkeeper | Lets them start from the balance sheet instead of from your statements, because the cash and card balances have already been checked against a document the business did not produce | They take the balances on trust, or they ask for 12 months of statements, which is a second round of questions three weeks later |
Closing statements for the last month of your year for every bank, credit card and loan account | Only you, or your bank | Confirms the closing balances and the loan principal outstanding | The balance sheet says what your books think you owe, and nothing says what you actually owe |
A year-end balance and an amortization schedule for every loan | Only you, or your lender | Splits what you paid into principal and interest | Without the split the whole payment usually sits in one account, and both the interest figure and the debt figure are wrong |
Fixed assets bought, sold or traded in during the year, with the date, the amount, and how each was paid for | Your books if the paperwork was attached, otherwise only you | Adds them to the depreciation schedule they maintain for you | An asset that surfaces after the return is drafted means the depreciation runs again, and so does everything downstream of it |
Year-end payroll reports and the quarterly filings your payroll provider produced | Your payroll provider | Ties the wages and payroll taxes in your books to what was actually reported and deposited | A difference between the two has to be explained before anything else can be finished, and nobody can explain it from your books alone |
Total payments to each contractor for the year, with each payee's name, address and taxpayer identification number from their Form W-9 | Your books for the amounts, only you for the W-9s | Works out which payees cross the reporting threshold and prepares the information returns | Chasing a taxpayer identification number in the last week of January is how a January job becomes a February one |
Owner draws, owner contributions, and anything personal that went through the business account | Only you | Moves them out of income and expense and into equity, where they belong | Left in the expense columns, a draw understates your profit, and the equity section will not agree with the return |
Three sources, and they behave differently. Anything from your books is already there and the job is to export it. Anything from your bookkeeper exists but has to be asked for, which takes a day. Anything marked only you does not exist anywhere until somebody goes and gets it, and those are the rows that stall a package in January.
The other distinction worth holding is between an item that is missing and an item that is wrong. A missing document produces one question. A wrong number produces a question about every number near it, because the preparer now has to work out how far the error spread before they can use anything else on the page. The reconciliation reports are on this list for exactly that reason: they are the cheapest available evidence that the numbers underneath have been checked.
Which four things should your preparer never have to ask you for?
These four, and every one of them is a decision somebody made months before the package was put together. They are on this page separately from the table because you cannot produce them in January. You can only have already done them.
A full year that reconciles. That means 12 reconciliation reports for each account, not 11. The one month somebody skipped is the month the preparer finds, because it is the month where the balance sheet stops tying to anything outside the books. Reading a balance sheet line by line against the documents behind it is the longer version of what they are doing, and if you would rather find the gap before they do, counting the reports takes two minutes. What should be arriving each month in the first place, and the document that proves each one, is the monthly standard this page assumes.
An equity section where owner draws are not sitting in expenses. Money you took out of the business is not a cost of running it. When a draw is coded as an expense your profit reads low, your equity reads high, and the two errors hide each other on separate statements. Correcting it changes the number at the bottom of the return, which is why it is found rather than overlooked, and why finding it in November is a different experience from finding it in March.
A fixed asset list that agrees with the depreciation schedule they already hold. Your preparer keeps a schedule of what the business owns and what has already been written off. Your books keep a fixed asset account. When an asset was sold, scrapped or traded in and only one of those two records heard about it, the difference shows up as a gain or loss nobody can explain.
A written capitalization policy that existed before the year started. This is the one that cannot be assembled in January at all, because the date on it is the whole point of it. Why the date a capitalization policy was adopted matters more than what it says is a subject in its own right. For the handoff, what your preparer wants is the document and the date, not a recollection of what you usually do with a $1,400 laptop, and the difference between those two is the difference between a lookup and a conversation about every small purchase in the year.
Nothing in a handoff package costs as much as an item that arrives, looks right, and is not.
In what order do I put the package together?
Start with the things only you can produce, because those are the ones with a waiting time attached. Six steps, and the first three can be done before your bookkeeper has closed December.
Ask for the documents that live outside your books. Loan statements and amortization schedules from each lender, the last month's statement for every account, and last year's filed return if you do not already hold a copy. These arrive on somebody else's schedule, which is why they go first.
Chase the taxpayer identification numbers. Go through the year's contractor payments, list every payee, and find the Form W-9 for each one. The gaps are what you want to know about now rather than in the last week of January.
Write down the owner transactions. Every draw, every contribution, and every personal charge that went through the business account. Nobody else can tell these apart from ordinary spending, and a bookkeeper looking at a line that says "hardware store" has no way to know it was your kitchen.
Ask your bookkeeper for the reports, by name. The trial balance, the profit and loss and the balance sheet for the full 12 months, plus a reconciliation report for every bank and credit card account for every month of the year. Naming them matters. "The year-end pack" means different things to different people; those four names do not.
Count the reconciliation reports. You are looking for 12 per account. This is the only step in the list that can surface a problem, and it is worth doing before anybody is waiting on you.
Send it in one delivery, with a note saying what is in it and what is not. A package with a known gap in it and a sentence naming the gap is far more useful than a package with an unknown gap, because your preparer can sequence their work around something they have been told about.
Intuit's QuickBooks Online documentation, read in September 2026, describes a report group named "For my accountant" on the Standard tab of the reports page, holding the reports often used to prepare year-end reports and taxes, with the General Ledger and the Trial Balance among them. That group is a reasonable starting shortlist if you are exporting the reports yourself. The alternative to exporting anything is to give your preparer access to the file directly, which changes the job from assembling a package to answering questions about one, and is worth agreeing in advance rather than in the week it matters.
What dates is your preparer actually working backwards from?
Four of them, and only one is the date most owners have in mind. IRS Publication 509, the tax calendar, states most of these as counts of months from the end of your tax year rather than as fixed dates, so the version that applies to you depends on your entity and on when your year ends.
The date | What lands on it | What has to be finished before it |
|---|---|---|
January 31 | Forms 1099-NEC filed with the IRS and furnished to each recipient | Your contractor totals for the year, and the name, address and taxpayer identification number for every payee |
The 15th day of the third month after your tax year ends | Partnership returns on Form 1065 and S corporation returns on Form 1120-S, and each partner's or shareholder's Schedule K-1 | The whole package. This is the one to work backwards from, because a personal return cannot be finished until the K-1 exists |
The 15th day of the fourth month after your tax year ends | C corporation returns on Form 1120, and a sole proprietor's Schedule C filed with Form 1040 | The same package, with one more month of room |
The original due date, whichever of the above applies | Form 7004, which requests an automatic six-month extension of time to file Form 1065 or Form 1120-S | Nothing, and this is the part worth understanding: an extension of time to file is not an extension of time to pay |
Read the table from the bottom up and the shape of the year changes. The extension moves the paperwork and not the money, so a package assembled in March to support an extension still has to be good enough to estimate from. The date that actually governs a small business with owners in it is the K-1 date, because somebody's personal return is sitting behind it, and every day the package is late is a day two returns are late rather than one.
One number behind that January row changed for 2026, and it is worth knowing before you total up what you paid people. For payments made in 2026, the reporting threshold for Forms 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC is $2,000 rather than the $600 that applied to payments made before 2026, a change the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act made to the statutory threshold in section 6041(a) for payments made after December 31, 2025, and the IRS instructions for those forms say the amount is adjusted for inflation beginning in calendar year 2027. Which of your payees that actually captures, and what happens with the ones it does not, is a question for whoever files your return, and it is worth asking in November rather than in the last week of January.
Open your reconciliation reports for the main checking account and count how many months of this year have one. You want 12, and anything less is the list of months somebody has to go back to. Finding that list in September rather than in March is the whole difference between a correction and a scramble.
How do I know the package is finished?
When it has gone out in one delivery and the reply is an acknowledgment rather than a list of questions. That is the whole done state, and it is deliberately binary: either your preparer came back asking for something, or they did not.
Write the covering note as a one-page summary of what you are handing over. Four lines is enough:
The 12 months it covers, and the accounting method your books are on.
The reports enclosed, by name, and the accounts each reconciliation report covers.
The things only you could supply: loans, assets, owner transactions, contractor totals.
Anything you know is missing, and when it is coming.
That last line is the one that does the work. A preparer can plan around a gap they have been told about and cannot plan around one they discover, and the difference between those two is usually measured in weeks rather than in hours.
If the package cannot be assembled because the monthly work never happened, that is a different problem from a handoff problem and it does not get solved in January. Catching up 12 months of coding and reconciling is work somebody has to do whoever ends up doing it, and what that work costs moves with your transaction volume and how far behind the file already is. The useful thing to know is that the same work done monthly and done in one January block is the same work, except that in January nobody remembers what the transactions were.
IRS Publication 583, revised December 2024, is worth reading once on the point that outlives any single filing season: your recordkeeping system is a summary of your transactions kept in your books, and that summary has to be supported by the documents the transactions themselves generated. The package you hand over is the summary. The support has to still exist afterwards, which is a question about where your file lives and who holds the subscription rather than about what you sent in March.
What does my accountant need from me for my business tax return?
A tax preparer needs three groups of things: the books for the full year, the documents that prove the numbers in them, and the facts that only you know. The books mean a trial balance plus a profit and loss and a balance sheet for the same 12 months. The proof means reconciliation reports for every account, closing statements from each bank and lender, and payroll reports from your payroll provider. The facts that only you know are the loans, the assets bought and sold, the owner draws and contributions, and what you paid each contractor. Last year's filed return sits across all three, because it carries the opening figures that have to agree with this year's closing ones.
Do I need to give my accountant receipts, or just the bookkeeping file?
The bookkeeping file, and the receipts stay with you. A preparer works from summarized figures rather than from individual transactions, so a box of receipts is not an input to the return. The receipts still matter, and IRS Publication 583, revised December 2024, is explicit about why: your books are the summary of your transactions, and that summary has to be supported by the documents the transactions generated. Keeping those documents attached to the transactions inside your accounting file rather than in a shoebox means the support and the summary travel together, which is what you want when somebody asks a question about one line 18 months later.
When are business tax returns due?
It depends on the entity, and IRS Publication 509 states the rules as counts of months rather than as calendar dates. Partnership returns on Form 1065 and S corporation returns on Form 1120-S are due the 15th day of the third month after the end of the tax year, and each partner or shareholder has to be given their Schedule K-1 by the same date. C corporation returns on Form 1120 are due the 15th day of the fourth month after the end of the tax year, and a sole proprietor's Schedule C is filed with Form 1040, which for a calendar-year filer is April 15. Form 7004 requests an automatic six-month extension of time to file Form 1065 or Form 1120-S. An extension of time to file is not an extension of time to pay.
What is a trial balance and why does my accountant want one?
A trial balance is a single list of every account in your books with its balance at one date, and your preparer wants it because it is the shortest complete description of your year that exists. A profit and loss shows the income and expense accounts. A balance sheet shows the asset, liability and equity accounts. A trial balance shows all of them on one page, which is what makes it the document a preparer maps onto the lines of the form. In QuickBooks Online it sits under Reports on the Standard tab, inside a report group that Intuit's documentation, read in September 2026, calls "For my accountant". If you are asking your bookkeeper for one thing before anything else, ask for this.
A package that comes back with no questions
You have the list and the order to do it in. If what you want is a second read on whether the file behind it will actually hold up, bring your trial balance and a month of reconciliation reports to a call and we will go through them. Bookist is AI automation for the monthly bookkeeping with an accountant reviewing it before it reaches you, which is the half that makes a year-end package assemble itself.
This article explains what a tax preparer needs from your books and why. It is not tax advice for your situation.
Operations background across retail, property management, and e-commerce. Writes step-by-step guides for owners who need the answer, not the theory.
